Musings on Speculative Fiction

[luckykaa]

An often made observation is that Star Wars isn't Science Fiction - it's Fantasy.  This is certainly reasonable.  We have sword fights, The Force is essentially magic, and the basic plot of Star Wars is a standard fantasy hero's journey.  A lowly farmboy becomes a warrior, rescues a princess from the castle, and then rides into battle to defeat the evil empire. It even happened a Long Time ago, as is befitting a fantasy

The flipside of this is Discworld.  Even though it has magic and dragons and a Medieval setting, the rules are much more thoroughly worked out than a lot of hard science fiction.  Right back in The Colour Of Magic, the basic mechanics of Discworld were explained. 

Fantasy and Science fiction are pretty vaguely defined.  Specualtive Fiction fans will often agree with the above defintions but that puts them rather at odds with the mainstream definitions where if it has dragons it's fantasy, and if it has space ships it's science fiction.  Are we just talking about space ships and dragons or the rules that the worlds work under?  The jargon just isn't fit for the purpose.  We add terms such as hard science fiction and soft science fiction, which doesn't really explain things, and "soft science fiction"/"space opera" is often used is slightly sneering tones.  High fantasy and low fantasy are other terms which distinguish Harry Potter from Conan the Barbarian and this clarifies the setting a little but this just gives us 4 boxes, and something like Dragonflight doesn't fit into any of them.

Really we're looking at two axes - on one we have Scientific versus Fantastical, and on the other we have Futuristic versus Mythic, with everything taking an arbitrary position on these lines.  Star Wars goes into the Futuristic Fantastical category, 2001 is the Futuristic Scientific, Discworld probably finds its way into the Mythic Scientific, and Lord Of the Rings is Fantastical Mythic. 

Do these categories work still?  Is mythic actually a counterpoint to futuristic?  And where do alternative histories fit in?  Is Steampunk a version of futurism?  Has Frankenstein shifted from Scientific to fantastical as we learn more about science?

The terminology we use is important to how we think about these things, but I don't really have a conclusion here. 

Comments

[jeanieofoz.livejournal.com]

So, does this theory take into account such ideas as Clarke's Third Law (and Gehm's Corollary) where the most advanced technology due to scientific progress is supposed to appear magical? Or does it not matter when the 'magic' of fantasy is not internally consistent?
Define mythic please. I have heard literature professors argue that mythos is not so much about the past as the nature of the story being told. Here it sounds like you equate 'mythic' with alchemists, drafty castles and dragons.

[luckykaa.livejournal.com]

When you start having extremely amazing technology such as faster than light travel - even if we might find a scientific breakthrough one day that allows this - we're heading into the fantastical. It's why I chose 2001 as an example rather than Star Trek, which does try to explain itself pretty well, but does still have the whimsy of Warp Drive and Transporters. I'm not sure how the alien technology of the monolith affects things.

Internal consistency in magic matters but that's more out of plot necessity. An explanation for how the magic works isn't always that important. An explanation for the explanation all the way back to first principles isn't a requirement.

I'd like a better word than mythic. I mean being about dragons, castles, noble houses, wizards and barbarians. Generally something that contains all the trappings of a traditional fantasy.

[ingaborg.livejournal.com]

It's an interesting question, and of course there are always edge cases e.g. Anne McCaffery, with space ships and dragons.

I think one issue is that fantasy as a genre has arisen from folk tale and myth, which are inherently non-scientific in the sense that they are non-rational: the worlds are not expected to follow clear rules. However, the people reading sci-fi and fantasy are increasingly "scientific" in background - we expect things to follow consistent, logical rules and to "make sense". So even when somebody sets out to write a fantasy novel, they end up creating "rules" of magic because without the rules, the world doesn't make sense to them. It's also an issue for role-playing games, where the magic has to be regulated and ends up, to my mind, not feeling like magic, but like a made-up science.

Oh dear, I've used up what remains of my poor brain :( I may chip back in to the discussion later, because I think it's interesting.

n.b. Star Wars surely is technically NOT futuristic, being clearly set in the past?

[squirrel-dreams.livejournal.com]

Do I get a prize for reading all of that?.

[luckykaa.livejournal.com]

No, but there will be a test later.

[squirrel-dreams.livejournal.com]

I'll wing it.

[ingaborg.livejournal.com]

I was going to say that the distinction between science fiction and fantasy gets so blurred that I am not sure it's useful, but then I remembered that while I like both, Al really only reads science fiction at present, so there clearly IS a difference. Now, it's true that SF more usually features tech/engineering ideas, and fantasy is more likely to be about teenagers embarking on mysterious quests, but I don't know if that is the critical difference. My favourite writers in both genres provide strong characters and a good story, set in a believable world that interests me.

So, for you personally, dear reader, what distinguishes the genres?

[chess]

The reason I prefer SF to Fantasy is that SF is generally more likely to be about Ideas - to be an exploration of what it means to be sentient, or what effects a certain technological advancement would have on society, or what it would be like to be a certain kind of alien.

Or it's likely to have military-fiction elements, and I have a slightly worrying fascination with military strategy, on-the-ground fiction and biographies about soldiers, etc.

Fantasy is more likely to be about Characters, or A Story, and the magic and cultures and setting are more likely to be comparatively nebulous / irrelevant to my modern questions of existence. If there's fighting, it's likely to be individuals or small bands fighting each other - and even if it is armies, medieval warfare interests me less than modern warfare.

Bizarrely, my preferences in roleplaying are entirely the opposite way around - I like Fantasy roleplaying and don't like SF roleplaying. I think it's a matter of scale and sympathy - for my reading I like vast sweeping scale, and People Like Me (so, scientists and techies, then) to sympathise with, whereas for my roleplaying I like personal / small group scale events and People Unlike Me to attempt being...

[the-smut-fairy.livejournal.com]

Personally, "but is it really Sci-Fi?" kind of ponderings irritate me quite a lot. While I do sometimes use labels for ease of description, I don't assign them by a rigid rule (more like by reference to similar works), I just tend to call Sci-Fi everything from, say, Egan to Atwood and Tolkien to Ballard, and to hell with the silly marketing pigeonholes. Well, actually, I tend to think of it as "the fantastical". There should be better one-term-fits-all descriptions of my sort of entertainment, at least in the English language. "Speculative fiction" is a start, I suppose.

[ingaborg.livejournal.com]

You make an interesting point about SF roleplaying: I think it tends to be weak generally, compared to fantasy or horror. (I don't know anybody who has done any non-genre roleplaying...possibly also an interesting area for discussion)

It seems to be genuinely difficult to create a hard-SF world that is engaging to play in. Some friends of mine ran a wonderful far-future adventure based on the stories they told as children (they are sisters) but it was quite exceptional.

I once stole Niven's "Patchwork Girl" as the foundation for a Lovecraftian horror adventure, because I thought it would work better that way.