Science fiction vs. Fantasy

[jack]

One of the thoughts from Eastercon was an (inevitable) panel on the difference between Science Fiction and Fantasy. The panel didn't actually get very far, as it stalled on a big argument between Weston, who argued so vehemently for science fiction being about rationalistic extrapolation of science that everything else got caught in the cross-fire, but it raised lots of interesting ideas.

It's one of the ideas I've been mulling around in my head since. I've yet to come to any decisions, but preliminarily started considering a list of *potential* ways genres are defined.

1. Sometimes, like any other word, the definition is mainly a gut feeling thing, typically encapsulated by having most of a bunch of properties. For instance, filk is defined as something like "Originally songs made by fantasy/scifi fans, about scifi/fantasy, based on well-known
tunes, but now anything related to this."

2. If and only if they use one central concept. Eg. the murder mystery genre is pretty well defined. There's a murder. And one character investigates, and deduces the culprit. Or detective stories are much the same, but it doesn't have to be a murder. And both are very recognisable, both in terms of their own genres, a "detective novel", and in combination with others -- if you say "science-fiction detective story" everyone will know exactly what you mean and know if a book is, whether or not it's marketed as such.

3. If it includes certain background concepts, in the world or the plot. Eg. historical novels typically have certain kinds of plot, but plainly you can have a historical novel with any kind of plot and it'll fit in, and you typically have historical thrillers, historical romances, historical mysteries, etc, whichever they get categorised as.

Now we can guess how scifi and fantasy _could_ be related:

1. Are they two ends of a spectrum? Do they share a large category X, but fantasy has Y and scifi has not-Y?
2. Are they orthogonal? Does scifi do X and fantasy do Y, and typically a book has one or the other, but could have both?
3. Are they separate concepts with a gulf between, so you have core scifi and core fantasy, and in the middle you have things that are kind of like both but not really?

What defining characteristics of science fiction can we spot? Off the top of my head, suggestions that may or may not hold up:

1. I would say hard science fiction is defined by "the story is about the science" and "the science is related to real science" maybe more or less of either, but I think that's the core, with a more or less fuzzy nimbus around.
2. It often has spaceships
3. The universe is in principle analysable by rational principles
4. The universe actually *is* analysed by rational principles.
5. The core features of the book are a couple of central ideas (eg. "What if we could do X?" and "What if there were a war about it?") rather than extensive and beautiful world building.
6. Written by a science fiction author.
7. Having science which our current science could, in theory, approximate. ETA: By this, I meant what Pavanne described well.

The natural thing to do is examine edge cases. Obviously whatever the definitions you _can_ have fiction that does both, but there are many books which you feel ought to be one or the other, but is fuzzy. Do they feel to fall more on one side or the other, or to do both science-fiction and fantasy, or to not really be members of either? Several classic examples:

1. Flatworld. Completely made up, but utterly serving the explication of real science. Some fantasy involved? But completely and utterly science fiction.
2. Atrocity archives. It feels like science fiction, with some horror. The world is definitely science fiction -- they fear the unknown, but they fight back by knowing stuff and building gadgets. Again some trappings of fantasy.
3. Magic goes away. To me definitely feels like fantasy, and has the trappings of fantasy, but fulfils most of the definitions of science-fiction too.
4. Bujold. Classic space opera. There's some hard-ish science fiction in there in the imagination of how technologies would affect societies, but the real strengths are the characters.
5. Amber chronicles. Feels like fantasy, but has definite science fiction aspects too, they solve their problems partly by learning to poke the fabric of the universe.
6. Cryptonomicon. Arguably not either. Most people read Cryptonomicon and see a technothriller set entirely in real world physics. But it *feels* like science fiction.
7. Startrek. Clearly science fiction, but why? The science is mostly made up as they go along. Is it solely for the social commentary? :)
8. Starwars. Classic space opera? Yet is a perfect transplantation of a fantasy story to space.

I want the definition of "science fiction" to be whether its rationalistic or not. But this excludes space opera, and includes magic that works by clearly defined rules[1], which doesn't feel right to me. Contrariwise, if you just define science-fiction to be "has spaceships or stuff", that feels like a cop-out.

Nor am I sure if fantasy is an orthogonal axis or not. Dave's suggestion was that fantasy was the style of a book, orthogonal to it being science fiction. But I'm not yet sure.

OK, that was most of my thoughts to date. Hopefully I'll actually come to some conclusions in a bit :)

[1] Not most magic which claims to be. Maybe not even Dungeons and Dragons type, where it's supposed to be, but in fact its effect is very abstract. But magic where you really can say "Why don't they do X?" and then they do :)

Comments

[pavanne.livejournal.com]

I think the difference is that science fiction is set in our universe, whereas fantasy is set in another universe.

