Thinking out loud (3): what the heck was I talking about anyway?

[truepenny]

The problem with fantasy and science fiction, as the comments to my previous post demonstrate, is that, like Walt Whitman, they contain multitudes. There is no definition you can put forward that someone can't find 1,654,420,749 counter examples for, especially if you're trying to talk about the difference between the two.

If there's any difference at all.

For me, there is. For matociquala, there isn't. And that doesn't mean I'm right and she's wrong, or that I'm wrong and she's right.¹ It means that it depends what angle you look at the question from, and in what light, and what lens or lenses you're looking through. For genre writers, one of those lenses is always going to be your own creative process, and what does and does not work to get the stories out of your brain and onto the page where they can start to live.

I'm not making any value judgments about that lens; I'm just saying it's there. I can write pure litcrit about sf, but that's not what these posts have been. These are posts about theory, and my theor(y/ies) of sf is/are deeply informed and inflected² by my own experience as a writer thereof.

But I've got another lens; insofar as I acknowledge allegiance to any critical school (which isn't terribly far, and genuine theoryheads would fall about laughing at the idea), I'm a genre theorist. And so when I think about science fiction and fantasy and the difference between them, or lack thereof, I think about them partly as a writer, partly as a reader, and partly as a genre theorist. And the interaction between those three things can get very interesting, in the Sparrovian³ sense.

As a reader, I agree that science fiction and fantasy are only dubiously distinguishable beasts. As a writer, I find them quite different, because they feel different in my head. As a genre theorist, I start making lists of conventions and tropes and attitudes, and say that, although there is no stable boundary between the two, and although they are very easily hybridized (a thing that has been happening to genres for hundreds of years), that does not mean that we should collapse them together.

The problem with genres is that they are Ouroboran. They eat their own tales.⁴ A genre is defined by the works in it, and a work's genre is defined by ... yeah. You see the problem. And yet, you can come to a workable consensus of what a genre is, even though no single work will have all the characteristics defined as typical of the genre, and most works in a genre will have characteristics that don't fit. It's that kind of discipline, genre theory, and I like it because what it's interested in are the places where the definitions don't hold and the boundaries become infinitely permeable.

So, actually, in my world-view, 'science fiction' and 'fantasy' are categories to define texts against, not to define texts as. The interesting question isn't whether a particular text is one or the other; it's what a particular text does, with one, the other, or both.

---
¹Hey, look! Chiasmus!
²And you can tell we've woken the litcrit demon because all the rhetorical tricks have put on their party hats and are looking for the limbo stick.
³Because, dammit, Captain Jack Sparrow needs an adjectival form.
⁴I am so leaving that typo exactly the way it is.

Comments

[fjm.livejournal.com]

I'm a genre theorist.

Yes. me too. But this is why you can tell that sf and fantasy are rather different furry creatures. They may use similar techniques but their understangings of the world are very different. Elsewhere I've said that sf wants to argue with the universe, fantasy wants to make it moral (not necessarily nice, just moral). This has nothing to do with tropes, but we all know that we can tell when a Dragon is a fantasy dragon or an sf dragon.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Hah! I think you've just identified one of the major reasons why I can't divide them in my head. Because it just occured to me how heavily my work argues with that trope, which proves exactly what truepenny said--that I'm seeing this through the lense of my own production.

My fantasy is sort of universally predicated on this idea that the universe is hideously unfair, and we have to live in it anyway, even though it's going to beat us in the end. And a lot of that is a reaction against the moralizing I see in traditional fantasy, and this tidy division of sides up into the Good Guys and the Bad Guys. (one of the things that was a real stated goal of mine in BLOOD & IRON was to tell the story from the point of view of the "Bad Guys.")

And my science fiction, on the other hand, is all about finding moral ways to live in the universe.

Huh. Which tells me that one of the reasons I'm rejecting that definition so viscerally (and why I also reject the "fantasy is nostalgic and SF is forward-looking" division) is that it's a trope I find insufficiently considered in the genres in question, and I've unconsciously rejected them and tried to undermine, without ever really realizing what I was doing.

Ah, hindbrain, still smarter than the ape.

I *do* see some genre differences in the way I approach them, but they're narrative and craft differences. SF readers will tolerate more straight exposition, while fantasy readers will tolerate more florid language. And so on.

And science fiction, to me, is also always about testing things to destruction--a political theory, a looming global disaster. You get to break stuff in SF and deal with the consequences, rather than stuffing them back into the box and calling that a happy ending.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

You know the definition which is about what happens with the different -- SF rushes to reverse-engineer the different, and fantasy tiptoes up to the different reverently and horror tries to throttle the different and mysteries and thrillers kill the different and stuff it back in the box and mundane fiction refuses to acknowledge that anything is different.

I find there's a way in which this is useful to think about.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

I think that for a full analysis, one also needs to consider:

Supernatural horror (which used to be redundant, but there's now non-supernatural horror)

Mysteries with supernatural creatures among the cast

Techno-thrillers

Survivalist novels

Utopias and dystopias

The Left Behind series

Paranormal romances

Woo-woo mysteries

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I think part of the problem is that there are several distinct borders between fantasy and science fiction.

There is the magic-as-technology edge where such things as Ian MacLeod's The Light Ages and Walter Jon Williams' Metropolitan and City on Fire and Richard Garfinkel's Celestial Matters and The Iron Dragon's Daughter and C.S. Friedman's Coldfire books dwell. Complementing that is the technology-treated-as-magic edge, including such things as Michael Scott Rohan's The Winter of the World trilogy, with active gods and smithcraft-type magic in which such things as carbon fibres and electroplating are recognisable to the reader, and augmented with runes and spells and whatnot, but seen entirely as magic within the narrative. Also to a lesser extent the SFnal elements in the underlying reality of Dragaera make me want to put a lot of Brust near this edge, though most of it isn't talking directly to the edge issues.

I think there's also a different border, quite distinct from those two, where King's Dark Tower books and K.J. Bishop's The Etched City lie - it would be easier to define this if I could actually bring any more examples to mind, damn it. And somewhere further along that border, or maybe on a third one, is the place where Desolation Road lives.