Hard Fantasy: Or, Illegitimate SF

[truepenny]

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."
--H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

---

Lovecraft is right, of course, the irony being that the correlation of seemingly unrelated ideas is how creativity works. Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town talks about this very helpfully in relation to poetry, as he describes the way a poem can be moved from its apparent subject to its real subject. And it's the thing that I found addictive about my college education: taking six different subjects at once resulted in some remarkable cross-pollinations.

It is also, of course, why fiction writers need to read nonfiction. Because we need those moments of brilliant cross-connect to generate stories.

It's also why elisem's Artist's Challenges work; the yoking of words to metal forces exactly the kind of cascade-effect I'm talking about.

It is a drug, make no mistake. And that's why Lovecraft is right.

---

I had one of those blinding cross-connects this morning, thanks to matociquala sending me the link to Ursula K. Le Guin's review of Jan Morris' Hav. (Which sounds like an awesomely cool book, and, yes, the review does leave me panting to find a copy.) Le Guin says:

This lack of plot and characters is common in the conventional Utopia, and I expect academics and other pigeonholers may stick Hav in with Thomas More and co. That is a respectable slot, but not where the book belongs. Probably Morris, certainly her publisher, will not thank me for saying that Hav is in fact science fiction, of a perfectly recognisable type and superb quality. The "sciences" or areas of expertise involved are social - ethnology, sociology, political science, and above all, history. ... Serious science fiction is a mode of realism, not of fantasy; and Hav is a splendid example of the uses of an alternate geography.

Whereas I, reading Le Guin's description of Hav--and noting her reference to her own Orsinian Tales--would describe it as fantasy.

But fantasy of a certain kind. And here's where the cross-connect happened, because yesterday, Bear and I were talking about the world-building in A Companion to Wolves (otherwise known as our wolf-smut book), and I fell over a distinction, like falling over a tree root, between "fantasy" and "hard fantasy." Which, as a back-formation from "hard science fiction," surely does look like a contradiction in terms, but bear with me for a minute.

Hard science fiction is science fiction grounded strongly in the "hard" sciences: physics, astronomy, chemistry, etc. It is also traditionally science fiction that has little or no interest in characterization or anything other than the Really Cool Shit (that being the technical term) its author has come up with. It is the science fiction that glorifies the sensawunda (sense of wonder) and believes this to be the genre's ultimate goal. It is also traditionally the preserve of male writers and readers, and the brouhaha starts up again periodically about whether women can or should be allowed to play with this particular set of tinker-toys.

You may suspect I am not in sympathy with hard sf; you would be right. However, my lack of sympathy is partly due to my own scientific ignoramity (I don't get a sensawunda charge off hard sf because I find the mental calisthenics distracting) and partly due to gender politics--not due to any feeling that wonder is out of bounds or childish or not worthwhile. In fact, my most recent encounter with a good sensawunda charge is The Lies of Locke Lamora, which I started yesterday. Wonder is not generated by science alone.

Hard fantasy, in my newly-minted definition, is fantasy that takes its world-building seriously, not as window-dressing or stage scenery, but as a necessary and important part of the story. And there are fantasies that do this, that are intent on working out the details, on having internal consistency of the slightly inconsistent kind that mirrors history most accurately, making their invented societies viable, making the imaginary world real and therefore, inevitably, a commentary on our own world.

... exactly what Le Guin says Morris is doing in Hav.

To-may-to, to-mah-to.

I've argued before that fantasy and science fiction have fundamental differences. Now I'm arguing that they don't. Or, rather, I'm arguing that while there are fantasies that have no truck with science fiction, and vice versa, there's also an area of convergence, where hard fantasy blends into illegitimate sf. Both of these are my own terms: fantasy that thinks about world-building in an sfnal way; sf that approaches its subject matter with a fantasist's sensibility.

Construct a theoretical model. Watch it spin. Take it down. Build another. Spin it around and see how it flies. Watch for the cross-connects that light up the internal landscape. I'm not saying this is how things are; I'm saying it's how they might be.

Comments

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

If I knew where my copy was, I'd offer to lend it to you. If you have a hard time finding one of your own, let me know and I'll do a little spelunking for it.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Construct a theoretical model. Watch it spin. Take it down. Build another. Spin it around and see how it flies.

