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truepennySo Jeff VanderMeer bounces off Ted Chiang, who bounces off me (and thank you, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
matociquala, for pointing out the expanding conversation, even if you do think we're all dingbats), and I feel a certain urge to complete the circle and bounce off Jeff, mostly to say two things.
1. There is a difference between science and technology. My post didn't say anything about science, and that was intentional. Which isn't a complaint about Ted's post; he doesn't misrepresent me in any way. But I don't think science fiction is necessarily about science at all. But it is about technology. It's all about the machine. In my view.
2. The question inevitably arises, as it arose in the comments to Jeff's post: why make this distinction at all? Why does it matter if it's one genre or two or eleventy-one?
And the first answer is, well, obviously, it doesn't. Doesn't matter a bit. Read what you want to read. Don't read things that bore you or annoy you or gross you out. That's all the classification system most of us need or want.
But then there's the second tier of response, and this is the tier on which I feel that science fiction, fantasy, and horror and all the interstitially things in-between, do need a critical vocabulary to work with. It's hard to articulate what you're doing if you don't have the language to do it with, and because sf/f/h tends, as a collective genre, to be highly self-reflexive, one necessary component of that critical vocabulary is a way to talk about genre and what we do with genre and why we know a genre trope when we see one.
On that level, the distinction matters, not so much for itself as for the comparative value. Defining a genre, however provisionally, gives you a baseline, a control group, a way to say, well, what X is doing in The Y of Z is interesting and cool because it deviates from the standard in ways A, B, and C, with consequences D, E, and F. It's not about pigeonholing every last novel and short-story in a Linnaean taxonomy; it's about saying, here's the aggregate we define works against.
And trying to define science fiction and fantasy--although most of the time, honest to Pete, it's as silly a pastime as teaching a duck-billed platypus to tango--has the potential to help us understand what's going on when we write science fiction and fantasy, and what's going on when we read it. Entertainment, you say, and yes, that's true, but if entertainment is all we're after, there's no need to bother with stories that invent ansibles and FTL drives and generation ships (on the one hand) or talk about wizards and selkies and ghouls (on the other). Storytelling is the universal, it's the particular localizations that tell you about the storyteller and the storyteller's audience.
As genres, science fiction and fantasy are locked together (not, I suppose, unlike yin and yang, although my first mental image was wrestling cats). If they were the same genre, we wouldn't need different words for them, but if they were truly separate genres, we wouldn't keep trying to define them as oppositional.
I wrote my dissertation about category collapse in Jacobean drama and how it gets troped in the figure of the ghost. And that's what I'm talking about here, the way that the boundaries between science fiction and fantasy refuse to stay stable, that in some places they're the Berlin Wall and in other places they're a faded signpost marking the county line between Here and There. But that's why it's useful to define them, so that when they start to collapse, you know what's going on.
I also firmly believe that the more you know about reading, the more you enjoy and appreciate what you read. And that's why you need a vocabulary to talk about it. And that's why these definitions matter, even when they're partial, even when they're self-contradictory, even when they're wrong. Because they're all part of the great conversation about books that makes this a living art form instead of a dead one.
matociquala, for pointing out the expanding conversation, even if you do think we're all dingbats), and I feel a certain urge to complete the circle and bounce off Jeff, mostly to say two things.1. There is a difference between science and technology. My post didn't say anything about science, and that was intentional. Which isn't a complaint about Ted's post; he doesn't misrepresent me in any way. But I don't think science fiction is necessarily about science at all. But it is about technology. It's all about the machine. In my view.
2. The question inevitably arises, as it arose in the comments to Jeff's post: why make this distinction at all? Why does it matter if it's one genre or two or eleventy-one?
And the first answer is, well, obviously, it doesn't. Doesn't matter a bit. Read what you want to read. Don't read things that bore you or annoy you or gross you out. That's all the classification system most of us need or want.
But then there's the second tier of response, and this is the tier on which I feel that science fiction, fantasy, and horror and all the interstitially things in-between, do need a critical vocabulary to work with. It's hard to articulate what you're doing if you don't have the language to do it with, and because sf/f/h tends, as a collective genre, to be highly self-reflexive, one necessary component of that critical vocabulary is a way to talk about genre and what we do with genre and why we know a genre trope when we see one.
On that level, the distinction matters, not so much for itself as for the comparative value. Defining a genre, however provisionally, gives you a baseline, a control group, a way to say, well, what X is doing in The Y of Z is interesting and cool because it deviates from the standard in ways A, B, and C, with consequences D, E, and F. It's not about pigeonholing every last novel and short-story in a Linnaean taxonomy; it's about saying, here's the aggregate we define works against.
And trying to define science fiction and fantasy--although most of the time, honest to Pete, it's as silly a pastime as teaching a duck-billed platypus to tango--has the potential to help us understand what's going on when we write science fiction and fantasy, and what's going on when we read it. Entertainment, you say, and yes, that's true, but if entertainment is all we're after, there's no need to bother with stories that invent ansibles and FTL drives and generation ships (on the one hand) or talk about wizards and selkies and ghouls (on the other). Storytelling is the universal, it's the particular localizations that tell you about the storyteller and the storyteller's audience.
As genres, science fiction and fantasy are locked together (not, I suppose, unlike yin and yang, although my first mental image was wrestling cats). If they were the same genre, we wouldn't need different words for them, but if they were truly separate genres, we wouldn't keep trying to define them as oppositional.
I wrote my dissertation about category collapse in Jacobean drama and how it gets troped in the figure of the ghost. And that's what I'm talking about here, the way that the boundaries between science fiction and fantasy refuse to stay stable, that in some places they're the Berlin Wall and in other places they're a faded signpost marking the county line between Here and There. But that's why it's useful to define them, so that when they start to collapse, you know what's going on.
I also firmly believe that the more you know about reading, the more you enjoy and appreciate what you read. And that's why you need a vocabulary to talk about it. And that's why these definitions matter, even when they're partial, even when they're self-contradictory, even when they're wrong. Because they're all part of the great conversation about books that makes this a living art form instead of a dead one.
