The other day, my dad texted me a link to this John Hodgman piece weighing in—or I guess I should say “adjudicating”—on whether the Star Wars series is really sci-fi or fantasy. This was apropos of an argument we (dad and I; Hodgman was not yet involved) had over the holidays about the delineations between those two genres. I proposed that the delineations between science fiction and fantasy can be more aesthetic than substantive; he maintained that there are more fundamental differences. He prosecuted his case with a lot of references to Star Trek, a childhood favorite of his which he introduced to us, his own children, in turn. I, like an egghead, countered with many “yes, but” theoretical arguments. I love to play the egghead. My brother even-handedly tried to parse out the merits of both sides while dad and I continued to lob differently-worded versions of the same point back and forth across the dinner table. Mom and grandpa did not engage. The tone was occasionally pretty strident for such a goofy topic. You know, the way you argue with your family?
And now dad’s fired another shot across my bow, courtesy of a cultural commentator with real-fake authority and fake-fake judge’s attire. Well, fetch my red shirt! Time to relitigate this argument in public, for if Star Wars has taught me one thing, it’s that throwing yourself in the path of a more powerful man in a dowdy black robe is a great strategy for winning a fight with your father.
May it please the court:
The Honorable John Hodgman, we should note, begins his short piece by noting that he also finds genre distinctions, or arguments about said, to be questionable or tiresome. Nonetheless, he delivers a verdict, finding that Star Wars is a narrative fueled by nostalgia rather than futuristic speculations, landing it much closer to Tolkien than Trek. This is a common enough differentiation between sci-fi and fantasy: that they look towards different horizons, the latter retro-gazing, the former speculating on what could be. Construed in this way, the two genres are not just different but full opposites.
And that is indeed a perfectly workable measure for explaining how sci-fi and fantasy stories have been traditionally classified. What bothers me, however, is the sense I get that assigning Star Wars the label of fantasy is a kind of relegation. That is, it’s not just that the fantasy label is a better fit, but that Star Wars is too unserious to deserve to be classified as sci-fi. Fantasy is fuzzy and frivolous, sci-fi is sophisticated and cerebral. (Plenty of people, I’m given to understand, think all genre fiction is fuzzy and frivolous, but that’s another matter.)
The emblematic example of Star Wars’ conceptual squishiness is that it misuses the metric of the parsec, referencing it as a measure of time rather than distance. Someone has likely explained this factoid to you before, probably one of those early figures in your life who tried to convert you to pedantry. We all had them. Mine were well meaning, good humored, and delightful. But we likely also overlook the parsec error, because we recognize that the real central concept of Star Wars is “the Force,” which has nothing to do with science and everything to do with feelings. Frivolous. Fuzzy.
Star Trek, by comparison, has very serious and grounded mechanisms like warp cores and transporters and dilithium crystals, which are also made up but could be totally scientifically plausible. Except that the scientific plausibility of dilithium-based technology, much like the parsec error, doesn’t matter. In fact, you could say it anti-matters (yuck yuck).
What is important about the starship Enterprise is not how it goes but where it goes. Star Trek may feature many, many episodes that revolve around fixing the warp core, but for the most part the concepts Trek wants to explore are really political and sociological, about interactions between the diverse crew and encounters with alien life. How many of these civilizations’ representatives are eager to sleep with Commander Riker? Better make a tally. For science. But specifically for the “soft” science of sociology.
To be sure, the sociological premises of Trek interact with its technological ones. For instance, the technology of the replicator helps to explain how the Federation’s egalitarian, moneyless society operates. But how does a replicator convert energy to matter? And why can’t it successfully replicate dilithium of sufficient quality to serve in a ship’s matter-antimatter reactor? Maybe it has something to do with how dilithium is also an energy source, and therefore the replicator’s process of converting energy to matter saps the dilithium of its potential energy? Or maybe it’s about dilithium possibly being a four-dimensional substance in a way that replicator technology can’t yet reproduce? To both the physicists and Trekkies out there, does any of that… make sense?
This kind of explanation, whenever sci-fi properties even bother to engage in it, substantively amounts to what is commonly called technobabble—or as I think of it, Ruddigore-ing! Meaning: this particularly rapid, unintelligible patter isn’t generally heard, and if it is, it doesn’t matter (matter matter matter matter). My eyes are fully open.
If Gene Roddenberry and his ilk really had a feasible and fully mapped-out mechanism for how their tech worked, they would have been on their way to the U.S. Patent Office, not NBC. But again, it doesn’t matter that the science is hokum, because what’s important is that said hokum permits us to engage in generative imagining. What would it be like to live in a society empowered by this kind of technology? How much would that change, and how could it change one’s relationship to their own identity and to others? That sort of thing.
