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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.
