Taking Another Tilt at the Windmill

[truepenny]

[first published on Storytellers Unplugged, January 7, 2011]

Writing "I'm a Member of an Evil Horde, Ask Me How!" (published December 7, 2010) started me thinking again about that hoary old chestnut and perennial panel favorite: “What’s the difference between fantasy and science fiction?” Since, insofar as I have an allegiance to any academic critical school, it’s to genre theory, I think about this a little bit differently than most people, and this round of thinking has led me to some interesting places.

First off, two caveats:

1.) “Genre” and “marketing category” are not the same thing. The latter is a label slapped on a book for the convenience of booksellers. (And I fully appreciate the need for quick, one-word, uncomplicated labels when all you’re trying to do is figure out how to put books where people will find them in order to buy them.) “Genre” has a complicated history, which I’ll get to in a minute. For now, I just want to point out that marketing categories strive for the absolute (though they don’t necessarily achieve it, even so): either something DOES go in the Romance section or it DOESN’T. Genres are all about relatives.

2.) I am not a prescriptivist. I don’t want to tell any story what it should be doing. Rather, I’m trying to find ways to describe what it is doing. So none of what follows should be construed as pronouncements from on high. It’s just me thinking about the stories I love.

All right. Back to the idea of “genre.” At the root of it all, genres are arbitrary categories which we use because we are hardwired pattern-recognition junkies. And I fully and cheerfully include myself in that. For pretty much as long as there’s been literary criticism, they’ve been used to try to impose value judgments on different kinds of stories and storytelling (think of Aristotle, think of Sir Philip Sidney), and as prose gradually supplanted poetry as the primary mode of storytelling in English (I can’t speak about any other language’s literature, because the only two I know anything about are (a.) pre-novel and (b.) dead), and the novel came to reign supreme over Anglo-American story consumption (I don’t know enough about other Anglophone traditions to discuss them), people started dividing novels into smaller and smaller sub-genres. And started, inevitably, making value judgments about them.

The divide between mimetic literature and fantastic literature is a relatively recent one, and judging by its effects, it went hand in hand with the effort to make prose fiction respectable, something critics and academics could take seriously, not just popular entertainment. And, whether by design or not, this bid for respectability involved disowning the fantastic. (I blame James Joyce, but only because I can’t blame Aristotle.) Fantastic literature became something suitable only for children and the ignorant masses–and notice the simultaneous denigration of children’s literature, and the way in which the two reinforce each other. It’s taken us most of a century to fight our way back from that completely arbitrary and artificial distinction. (Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap. The way you elevate mimetic literature and denigrate fantastic literature is by comparing the 10% to the 90.) If you go and look at Western canonical literature, you’ll be hard pressed to find any of it that isn’t fantastic in one aspect or another until you get to Clarissa; Clarissa, while I wouldn’t call it particularly realistic, is definitely in the para-real rather than the contra-real or sur-real camp. (And that, of course, has a great deal to do with the origins of the novel in confessional literature . . . but that’s another topic entirely.)

My point is that I think most definitions of fantasy and science fiction (or fantasy vs. science fiction) are starting from premises that could themselves stand to be more carefully examined.

I’m going to define “genre” as stories concerned with the same set of narrative conventions and expectations. In other words, I see a genre as a series of questions which a story chooses to engage with. It may answer “yes,” “no,” or “giraffe,” but it is engaging with those questions, rather than another set.

It becomes immediately apparent, by this definition, that fantasy and science fiction are not genres. Horror is a genre, because horror brings a set of narrative expectations, just as mystery and romance do. You can put a romance into a fantasy story or a science fiction story, and nothing about the plot of the romance must or should change. But if you put the romance into a horror story–yes, something has to change. Just as you can take the same set-up–a dead body found under strange circumstances–and make it either a mystery story or a horror story; either one may have elements of the other, but fundamentally, whether you pick mystery or horror makes a difference to your plot and its outcome. They are genres.