This means that SF can't introduce something that is contrary to our observation of the universe. It can introduce something which is discovered or revealed to show that the universe is not as we thought it, but this must be consistent with what we have observed up to the present. Anything can happen in the future, but there must be the possibility that the past is as we see it (except in certain time-travel-paradox stories). SF isn't under obligation to show how we got from here to there, but it should be possible that we did or will.

Whereas in fantasy the rules can change and you can introduce 'new things' which are just completely against what we observe. People can fly, and can always have flown. Or things can be just slightly not as we see them, for example if fairies or ghosts exist.

By this definition you could shoehorn Star Wars into either, though the use of telekinetic and other mental powers by a specialised, highly trained elite does not necessarily contradict our view of the universe. Particularly if you treat the defining characteristic of the SW universe to be 'some rare people have limited telekinetic and other powers, and technology is a little ahead of our own plus FTL travel'.

[simont]

Although, of course, a notable subset of fantasy is apparently set in our multiverse, since it starts by having someone from our Earth stumble upon the one magic door that lets them through to the fantasy world. Often the rest of the magic in the fantasy world completely fails to work in our universe. I would say that The Chronicles of Amber, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Fionavar Tapestry and Mordant's Need are all at least as "consistent with what we have observed up to the present" as Star Wars is.

Mordant's Need is also an interesting case because a sizable amount of the plot revolves around continuing research into (the practical applications of) the magic system, and to some extent the ideas are things the reader could have thought of too. For this reason I've often felt that it has a slightly more SFy feel than most fantasy. (Also helped by the fact that the fantasy world is 100% secular, which is a pleasant change after all that fantasy with manifest gods.)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yes, that was a distinction I was proud of articulating. I think you can patch up the AU problem (if it's mainly in one alternate universe, if that one is a continuation of ours, at least in the technology if not the history, or if it's about the hopping between universes, whether than hopping is sci-fi or fantasy).

However, what about urban fantasy? That the fantasy equivalent of technopunk, assuming that about five years in the future vampires are suddenly discovered to exist, and gives people who are angsty about special powers.

And what about flatland and utopian/dystopian fiction? I think those are plainly sci-fi as they're exploring a single idea designed to shed light on our own world. And the science they're illustrating is real, but the internal science is not.

[pavanne.livejournal.com]

Arg, urban fantasy. Sometimes it just has to depend on flavour? You have SF vampires and fantasy vampires. SF vampires are photophobic (particularly at certain wavelengths) and fantasy vampires are burned by daylight... I appreciate that's kind of subtle but you know what I mean.

Flatland would seem to be satirical fantasy, no? Whereas utopian/ dystopian would often be satirical SF?

And fanf mentioned steampunk, which I would still say is SF. It's still possible that the state of the world might change so that steampunkyness becomes preferred to cyberpunkyness/ current high-tech. Maybe not likely, but it's still recognisably our universe.

Most AU stuff where the rules of the multiverse turn out to be different from the rules of the universe is fantasy. So Diana Wynne Jones' Twelve Related Worlds multiverse novels are fantasy. Possibly if someone steps between the universes and says "hey, the sky is green - the atmospheric composition/ history of the Industrial Revolution/ Planck's constant must be different here!" it remains SF.

So much to read.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

However, what about urban fantasy? That the fantasy equivalent of technopunk, assuming that about five years in the future vampires are suddenly discovered to exist, and gives people who are angsty about special powers.

I think of those as fitting under the heading of secret history, really, and being more like the secret history/conspiracy genre than anything else in terms of how the world-shape feels. Mind you, most of the examples to come to mind do actually fall apart considered as secret histories, you can't roll them back or forward very far without the contrivances necessary to keep the consequences of the secret history from changing the direction of real history becoming overloaded. (Vary honourable exception is Mike Carey's Felix Castor series, the which I would heartily recommend; Castor is a medium-boiled North of England gumshoe/exorcist, in a world where ghosts coming back has been a very minor and occasional thing for all of history, but where some unexplained event in the mid-1990s, which the series is digging towards revealing, caused the frequency of ghosts to go up by several orders of magnitude; Carey has done some lovely worldbuilding in the classic SFnal mode of thinking through the consequences of this single change to the second and third order, and how people live with it, and his prose and characterisation skills are up to it.)

[fanf]

Interesting.

So by this definition, alternate history like Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle and the various steampunk books are fantasy, though their sensibilities are sfnal.

It also puts certain stories that contain speculative physics right on the borderline of sf. For example, Vernor Vinge invented the zones of thought he described in "a Fire Upon the Deep" to escape from his own problems with imagining past the singularity - they aren't intended to be real. There are plenty of stories that feature ftl drives or ansibles without any attempt to reconcile the tropes with known science.

