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truepennyI seem to have started something.
Which was not my intention.
But I'm going to assume that people are enjoying the discussion and finding value in it, and try--again--to clarify what I personally am talking about. This is not to take issue with what other people are talking about, but we aren't all having the same discussion, even though it may look like we are.
Confused yet? Good.
I realize, in reading what other people have had to say on the subject of the difference or lack thereof between fantasy and science fiction, that I come to this discussion from a rather peculiar angle, that of a writer of both sf and f who is ALSO an academically trained genre theorist. This matters, not because I think it makes me smarter than anyone else (it doesn't) or because I think it validates my pronouncements (it doesn't), but because it means I've been trained to approach a discussion of this nature as something inherently ongoing.
No, of COURSE we're never going to reach consensus. That's not the point.
Academic conversations do not happen in real-time. They happen in the publication of articles and books. You read what other scholars have written on the topic; you publish your own argument, building on them in some places and tearing them down in others. Your argument is read by scholars who do the same thing to it in turn. And you can have, and can continue to have, a fruitful conversation with a scholar who wrote 20 or 30 or 50 years ago. These conversations are very slow, and they are very carefully mapped--which is another reason citing your sources in academic work is so darn important. You can draw genealogical trees, if you're that way inclined.
On the internet, on the other hand, conversations take place--not even in real-time, but in almost what you might call para-time, an endless series of 3D Venn diagrams. So rather than the argument proceeding linearly, along one or five or twenty-five branches, with interweaving and cross-referencing and cousins getting married and all that stuff, you have the argument exploding and propagating and turning into different arguments and getting hijacked by people who have Something To Say on a tangentially related subject and all the rest of it that makes the internet sometimes a joy and sometimes the world's most colossal headache.
Internet arguments are famously unresolvable, tending always towards Godwin's Law. And this in turn tends, I think, to create--and not without reason--the feeling that any argument in which there is inherently no agreement on definitions of terms, much less agreement on how those terms should be used, is fundamentally a waste of time.
But the academic process, which is a process of slow refinement, of debate and deliberation, predicated on the assumption that even if you don't agree with all of what someone says, their viewpoint is nevertheless useful in helping you clarify your own--and sometimes is blindingly necessary to the success of your own intellectual endeavor--says that this doesn't mean the conversation is futile, only that it needs to be argued about some more.
Ironically, the internet requires much more patience than academia.
Now, some people feel that this discussion is pointless ANYWAY, because there's no use talking about these things when you ought to just be writing. I don't like that point of view, partly because it slams the door in the face of people who aren't writers, but who are passionately interested in the genres of fantasy and science fiction. And partly I don't like it because it gives me terrible flashbacks to elementary school and junior high school, when I tried to tell someone about something I thought was incredibly cool, and had them look at me like I was not only a freak, but a complete and total lameass loser as well.
I got that look a lot.
Now, if this discussion does nothing for you personally, as a writer, as a reader, or as both, then, dude. You don't have to play in this sandbox. Amongst the many continuums (continua?) at work here is the one along the axis of tolerance for theory. You can be a committed and passionate writer, a committed and passionate reader, and have no interest in theory of any kind. Or you can be so theoretically minded that most of us can't even understand you. I know academics like that, and I know speculative fiction writers like that as well. And they're just as invested in their work as the people who don't want to talk about theory at all. It also doesn't meant that one end of that continuum is smarter than the other
For the record, I personally am fascinated by the relationship between fantasy and science fiction, as reader, writer, and as literary critic (which is not quite the same thing as being a reader). As a writer, I find a sharp distinction between fantasy and science fiction, because that's the way my particular creative process works. As a reader and literary critic--not so much. One of the reasons these genres are so hard to talk about is precisely because they are not a binary, because any characteristic you choose to try to make a distinction between them will promptly be proved to belong to both sides. It's a continuum, as some voices in the debate have been saying, but the trick is that it's not a LINEAR continuum. A little like an internet argument, it's a series of 3D Venn diagrams, or--better--like a model of a binary (trinary? pentary?) system of erratic orbit and varying gravitational pull, with planets and asteroids and alien artifacts and space junk all following their own paths around it.
But I still think it's worth trying to name the stars.
Which was not my intention.