Fantasy and science fiction, on the other hand, are like Western and historical. They’re something for which there isn’t a good word. “Setting” is accurate as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough, because it implies that the fantastic/sfnal/Western/historical elements of the story are merely window-dressing, and that is not at all the case. (Okay, here I am a little bit prescriptivist, because what I mean is that it shouldn’t be the case. In good fantasy, the fantastic element should be integral to–and also well integrated in–the plot. Ditto the sfnal in science fiction, the western milieu in Westerns, the historical in historicals.) But they aren’t genres, because there is no narrative expectation you can apply across the board. You can have historical mysteries, fantasy mysteries (Barbara Hambly, Elizabeth Bear, Jim Butcher, to name three off the top), science fiction mysteries. I’ve never seen a Western mystery, but there’s no reason you couldn’t write one. You can put horror in any of these settings, likewise. They don’t care what kind of narrative you apply to them.

(The other odd thing, while I’m talking about things for which there aren’t good words in English, is the way in which horror, aside from being transportable from one genre to another, can make back-formations and put down roots. A detective without a mystery is like something out of Pirandello or Beckett, and a romantic lead without a romance is even worse. But Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker is, among other things, a fantasy novel with zombies in it. Zombies are a horror trope, but they don’t make Boneshaker a horror novel, any more than vampires, likewise a horror trope, make Those Who Hunt the Night (Hambly) or New Amsterdam (Bear) a vampire novel. And yet the zombies in Boneshaker are still zombies, and Bear and Hambly’s vampires are most definitely vampires. (N.b., they do not sparkle.) It’s odd and it’s also marvelous that you can cut horror tropes loose from their genre moorings, and they keep working.

(I don’t know what to do with that, and the neat thing about genre theory, and the fact that it’s descriptive rather than prescriptive, is that I don’t have to know what to do with that. It’s okay to just sit and watch it work and be filled with delight.)

Under this schematic, fantasy and science fiction differ in world rather than in story, and I think this applies to Westerns and historicals, too. World, like genre, does bring with it questions a story has to answer, but it brings different questions, and they interact with the story in different ways.

… I guess for next month I can start thinking about what I think those questions are.

Comments

Look-and-feel

[leoboiko2.livejournal.com]

Two things made me start thinking about fantasy and sci-fi as genres, or at least as feelings induced by the writer, rather than just settings (that is, as a "look-and-feel" thing, rather than just "look"). The first thing is the widely observed point that Star Wars feels like fantasy, not sci-fi, despite lasers and spaceships. Why does Start Wars cause this impression, but not Star Trek? (It's not "hardness" ; Trek has a lot of handwaved mumbo-jumbo, too, and its own sort of Space-Age mysticism etc.). The second thing was China Miéville's Embassytown. Miéville has this method where he throws lots of weird, incomprehensible things on your face ("at the age of five, she became a simile"); at first reading you're, like, what the hell? am I reading this right? But then you keep on, and soon, in a way that's carefully designed to look accidental, you get some piece of information that makes all the baffling things to be reasonably explained and, in retrospect, perfectly sensible.

The whole process feels a lot like science: bafflement, exploration, wonder, hypothesizing, reasoning, explanation.

I thought: if this was Tolkien, he'd stop at "wonder". In LotR, we (by design) never even learn what it is that the One Ring even does, much less how it does whatever it is (yes, it transports people to the world of invisible beings, but that's like a side-effect, it isn't its true power). We never even see the extent of Gandalf's abilities: serious battle involving him keeps him off-camera, no more than distant flashes on the horizon (contrast this with the movie, e.g. the Gandalf/Saruman battle). By cautious omission, Tolkien keeps alive a sense of wonder, even of the numinous; like stumbling upon a magnificent oak tree in an ancient forest.

So my little pet theory is that, as modes of telling rather than settings, sci-fi is primarily about reasoning and understanding, while fantasy focuses on wonder. On the one hand, we have Aristotle's pleasures of learning; on the other, the shaman in drunken reveries around a midnight fire. Because Star Wars is more about awe than explanation, we feel it as "fantasy", despite the setting (to the point that, when it does do something that feels sci-fi, namely the midichlorians, the fans reject it as an unwelcome tonal shift—comparable to the shift from Dragon Ball to Dragon Ball Z, or Highlander to Highlander 2.)

Cf. also LeGuin's critique of Harry Potter.

(I'm sorry if a draft of this comment appears in duplicate; it seems that my cellphone ate it.)