[naath.livejournal.com]

There is at least one element to the Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon that makes them clearly *not* in the category of "plausible in our universe"; I don't think that makes something "not SF" on it's own, because I think things like Fire Upon the Deep are SF, on the other hand Stephenson never bothers to attempt to explain/justify that change to the world in terms of any sort of Science.

I think those novels are very hard to categorise - they aren't "historical" because historical novels generally try not to overly much change the world; I don't think "alternate history" work, because generally "alternate history" suggests that one thing is changed and then its consequences explored - I'm not really convinced that that's what Stephenson was doing, the changes to the overall flow of history are minimal. It reads like SF because people are always explaining cool science stuff to each other, it doesn't read like fantasy because no-one seems to be really interacting with the more fantastical elements.

I'm also not sure I've read anything else that would fall in to the same category - although possibly 1610 a Sundial in a Grave (Mary Gentle) might fit.

It lives on my SF&F shelf, because Stephenson is an SF&F author and I don't have anywhere better to put it...

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I think Cryptonomicon is a fascinating example even apart from the discussion, because he's plainly scifi, but it's very hard justifying that.

Apart from the one element[sic], they're basically real world (or maybe technothriller), but feel like scifi, and I don't think that addition does change it, just adds a little icing.

I'm not sure why. Perhaps that it's so little, or perhaps that the characters approach the anomaly in a science fiction way, or perhaps that even if it were fantasy, the book seems to support an inevitable and good ascendence of fantasy over it.

FWIW, one theory has that in the Future sequel, the element will be explained to come from a science-fiction source after all.

[naath.livejournal.com]

I kept expecting that it would be explained (or at least that the characters would come up with a scientific explanation)... that was a bit disappointing really.

It's a History-Of-Science novel I think, which there aren't many of. Maybe that can come under SF - but rather than being about some scientific thing it's about the very process of science and how that emerged from what we had before.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I think the first time I read them I didn't really pick up what was going on enough to have an opinion...

:)

It's a History-Of-Science novel I think, which there aren't many of. Maybe that can come under SF

Another point I made before was a lot of the novels that feel like a "classic" (either traditional classics, or modern novels which feel like that) do what they do and let other people worry about categories, so often the most prominent are difficult to place.

I think the contemporary parts are technothriller, and as you say, the historical parts "history of maths" (and both could have been set in the real world if Stephenson could hold himself back), but what's really defining is the style, which is all scifi...

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I kept expecting that it would be explained (or at least that the characters would come up with a scientific explanation)... that was a bit disappointing really.

I have a theory that it more or less has, but it involves real book-destroying level spoilers for Cryptonomicon; what would be the best way to proceed if I wished to lay that out here ?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

(Responses to other cogent points later, but) I suggest making a post yourself and linking to it, with cut text "no, seriously, spoilers" or "no, seriously, speculation spoilers, even if you've read it" cut tags as appropriate :)

(I also owe a post about thoughts about cryptonomicon, arising from conversations with mair, after she found a site that did thje best job I've seen of collating various theories.)

[naath.livejournal.com]

Hmm, tricky. I've read it - and can't immediately think what you mean but of course I read C. before I read the Baroque Cycle so I wasn't looking out for it...

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

FWIW I think of the Baroque cycle as notionally supposed to fit into "what could be really going on in our universe" and be consistent with it, even if the Stephenson's flamboyancy sometimes means it couldn't actually.

And Vinge... I think it is supposed to be consistent with what we see, right? We're in the slow zone, and eventually colonise a swathe of it, and can never detect the zones. But I admit the books would work equally well if they didn't.

But yes, those borderline cases are the problems for this definition.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

The thing about the Slow Zone is that it's an answer to an extremely nebulous and hypothetical problem; if you believe with genuinely messianic zeal that the Singularity is universal, imminent and inevitable, you need to come up with a construct preventing it from happening if you want to play with relatively high-tech societies that exist long enough to communicate and exchange spaceships and so on.

[naath.livejournal.com]

But there exist fantasy books where you eventually find out that *actually* what happened is that 1000 years prior to the story a bunch of humans came in a space ship and colonised this world, which happens to have alien creatures that are a lot like ghosts/fairies/dragons etc. or alien drugs that can cause people to be psychic or etc. etc.

Some of the stories in these world feel like fantasy, some of the stories feel like SF.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to popularise the term "fantasy with SF underwear" for this subgenre, myself, because it's a very real edge case but not always well distinguished from the other very different edge cases between SF and fantasy. [ And also because it lets me consider The Book of the New Sun as a 1940s Lili St.-Cyr burlesque routine. ]