Science fiction vs. Fantasy
Apr. 8th, 2008 01:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackOne 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 :)
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 :)
no subject
Date: 2008-04-08 10:32 am (UTC)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...
no subject
Date: 2008-04-08 10:40 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-08 10:49 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-08 11:11 am (UTC):)
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...
no subject
Date: 2008-04-08 03:09 pm (UTC)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 ?
no subject
Date: 2008-04-08 03:17 pm (UTC)(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.)
no subject
Date: 2008-04-08 03:20 pm (UTC)