Time for SF and Fantasy to split?
by markchadbourn on Jul.08, 2010, under Mark Chadbourn and Justina Robson
I’m interested in the dividing line - or lines - between fantasy and SF that you touch upon, Justina. We’re both reaching for the same numinous area, I feel, but you do it from a rational, science-based approach, and I don’t.
I’m not interested in whether magic is real or not. What I find important is what it represents for the characters, or what any seemingly inexplicable event means. For me, fantasy utilises the secret language, the true, ur-language, of the unconscious mind. It’s all symbols and metaphors and Jungian archetypes. The myths and legends that we’ve clung to for thousands of years all speak in that same way. They’re not meant to be explained because they’re not designed to be taken literally. Those kinds of stories shine a light into our inner landscape, a place which defies all measurement - and as such, I suppose, is anti-science in the way that we currently accept it.
Maybe this is why many SF authors - and an increasing number, I feel - hold fantasy in something near contempt. There’s a degree of cognitive dissonance, certainly. Fantasy jars with their world-view. In this piece, Charlie Stross talks about writing “a big fat fantasy piece” as a career move at his agent’s suggestion, while at the same time disparaging a big chunk of the genre and admitting “I don’t much like it”. He goes on to describe SF as the literature of disruption - change - and fantasy as the literature of consolation: “a warm feather-bed of social conservativism”.
Which is about as narrow a reading of fantasy as I’ve ever come across (and I know he admits he’s speaking in general terms). Much of fantasy is actually transgressional, but that’s for another time.
It makes me wonder, though, if it’s time for fantasy and SF to dissolve the marriage of convenience. They came together in an age when there was a limited number of speculative fiction books on the shelves and the two genres huddled together for support. But as Charlie Stross points out, they’re very different in outlook - one stares out to the world, one peers into the unconscious.
When a good number of authors and readers of one genre openly sneer at the other genre, that’s probably a good time to disentangle them at the level of marketing, conventions, societies and the rest. Fantasy has more in common with horror, and urban fantasy which straddles the two. And that would leave SF to be “pure” which a lot of its supporters seem to want.
Of course, members of the SF community who speak openly about that kind of thing might find it a double-edged sword. Fantasy thrives in sales terms, and those big secondary world epics that Charlie Stross mocks give a lot of bookstore cover to what may be perceived as the more challenging of the SF fare - especially at a time when three senior editors (two in the US, one in the UK) tell me they’re no longer really in the market for SF for sales reasons.
Though it seems to me, Justina, that your series captures both the logos and the mythos, mapping the outer world of SF and the inner world of fantasy, and so is one of the few that straddles the storytelling dividing line. That’s an intriguing place to be.
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July 8th, 2010 on 10:30 am
I love scifi , I hate fantasy.
I love star trek, firefly , gattica, primer, terminator, aliens, and darth vader.
I think lord of the rings is over rated.
I think hercules, xena, all those dragon movies are over rated.
I want them to split asap.
July 8th, 2010 on 12:31 pm
I’m not sure the split would be nearly as easy as you make it sound, and I’m not sure this is really a marriage of convenience. For one thing, I’m not a hundred percent sure I know what science fiction is. Is it hard SF? Soft sci-fi? Cyberpunk? Is it the Cold Equations, or Neuromancer or Star Wars? Is it just the setting that makes something SF? If it’s in space, or in the future, then it’s SF and if it’s in the past (and speculative) then it’s fantasy? I’m not sure where you’d draw the line.
I read what I considered to be an extremely interesting book on the subject called Star Wars on Trial (David Brin, Matthew Woodring Stover) where at least one of the essayists tried to make the case that Star Wars isn’t science fiction at all; it’s fantasy set in space. The difference, apparently, is whether you’re looking to explore what may become possible as technology advances or looking to explore present-day social interactions by removing them to a different setting.
