Not A Blog™

Some may consider this equine deceased, yet I continue to flog. Like everything, it’s a matter of knowing why. I feel this is important for some reason.

I’m talking, of course, about my enjoyment of science fiction versus my animosity toward fantasy. If you really want to get right down to it, they’re both absurd. I’ll admit that. Absurd for different reasons, of course, but absurd nonetheless. So it seems odd, then, that someone like me would embrace such a preposterous form of entertainment, and not just spend his time reading about valid scientific hypotheses, such as string theory. Not to change the subject, but the current debate as to whether or not string theory is really a real theory—seeing as how it can’t be tested—delights me to no end. Evidently, I’m easily amused.

This is not to say that I haven’t made fun of my share of science fiction. At least one of the old posts was dedicated to doing just that. But the good stuff, subjective though that may be, still holds my interest. I’ve also considered the notion that maybe the reason I find so little of it good today is that I’ve simply grown up. Plausible, but an essay for another day.

Over the weekend, I actually put some thought into this. I never let it bother me before, but over the past week or so, I realized that I’ve always fancied science fiction over fantasy, to the point where they’re at the opposite ends of my “interested in reading it” spectrum. The problem is exacerbated by the simple fact that these two things are grouped together in bookstores ‘round the world. However, I have never made clear my motives, and so I sought to do that for myself, in order that the next time someone asks me what’s so bad about fantasy, I can snap back with a scripted answer as I prefer to do, rather than bumble about like a fool, which is what I usually do. (You may have noticed.)

So what’s going on here?

Initially I figured it had something to do with the time period. This is true to a certain extent. One problem I’ve always had with Lord of the Rings is that it doesn’t fit anywhere, temporally speaking—or geographically speaking, for that matter. Geography I can let slide because it does change, but history? I mean, I guess it could have happened like a billion years ago, but then we’d be finding fossilized skeletons of hobbits and dragons and stuff. Or you could say maybe it was on another planet, except that Tolkien already killed that possibility by having it take place on middle Earth. Never mind that the entire thing is fiction; my brain prefers its version of the world to be coherent, even the made up parts.

Anyway, the point is clear: I can’t get past the placement. There’s no room for fantasy in my brain anywhere, because it’s all taken up by real data. You know, that stuff that actually happened called history.

On the other hand, sci fi is easy: it’s the Future! Even the golden age stuff where they talk about reels of magnetic tape and vacuum tubes—I can justify this away, simply by pointing to the era it was written and saying, “that was the future in the 1950’s.” I love the idea of alternate futures; indeed, we would still be using tubes if aliens never landed and gave us transistor technology. But the point is that the future is wide open, and so it could have happened like that. Of course it’s important to point out that science fiction is never right. It’s not supposed to be a predictive genre, although some people think this is the case. The fact that science fiction becomes laughable not one decade later does not in any way diminish its real usefulness, which I’ll be mentioning momentarily.

However, time is not the whole story. It’s not just a matter of temporal displacement, because I can excuse that in certain circumstances. I have no problem with historical fiction, for example; I’ve written some myself as a matter of fact. (I’ve written some fantasy, as well, but it was tongue in cheek). Here’s the real reason, above everything else.

There is nothing to be learned from fantasy that cannot be learned from some other genre.

Any fiction serves a number of purposes: entertainment, warning, speculation, etc. I suppose entertainment is the number one reason to read for most people, but to be perfectly straightforward, that’s not true for me. I’m most interested in how events, actions, and technologies change, or serve to give warning to upcoming generations. Given situation x, introduce concept y at point z and observe the effects. Discuss.

This is what science fiction does. To a lesser extent, this is what historical fiction and straight up literary fiction does, too. In literature, you’re looking more at realistic events happening to realistic characters, and if all goes well, you see realistic consequences. Don’t let revenge eat your soul or you’ll be eaten by that to which your revenge is directed, that sort of thing.

Science fiction introduces some new technology or process into a life or lives. This technology doesn’t have to be scientifically plausible, or even possible, so long as it meets the following two requirements: 1) it places some sort of restriction on the story to put people in situations in which they would not otherwise experience and 2) it’s not simply taken for granted, as in, “this is just the way things are.”

This obviously shares commonality with historical fiction, because there are a great number of science fiction stories which would have the same restrictions on them as a story set, say, three hundred years ago before the advent of instant access to anyone, anywhere. Put some guy on a boat traveling to undiscovered new lands: it’s basically the same thing as putting some guy on a spaceship and having him gallivant around the galaxy.

In the more modern case, the faster-than-light cliché is simply there to make the plot move along, so people aren’t dying of old age before they can get anything done. Either that, or the fact that near-light travel changes peoples’ time frame of reference, so one person lives hundreds of years in a year, and so forth. That’s the sort of thing that is not only a real phenomenon, but has societal implications as well. We can learn from that, the same way we can learn from speculating about the rise of all sorts of technologies and institutions and their impact on the culture, regardless of how speculative or far-fetched they may be.

Fantasy, on the other hand, doesn’t do this. Here’s why. Fantasy introduces concepts which are used as the basis to drive the story, however these things not only don’t exist, they will never exist in that context. That is, a non-scientific one. Kind of an arrogant thing to say after talking about the wide possibilities of science fiction, don’t you think? Not really.