But I'm going to assume that people are enjoying the discussion and finding value in it, and try--again--to clarify what I personally am talking about. This is not to take issue with what other people are talking about, but we aren't all having the same discussion, even though it may look like we are.
Confused yet? Good.
I realize, in reading what other people have had to say on the subject of the difference or lack thereof between fantasy and science fiction, that I come to this discussion from a rather peculiar angle, that of a writer of both sf and f who is ALSO an academically trained genre theorist. This matters, not because I think it makes me smarter than anyone else (it doesn't) or because I think it validates my pronouncements (it doesn't), but because it means I've been trained to approach a discussion of this nature as something inherently ongoing.
No, of COURSE we're never going to reach consensus. That's not the point.
Academic conversations do not happen in real-time. They happen in the publication of articles and books. You read what other scholars have written on the topic; you publish your own argument, building on them in some places and tearing them down in others. Your argument is read by scholars who do the same thing to it in turn. And you can have, and can continue to have, a fruitful conversation with a scholar who wrote 20 or 30 or 50 years ago. These conversations are very slow, and they are very carefully mapped--which is another reason citing your sources in academic work is so darn important. You can draw genealogical trees, if you're that way inclined.
On the internet, on the other hand, conversations take place--not even in real-time, but in almost what you might call para-time, an endless series of 3D Venn diagrams. So rather than the argument proceeding linearly, along one or five or twenty-five branches, with interweaving and cross-referencing and cousins getting married and all that stuff, you have the argument exploding and propagating and turning into different arguments and getting hijacked by people who have Something To Say on a tangentially related subject and all the rest of it that makes the internet sometimes a joy and sometimes the world's most colossal headache.
Internet arguments are famously unresolvable, tending always towards Godwin's Law. And this in turn tends, I think, to create--and not without reason--the feeling that any argument in which there is inherently no agreement on definitions of terms, much less agreement on how those terms should be used, is fundamentally a waste of time.
But the academic process, which is a process of slow refinement, of debate and deliberation, predicated on the assumption that even if you don't agree with all of what someone says, their viewpoint is nevertheless useful in helping you clarify your own--and sometimes is blindingly necessary to the success of your own intellectual endeavor--says that this doesn't mean the conversation is futile, only that it needs to be argued about some more.
Ironically, the internet requires much more patience than academia.
Now, some people feel that this discussion is pointless ANYWAY, because there's no use talking about these things when you ought to just be writing. I don't like that point of view, partly because it slams the door in the face of people who aren't writers, but who are passionately interested in the genres of fantasy and science fiction. And partly I don't like it because it gives me terrible flashbacks to elementary school and junior high school, when I tried to tell someone about something I thought was incredibly cool, and had them look at me like I was not only a freak, but a complete and total lameass loser as well.
I got that look a lot.
Now, if this discussion does nothing for you personally, as a writer, as a reader, or as both, then, dude. You don't have to play in this sandbox. Amongst the many continuums (continua?) at work here is the one along the axis of tolerance for theory. You can be a committed and passionate writer, a committed and passionate reader, and have no interest in theory of any kind. Or you can be so theoretically minded that most of us can't even understand you. I know academics like that, and I know speculative fiction writers like that as well. And they're just as invested in their work as the people who don't want to talk about theory at all. It also doesn't meant that one end of that continuum is smarter than the other
For the record, I personally am fascinated by the relationship between fantasy and science fiction, as reader, writer, and as literary critic (which is not quite the same thing as being a reader). As a writer, I find a sharp distinction between fantasy and science fiction, because that's the way my particular creative process works. As a reader and literary critic--not so much. One of the reasons these genres are so hard to talk about is precisely because they are not a binary, because any characteristic you choose to try to make a distinction between them will promptly be proved to belong to both sides. It's a continuum, as some voices in the debate have been saying, but the trick is that it's not a LINEAR continuum. A little like an internet argument, it's a series of 3D Venn diagrams, or--better--like a model of a binary (trinary? pentary?) system of erratic orbit and varying gravitational pull, with planets and asteroids and alien artifacts and space junk all following their own paths around it.
But I still think it's worth trying to name the stars.