I don’t know if I buy that, or if it’s even an important distinction. What seems to be true, though, is that there are books out there that are all about the science and there are books and movies and series that are mostly about people that happen to be set in space. The second category is the one that I tend to enjoy more and I (for the life of me) can’t find a meaningful difference between those works and works of fantasy *except* the setting. To me, it seems there’s a much bigger difference between the two types of SF than there is between the more popular type and fantasy.
July 8th, 2010 on 12:56 pm
David, that’s a really interesting point, and I think I might agree with your last sentence.
July 8th, 2010 on 2:03 pm
SF fan here. I want the split. Oh, I don’t hate fantasy, I’m just not a huge fan. Though, I could be talked into hating the current deluge of urban fantasy obscuring all the actual good books in SF and fantasy section (yes, I realize there is probably one or two urban fantasy books that don’t sparkle, but there a thousand that do). This has actually caused me to give up going to book stores and I now order every book on-line at Amazon.
Maybe it’s true editors are giving up on SF. Well, if they are then let’s do it and get it over with, so some poor unsuspecting SF reader doesn’t buy another book they don’t want out of frustration of not finding SF in the SF section.
July 8th, 2010 on 4:50 pm
I’m not really sure whether I’m an advocate of a split. I’ll admit, I think about SF and F in very different ways, both personally and professionally. Personally, I’m more of a fantasy fan than a SF fan. (In all fairness, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey may be solely responsible for my reluctance to pick up SF - I just couldn’t get over that docking scene set to Blue Danube.) I will cop to reading LOTR once a year every year no matter what. But if they were split, I would never venture out of my comfort genre and I would be missing out. I would never have picked up Alastair Reynolds or William Gibson if SF were off on its own. Personal failing? Perhaps, but still true.
Sure, there’s an abundance of urban fantasy available right now and some of it is sparkly brain candy (to say the least), but not all of it is - Seanan McGuire, Gail Carriger, Nicole Peeler. There’s a lot of cool stuff going on in epic fantasy, too - Brent Weeks, Brandon Sanderson, N.K. Jemisin.
Mostly, I’m hesitant to split the two too dramatically because the rise and fall of SF/F subgenres is cyclical. Urban fantasy won’t dominate forever and the next big thing just might be space opera. The question is, who would be sneering at whom if the tables were turned?
July 8th, 2010 on 4:53 pm
That’s a good question, Terry! But I have to say I’ve rarely heard a bad word about other genres or writers from fantasy authors and readers, horror, urban fantasy, romance even, or the odd western writer I know. But I’ve heard many a disparaging comment from the SF community. I wonder why that is?
July 8th, 2010 on 5:18 pm
Any good fiction relies on suspension of belief. To me, the major working difference in the genres of sci-fi and fantasy is that they each rely on different frameworks to allow for that suspension; in sci-fi literature the framework is based on technological advance more or less according to scientific paradigm, and in fantasy it’s based on elements of spirituality and magic. There is naturally some overlap, particular in space epics like Dune or Star Wars, although I would say in both of those examples the m.o. is primarily fantastical and the sci-fi elements emerge secondarily as a function of the space setting. People who identify more readily with one genre or the other might do so because either one kind of imagery appears to them more, or one general narrative framework is more palatable (math & science vs. liberal arts, so to speak). But I’m not sure that either is intrinsically more inward-looking than the other, at the most general level.
Personally, I’m more of a fantasy fan, but a voracious reader of both. Are fans really sneering at each other? >:( Stop that!
July 9th, 2010 on 8:01 am
@markchadborn
“But I’ve heard many a disparaging comment from the SF community. I wonder why that is?”
The dispariging remarks from SF fans is out of frustration. We go to the SF section & can’t find any SF! Or, very little of it surrounded by romance books draped in vampire and werewolf costumes. What is available is old and bad like Asimov (heresy I know), or it’s books any SF fan of 5 years or more has already read (Card, Herbert, Gibson, etc.). The handful of new books are all cyberpunk or steampunk, which is fine but only goes so far.