Exactly. Our theoretical models for how literature works are just patterns that help us see what bits do what; sometimes they are mutually exclusionary, and that's okay. You *can* hold two contradictory ideas in your head at the same time.

They're not religious tenets, or they shouldn't be.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

No. They're only approximations. And they can't be "proved," either.

(This is why mirrorthaw objects to literary studies using the word "theory." Because it's a misappropriation.)

[jennifer-dunne.livejournal.com]

OMG! I'm a hard fantasy junkie! Who knew?
But I love reading all those books that tell you how the world works, in all their messy, cobbled-together-on-the-fly, realistic glory.

Summed up as "what's the magic do?" Because in a real world, there isn't going to be a billion and one enchanted swords and armor. You're going to have enchanted bedpans, too.

[handworn.livejournal.com]

That considerable amounts of good writing involve non sequitur has been a theory which has intrigued me for maybe a year now. Of course, what it actually is is non [whatever the Latin is for directly] sequitur. It does in fact sequitur, and that finding-out of how it does-- how it actually was related to what preceded it-- is a release the reader wants of the tension the writer builds.

Or so it seems. This is all just theory, for me.

Anyway, interesting topic.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Directo.


--Latin Geek At Large

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. And it's why, though I like Doppelganger well enough, and was willing to write a sequel, I didn't want to park myself in that world for an extended period of time; it's one of my earliest worthwhile ideas, and predates the point at which I really started applying my anthropology-fu to my worldbuilding. The world is nice enough, but it doesn't interest me nearly as much as some of the things I've come up with since.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

I feel the need to state, for the record, that:

a) there needs to be more anthropology-fu in the world, and especially in fiction

b) there need to be more words with the morpheme "-fu" appended, as every profession and specialty deserves its own corps of calmly mercilles karate-chopping experts. Metaphorically speaking.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

a) It's in some ways harder to prove you're doing intellectually rigorous "hard fantasy" than intellectually rigorous hard sf; anthropology is not a field that lends itself to showing one's math. I myself do it more on an educated gut instinct than anything else at the moment -- realizing that if Tir Diamh has a religion that looks a lot like Shinto, then I'm going to have to rethink the philosophical underpinnings of their Renaissance-esque monarchy, since that latter was heavily intertwined with Christian theology. Etc.

b) You can put fu on anything! It started (for me) with "gun fu" as an analogue of kung fu, and "wire fu" for Matrix-style stunts; from there, it became an all-purpose suffix.

[larryhammer]

And don't forget Google fu.

---L.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Ah, what a useful distinction! Certainly fantasy that doesn't take its world-building seriously drives me batty.

[reannon.livejournal.com]

Off-topic, but I stumbled across this interesting piece on feminist science fiction, apparently inspired by Wiscon. I thought you might be interested.

http://www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/10285

[torrilin.livejournal.com]

Hard science fiction is science fiction grounded strongly in the "hard" sciences: physics, astronomy, chemistry, etc. It is also traditionally science fiction that has little or no interest in characterization or anything other than the Really Cool Shit (that being the technical term) its author has come up with. It is the science fiction that glorifies the sensawunda (sense of wonder) and believes this to be the genre's ultimate goal. It is also traditionally the preserve of male writers and readers, and the brouhaha starts up again periodically about whether women can or should be allowed to play with this particular set of tinker-toys.

You're packing an awful lot into the term hard SF that doesn't particularly need to be there.

1. Writing is not a gendered activity. Therefore, women can write hard SF. the cultural issues of science education and women often lead to women not having the background to write hard SF, but that's our cultural problem, not an inherent trait of the genre. Men whining that women can't write hard SF because they're women are doing the same kind of whining they always are when priviledge is threatened. Don't listen to them.

2. Bad characterization should not be a requirement of a genre. It may be a common feature of a genre in the hands of poor writers, but that's the failing of the writer, not of the genre. A good allegory can have good characterization, but bad allegories frequently have characters that make hard SF characters look lively.

3. The more SF I read, the more I think the *proper* domain of hard SF is not the traditional hard sciences, but the sciences most in flux at the time the author is writing. Cyberpunk is likely a form of hard SF. An awful lot of the SF that explores biology, genetics, chemistry and the intersection between those disciplines is hard SF. Back when Asimov was writing, astronomy and physics were in flux, and biology was pretty boring. Computer science wasn't even invented.