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no subject
Date: 2005-12-04 07:48 pm (UTC)To me, SF smells different from fantasy. Even when it isn't, really. If it falls somewhere in the middle, I think a lot depends on which end of the line the author was aiming for when they wrote it. Not that I know anything, of course. Or am even coherent.
By the by, can I add that I really liked Mélusine?
no subject
Date: 2005-12-05 04:55 pm (UTC)Of course you can!
And thank you!
no subject
Date: 2005-12-04 08:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-04 09:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-04 09:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-04 08:45 pm (UTC)Part of this is because I'm an occultist who studied history of science in grad school and works in medical research; I believe passionately in the relevance, usefulness and truth of science, magick AND religion, and so I write fiction set in worlds, spun out of whole cloth or purloined, where all three are muchly in evidence. But part of it is that I can't honestly say I prefer one over the other; though most of the books I like best were labelled sf, not all of them were, and I used to think I hated fantasy when what I really loathed was Tolkien and Conan pastiches.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-04 09:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-04 09:48 pm (UTC)I'm not saying the internet is WORSE than academia--oh good lord am I not saying that--just that the protocols are different, and that our collective attention span is much shorter.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-04 09:39 pm (UTC)Oh yes indeed, what a lovely summation.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-05 03:35 am (UTC)PS--it's naming all those bloody planetoids and moonlets that drives us all so bughouse in short order.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-05 12:51 am (UTC)You are eminently sensible, and for me the penultimate paragraph really says it all. I too am fascinated by the relationship between science fiction and fantasy. But when people start tossing definitions around, I just tend to think, "Sorry, wrong axes."
Thank you.
P.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-05 07:35 pm (UTC)Dancing bears are probably in it somewhere, though.
P.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-05 05:10 am (UTC)So - thanks for getting it all started.
Post originally found on another LJ
Date: 2005-12-06 07:24 pm (UTC)LJ ID: Reasie
Date: 2005-12-02 08:41
Subject: Does the future have a future?
Security: Public
Mood: thoughtful
Music: Rush: I sing the body electric
It's hard to deny that SF is falling from its peek. The market share is down. Of course it is. Walk into any book store and look for the science fiction section. What I recall in my youth as being a bursting rack of different paperbacks has become a modest collection of 'classics' wedged between role-playing books, graphic novels, and the ever-expanding fantasy section.
Thinking more about SF itself as a setting, a genre, a literary movement... which is it? Brian Aldiss argued passionately it was a movement. If he was correct, movements are things with beginnnings and ends, and this one seems to have reached an end. I think, however, that he was trying elevate his own field past its own reality to its ideal. As a genre, it is easily identified - florid paperbacks with stars on the covers and air-brushed supermodels in space suits. But compare it to romance or mystery or detective stories - it is not so formulaic. In fact, I have read SF romances, SF mysteries and SF detective stories. How about as a setting? Many are the SF stories and novels where, quite frankly, one could replace the space ship with a conastoga wagon, the laser guns with flint locks, and the aliens with Injuns and nothing would really change. Except, of course, that you would be offensive to history buffs. Thinking of SF as merely a setting gets you away from those 'why is this science fiction?' questions I detest so much.
Science fiction lets you get away with making things up. It frees you from the constraint of reality. I consider my story 'The Gods Awoke' to be science fiction, even though there is very little technology in it. I suppose in this case I'm pumping the 'speculative fiction' definition.
I think the rise in fantasy and non-science speculative fiction has a great deal to do with our own technological sophistication. We think we know everything, ergo we can't suspend disbelief as well when it coomes to science and technology. There can never be another TRON. We aren't mystified by computers. Neuromancer? We may still be a little mystified by networks - which explains why cyberpunk is still breathing while other sub-genres are simply withering.
We aren't awed by the future anymore. Perhaps because we aren't seeing the growth of technology and knowledge we experienced in the past two centuries. Mary Shelly could be amazed by electricity causing a frog's leg to jump. Today we are still researching electrical stimulation as a medical therapy or prosthetic alternative. The city of the future may have a skyline very unlike today's, but we know the old buildings will still be there as well.
If there is one thing I would like to accomplish with my writing, it is to make people in awe again. Naivete and joy verses cynicism. I don't know if I'm up to the task. Can we wrest wonder away from fairy tales and back into the world of tomorrow?