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

[simont]

I think, for me, the key similarity between sf and fantasy is that both are set in worlds where you can do cool stuff – fly to the stars, build nanotech and/or strong AI, levitate by power of mind, spit fire from your fingertips, create platefuls of food with a wave of your hand. This is what makes reading either of them a nice change from the real world in which conservation of energy, technological limitations, the absence of any telekinetic facility in our brains, and (in extreme cases) the light-speed limit and the uncertainty principle tend to prevent us from doing anything seriously cool.

The key difference is in the character of the cool stuff: in sf, it's all done by science, and in fantasy, it's magic. So for me, the question boils down to asking, what's the difference between science and magic?

Well, in the real world science and magic are difficult to even confuse in the first place, since the former actually works and the latter is poorly specified fiction or myth; but when the science becomes fictitious and the magic starts working, one has to find a new basis on which to draw the dividing line.

I'm sure there are difficult borderline cases, but I think the key point for me is that science is basically reductive whereas magic is holistic.

A scientific effect is one which basically occurs at the level of atoms, or fundamental particles, or space-time (even if the actual atoms or particles in question don't exist in real science – unobtainium, tachyons, hyperspace, polarised neutron flow), and macroscopic effects on people, chairs, planets etc are emergent consequences of those rules. Even if the author doesn't actually do the analysis to show you how the macroscopic effects you're seeing are emergent consequences of uniformly applied physical principles, the character of the macroscopic effects tends to be such that you can figure out as much detail as you need for yourself.

By contrast, magic tends to operate fundamentally on macroscopic things like "human being". Suppose someone casts a magic spell on a person, for instance, which prevents them from moving outside a circle drawn on the floor, but which is fine with air and food and other stuff moving across that circle, and can stop the person jumping over the circle but is somehow fine with people walking around the general area on the floor above. If you try to think up a scientific implementation of all of that behaviour, it's very difficult to come up with one which forbids all the right things and permits all the right things – not least because a lot of the concepts involved are so nebulous. (The air breathed out by the person can clearly cross the line; can their skin flakes? Their nail clippings? Their nails while attached, which are after all already dead? Can they reach past the circle with a hand-held tool? Why that but not their fingernails?) The best you can typically do, if trying to implement magic by means of science, is to postulate a sentience somewhere to oversee the spell: give it a bunch of powers to apply physical forces and manipulate microscopic concepts, and tell it to use its best judgment in deciding what to forbid and permit. Magic is AI-complete.

So is Star Wars sf or fantasy? I think it's an overlapping of both, because it has both science (hyperspace, energy weapons) and magic (the Force). In the prequels, of course, Lucas attempted to make the Force become science as well by inventing the clearly scientific midichlorians as carriers of it; but the reason this failed to work (thankfully) is because whatever the cause of the Force, its effects are still magical, since they operate at the level of "emotion", "presence of a particular person", "danger to someone's health", "millions of people dying".

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Ah! I think you've nailed it. I don't think cool stuff is necessarily involved, but that's what makes it worth reading, and I think classifying the departures from reality in terms of science or magic is the way to go.

I was edging towards it with rules like "in principle subject to rational analysis" but it was hedged about with too many caveats.

I think this description fits what I want for all the edge cases, so I want to accept it. Describing it in terms of science and magic reduces it to another question we've debated before, but I think a question (a) we have a better intuition about (b) we've more answers for and (c) more fundamental.

There are lots of edge cases between science and magic, but we can generally decide where things ought to go. And it explains why there are different sorts of edge cases of books -- some are edge cases because they have both science and magic, some have cool stuff which is not clear if it's magic or science.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

And I think your characterisation of the difference between science and magic is good, although I think there's probably more to say; the question came up most recently in connection to Clarke's Law and I don't think we've quite settled it yet, though I think we have a good handle on it.

I once envisaged a story series (I never got as far as writing anything) where people lived in a matrix-like world and deduced they were doing so because they noticed psychic powers granted special status to units of people, and correctly deduced this would only work if the universe was set up for the benefit of people specifically, and with some more poking, deduced these powers were due to bugs in optimisation routines, etc.

There are two natural edge cases to poke at. The first is magic which does follow emergent rules. (This is practically the same thing as being subject to rational study, as although you can in theory study holistic things, you hit constant edge cases...) But this seems quite rare, almost all the examples which *claim* to follow rules are actually much better explained holistically. The most blatant example is roleplaying. Imagine how cool a roleplaying game would be if you could mung magic at the lowest level, and it was balanced to say "OK, I combine spell X and spell Y and get effect Z" as people playing roleplaying games always want to do. However, in almost all cases, that can't *actually* work, what you actually have is limited to predetermined list of spells, or DM's intuition, and it's defined mostly in terms of the effect it has on a person in a sword-fight.

Pl: I summon a rhinoceroses. INTO HIS LEFT VENTRICLE
DM: You can't do that.

Magic that affects people is harder than any other sort. (In extreme cases, some things are immune to most magic, full stop.)

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

There are two natural edge cases to poke at. The first is magic which does follow emergent rules. (This is practically the same thing as being subject to rational study, as although you can in theory study holistic things, you hit constant edge cases...) But this seems quite rare, almost all the examples which *claim* to follow rules are actually much better explained holistically.

This is a notion that fascinates me, and I am working on a couple of projects in this direction, but I would suggest as interesting related examples the small genre of "alternate science" stories. Things like Ted Chiang's "Seventy-Two Letters", or Richard Garfinkle's Celestial Matters, which is set in a universe that works according to Aristotelian physics and has developed technology based on that to the point of space travel. Or arguably Walter Jon Williams' Metropolitan and City on Fire, though it's strongly suggested that the milieu there [ basically Trantor with the addition of feng shui-type magic as a utility, stuck behind an impenetrable Shield ] has been set up from outside, and it does not look like the culminating volume of that will ever see the light of day, alas.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Thank you immensely for all the books you mentioned in comments to this, they all sound fascinating :)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

The other obvious example is science that is effectively magic, ie. "travels at the speed of plot". Or startrek phasers which annihilate one contiguous object. But in some fashion they are generally recognisable as supposed to be science.

[naath.livejournal.com]

I think that's a good starting point - and it makes it clear that whilst Greg Egan writes SF, Robert Jordan wrote Fantasy, but we knew that anyway (but now we can codify it).

I don't think this sort of line can always be easily drawn - there are books where magic is done in a very sciencey sort of way (New Crobuzon for instance) and in other cases SCIENCE comes over as very fantasy because the details are clearly just not there (popular SFy TV shows come to mind like Firefly, Star Trek, etc.).