Side note: the average hard science or engineering geek has such a poor background in biology that he's likely to think the theory of evolution must be false since it can't be proven experimentally. This tends to argue against letting those geeks determine what science is "good enough" to be allowed into science fiction.

4. Don't care what the boys say, both fantasy and SF should encourage our sense of wonder. It's not just the domain of hard SF, no matter how much they whine that it is.

So after we've taken away all the gender nonsense, and stopped making bad writing a genre requirement, we're left with stories about Really Cool Shit that have a strong scientific basis. Further, the science involved should be science that's changing a lot, so there are more options for Really Cool Shit.

(of course, in my own particular brand of lit crit, all SF is a subset of fantasy. YMMV)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Please notice the word "traditionally."

Nowhere did I say women can't or shouldn't write hard sf. Or soft sf or cyberpunk or any other damn kind of sf they want to write. Nor did I say I agree with the traditional definition of hard sf.

[torrilin.livejournal.com]

Yup, but then your response to the idea of hard fantasy (describing it as "illegitimate" SF) comes from your reaction to those traditions. If you look at what the genre actually requires, hard fantasy is a sensible thing, not illegitimate at all. Defining things in response to how the stereotypical hard SF fan sees things is not particularly useful. It's limiting to only grapple with things on their terms, because they set the terms (mostly) on ground they understand and then whine if you bring out literary analysis techniques more sophisticated than a physics equation.

Hard fantasy is actually a cool and useful term for litcrit. It's worth exploring. With the genre framework *I* work with, SF becomes a subgenre of hard fantasy.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Why do you imagine that I'm using the term naively or without self-awareness? As it happens, "illegitimate sf" is a joke about canonization that is also a useful way to think about the interstices of the science fiction genre.

[torrilin.livejournal.com]

Because there weren't enough sarcasm markers in the text for me to catch that you were intending sarcasm. Yes, I can be stupid. But read the text with no sarcasm, and my response makes sense.

[pnh.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, I had the same reactions torrilin did. I think you may not have been as clear in the world as you were in your mind.

To me, your characterization of what "hard SF" inherently is felt remarkably like claiming that Americans are all right-wingers based on the fact that Republicans claim that Americans are all right-wingers. It's a raised middle finger to the hard work and efforts of a lot of people who don't fit your generalizations. Yes, I'm taking it personally. It's personal.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

If you feel like I've stepped on your toes, then of course it's personal, and I apologize.

I did not express myself properly, due partly to (a.) using a piece of personal shorthand (http://truepenny.livejournal.com/422361.html), (b.) sloppy synechdoche, and (c.) not having the sense to delete a paragraph which was opening a can of worms I didn't want to deal with. And which was irrelevant to what I was trying to say, anyway, and I don't know why I included it.

What I was trying to say, and failing, is that wonder is a laudable goal, and you don't have to be writing science fiction either to seek it or to achieve it. And I think, trying to reconstruct my train of thought, that I brought "hard sf" into the conversation because it does prioritize wonder as part of its self-definition, and because I think fantasy should do likewise but often doesn't.

Which is a better thing to say than what I actually said.

[pnh.livejournal.com]

"wonder is a laudable goal, and you don't have to be writing science fiction either to seek it or to achieve it."

Absolutely right. The idea that we have some uniquely precious relationship to "wonder" is a shibboleth of SF, right alongside the notion that we are committing something that's uniquely a "literature of ideas."

Leaving aside the credit you get for so graciously responding to my rather grumpy post, allow me to admire the concision of "sloppy synecdoche".

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

I think you read a different post than I read.

[elisem.livejournal.com]

Defining things in response to how the stereotypical hard SF fan sees things is not particularly useful.

I was thinking that it runs the risk of setting up a Straw Genre, myself.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I've read Last Letters From Hav approximately a million times, and I can't wait to get the sequel, but what I'm saying here is about what Le Guin is talking about as the first half of Hav as now published, and maybe the second half is different.