I’m talking specifically about two things here. Both of these things have their parallels in science fiction, but it’s not quite the same thing, in a way which I’ll hopefully be bringing around into a coherent whole by the end of this essay. Fantasy has magic and sentient creatures that aren’t human.

Arthur C. Clarke said, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and this has been leveraged with success in science fiction. Fantasy would appear to be doing the same thing, but it’s not. The magic in fantasy has no origin nor explanation. In fact, it is taken for granted, in that it’s just there. No particular reason, except that we happen to be writing in the fantasy genre, and it usually has magic. For this reason, any social commentary which could be wrought from its use is necessarily moot. How can you predict the actions of anyone when they have access to this thing, the extent of which is undefined and the nature of which is arbitrary?

I ran into this very problem with my story for Nanowrimo last year. It was a bunch of normal people versus a bunch of wizards. This is akin to trying to play chess where one side is nothing but queens. I found myself struggling to make up some sort of limitations—anything at all—to prevent these guys from flying around and just owning the whole place. The limitations were based on nothing but the fact that the wizards couldn’t be that powerful or the good guys wouldn’t be able to win. It was kind of like a reverse dues ex machina, in a sense.

What does this tell us about humanity, good and evil, or overcoming adversity in the face of great loss? Nothing! Normal people would never encounter these types of situations. This is opposed to science fiction where the science may one day be real and very real people are going to have to deal with it.

Secondly, fantasy has fantastic, sentient creatures such as dragons, orcs, centaurs, etc. Science fiction has aliens. Essentially, these two are the same thing, with one important difference: aliens could be real. The other stuff won’t be real, unless it’s a matter of science down the road which makes them real. What is the point of showing someone of the middle ages reacting to a dragon or talking to a faun when they don’t exist? The main reason for doing this, as in Lord of the Rings or Chronicals of Narnia, is for allegorical purposes. The dragon/faun/whatever stands in for something else. When this is the case, the environs of the story are transparent to the true message. This means the story, at that point, doesn’t even have to be fantasy. It could be anything—historical fiction, for example—and the message remains.

The second part to this second part is that fantasy, unfortunately, has its own rules about how the way things are done. I can world-build my space operas and populate them with aliens, and there is no particular associations about any of the creatures I make until I show them to you. Fantasy, on the other hand, has its own collection of stereotypes, to the point where, if I say, “elf”, you have in your head an idea of what this is supposed to be. Stereotypes are generally shunned in regular literature, but in fantasy they’re embraced. (Largely due to the fact that every person since 1945 rips off Tolkien, whether intentionally or not.) That’s not to say that sci fi doesn’t also have it’s share of stereotypes, it most certainly does—but the best of it transcends this.

At this point I’m half way there, but I still haven’t actually explained what I don’t like about fantasy. The only thing I’ve done is shown what it has in common with sci fi, and what is different, and why it’s important. So here’s the clincher.

It is the combination of a non-existent place in the past or present, arbitrary power or physical feats, and non-human creatures with pre-defined personalities together in one story which serve to make that story irrelevent.

Taken together, this combination cannot reveal anything new about the human condition that could not otherwise be told in a non-fantasy type story. Nothing can be revealed in this format that could not have been revealed more powerfully, concisely, or more originally in some other genre. Science fiction may not always present the most realistic of scenarios, but it forces one to consider possibilities that might not otherwise have arisen. Incidently, as soon as sci fi gets all three, namely not being in the future, it becomes lame. Evidence of this is $tar War$ which was set a long time ago, according to the exposition on screen. If that’s the case, what’s the point? It’s fantasy in space. The fact that spaceships and aliens exist in this universe happens to be incidental to the story, which isn’t original to begin with. Entertainment, et al.

This also clarifies another genre I hate: the superhero story. Superhero comics I have always regarded with disgust, as demonstrated by the most vitrol-filled essay I have ever written (also missing since I converted over from the old site). Suffice it to say, few things besides being forced to learn about superheros have elicited in me such a rage. The reason now is clear: the stories are set in the present day, often in a nonexistent place such as “Metropolis” (City-city?) featuring arbitrarily strong powers.

Who cares? This serves to reveal nothing about humanity. How relevant is it to show someone with super-human powers struggling with an ethical dilemma—particularly in the case where those powers were borne of an accident? It’s one thing, I will admit, if someone scientifically engineered powers, but just from radiation or even mutation and bam, now we’ve got a super people? And I’m supposed to be able to relate? This is pointless. Even in the case where powers are engineered, if they break the laws of physics, how is this pertinent? I’m looking at you, Akira.

So that’s the deal. That is the reason sci fi should not be grouped with fantasy. Sci fi is a construct in which to evalute and critique ideas and their impact on a variety of subjects; fantasy is allegorical at best, stereotypical most of the time, and reveals nothing new about the world we live in, even in a speculative way—at least not in a way that is unique to the genre. While both are entertainment, I suppose I must embrace the fact that I don’t read primarily for fun; I read primarily to think. The fun helps, but stories of might and magic don’t actually involve any thinking—they’re just saccharine. This doesn’t do it for me, subsequently, I’m not a fan.

-Ted