It's a travel book, by a travel writer (and it ruins you for the rest of her travel writing because when she says "Oscar Wilde went to Chicago" you think "Yeah, and I believed you about Nijinsky in Hav but that's a bit far-fetched...") and it's about an imaginary city, and it's actually not utopian or SFnal, it's Ruritanian. It's a travel book, with the incident and inconsequence and odd intrusions of personal POV and digressions into history that you get in a travel book. It definitely ought to be considered with Kalpa Imperial, but there's nothing else in or out of genre that I've ever read like it. And it is set in our world, in an imaginary city in our Europe, and nothing of it is fantastical at all or anything you wouldn't find in a travel book, except that it's all made up.

(I want to know what has happened in Hav since 1980 so badly that I have to put it out deliberately of my mind, because the sensible thing to do is to buy it in a month in Britain, where it will be on shelves. All the same.)

[kate_nepveu]

Huh. I have the copy you gave me and have been looking consideringly at it lately, but I had no idea there was a forthcoming sequel.

Well, I'll shelve it a bit longer and let you tell me whether I should think of it as a single book or a duology.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

The new book Hav is composed of Last Letters of Hav and Hav of the Myrmidons. The latter is about half the length of the former, probably about 33k. There is also a preface that binds the two stories together; they are presented as one text.

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

This is somewhat out of left field, but when I read the mention of 'hard fantasy' on Elizabeth's LJ, I thought out a few definitions before turning to your actual post, and what I had decided it meant was: fantasy that draws strongly on folk traditions and is thus within some kind of long-term existing canon of lore. On this view, Greer Gilman writes very hard fantasy.

This is obviously not what you meant and I think the definition you have coined is excellent. But I contribute nonetheless...!

[almeda.livejournal.com]

Maybe we could call your kind 'roots fantasy' (in analogy to 'roots music', which seems to be people getting REALLY REALLY INTO various cultural canons of historical musical forms, and then playing with them)?

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

Other people talking about what hard fantasy might be (http://megmccarron.livejournal.com/57970.html).

[kateelliott.livejournal.com]

Hear hear. Good post.

I especially like the point that a seriously built world has "internal consistency of the slightly inconsistent kind" - the idea that it all has to line up is, well, inaccurate.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

Michael Swanwick has used the term "hard fantasy" for (if I understand him correctly) fantasy which has outstandingly original backgrounds. I dislike that use of the term because it's not parallel to "hard science."

I would say it's hard science if 1) the writer has worked out the equations and checked the details and 2) it matters -- to readers and to the writer -- if it's been done accurately.

There's no equivalent for fantasy, because there's far less agreement on what's accurate. The Hidden Folk/elves/alfar/Gentry vary greatly, depending on what folk legend you use. For example, they might be unable to bear being around crosses; or they might be devout Christians (who, howver, use only the Old Testament because, being unfallen, they don't need the New Testament.) They may live in our world, or they may have their own world.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Which is why, to me, "hard fantasy" would indicate internal consistency and an attention to the structural underpinnings of those ideas, rather than an adherence to a specific narrative. (The comments to the post linked above point out, very effectively, the impossibility of establishing a base stratum of folkloric sources. I'd add to the things said there that a bunch of Finnish folklorists tried really hard to do exactly that, and failed.)

Hard = minimization of hand-waving; that's how I'd put it. It's a distinction of degree rather than kind, to me, asymptotically approaching a point where absolutely everything in the setting makes rigorous sense, and you can show your math if necessary. Which runs the risk, in fantasy, of losing the numinous, but I think that internal consistency can be done in a numinous fashion. (Just like one can juggle five flaming torches while riding a unicycle on a wire above a pit of alligators. We never said it was easy.)

[elisem.livejournal.com]

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."
--H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu


Lovecraft is right, of course, the irony being that the correlation of seemingly unrelated ideas is how creativity works. Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town talks about this very helpfully in relation to poetry, as he describes the way a poem can be moved from its apparent subject to its real subject. And it's the thing that I found addictive about my college education: taking six different subjects at once resulted in some remarkable cross-pollinations.

It is also, of course, why fiction writers need to read nonfiction. Because we need those moments of brilliant cross-connect to generate stories.

It's also why [info]elisem's Artist's Challenges work; the yoking of words to metal forces exactly the kind of cascade-effect I'm talking about.

It is a drug, make no mistake. And that's why Lovecraft is right.

Forgot to say: I adore this. May I nab it for the website? Also, must link. MUST. SIMPLY MUST. Because you GET IT.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yes, of course.