I don’t wish to be too dismissive here and give the impression that all the science in sci-fi media is technobabble. Sci-fi writers show, rather splendidly, out how incredibly fruitful it is to engage with actual principles of physics and biology and programming. Heaven knows, Asimov got a lot of mileage out of simple conflicting booleans. Only, the “fi” half of the sci-fi requires audiences and writers to lean in to unproven, speculative territory.
The exact same sort of sociological speculation can and does occur in stories that are premised around the lack of common post-industrial technologies or around the existence of some magical force that has shaped society in much the same way that a microchips-and-circuitry technology would. A Song of Ice and Fire, when you get down to it, is the tale of a world whose dynastic politics were heavily shaped by the “technology” of dragons, and their subsequent, erm, obsolescence. Ditto pretty much every dragon-riding story, Eragon, Temeraire, The Dragonriders of Pern (which already casually straddles the border between sci-fi and fantasy in its premise), etc.
So: if we dispense with the technobabble and just say our space machine or what have you is powered by magic, what exactly do we lose? Just the flashing lights on the dashboard? I am willing to concede that we do lose slightly more than just that.
Because it’s often futuristic and therefore less likely to hold itself constrained by historical precedent, science fiction may, generally, be more inclined or more free to imagine radical ideas. The aforementioned moneyless society of Star Trek, for instance. But that is just a tendency and not a strict constraint. Fantasy stories set in alternate worlds are just as free to imagine strange, unprecedented societies as sci-fi set on alien worlds.
While a considerable bulk of traditional fantasy takes inspiration from medieval Europe, it’s disingenuous to say that worldbuilding that deviates from either European or other historical models is therefore “unrealistic,” as author and medievalist Shiloh Carroll points out in a critique of how the House of the Dragon showrunners have discussed the inclusion of elements like sexual violence in their show as necessary toward the interest of historical accuracy. Phillip Maciak had the same note for House of the Dragon’s parent series, Game of Thrones, in a review from back in 2011. We’re all, evidently, still waiting for someone to hear it…
Regardless, while they might trend in different directions, both fantasy and sci-fi are equally free to imagine whatever they will, empowered by the license of otherworldliness and the equally potent forces of either magic or super-advanced technology.
This is not an original argument, of course. J.R.R. Tolkien made this observation in his magisterial essay “On Fairy-Stories,” at one point in which he proposes that H.G. Wells’ novel The Time Machine better meets the criteria for what counts as a fairy story than some other tales that have traditionally made the cut. In justifying this claim, he argues:
“The magic of Faerie is not an end in itself, its virtue is in its operations: among these are the satisfaction of certain primordial human desires. One of these desires is to survey the depths of space and time. Another is to hold communion with other living things. A story may thus deal with the satisfaction of these desires, with or without the operation of either machine or magic, and in proportion as it succeeds it will approach the quality and have the flavour of fairy-story.”
To paraphrase that, Tolkien identifies the fact that sci-fi and fantasy fulfill a common wanderlust; to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; one could even say, to boldly go where no man has gone before! (How do you like them apples, Dad?)
We should not fail either to mention Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws, the third of which is the most famous: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” There are a few ways to interpret that statement’s meaning, either as about the gullibility of rubes who mistake tech for magic, or as about the wonder of tech so powerful and with workings so obscure that it seems magical to everyone. I lean toward the latter camp, and reading Clarke’s third law in the context of the first two, oft elided, supports my inclination. Those read as follows:
- When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
- The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Collectively, the three laws read as a commentary on the relationship between imagination and possibility, with Clarke arguing that imagination consistently expands our ambition about what could be possible, even to the point of achieving something that felt so impossible it was labeled as magical.
Clarke’s laws, then, muddle the idea that we can divide science fiction from fantasy on the grounds that sci-fi deals with the plausible while fantasy peddles the implausible. Both genres invite their audiences to flirt with unreality, they just use different pretexts to do it. For a more contemporary version of this same take, see China Miéville:
“[T]he boundaries between the impossible of the fantastic and Gothic on the one hand, and the impossible of science fiction on the other, are simply too fuzzy to be systematically maintained. What they share is as important as what distinguishes them. What they share is the starting point that something impossible is true.”
To go along with Tolkien, Clarke, and Miéville, we ought to put sci-fi and fantasy together in the same Wittgensteinian family of resemblances. Almost all members share the aquiline nose of fancifulness. The square jaw of obeying the laws of thermodynamics? Less prevalent.
But I promised that we would actually concede one major difference between the sci-fi and fantasy genres. And we will. Is everybody ready? Here it goes: people don’t relate to them in the same way.
I know: groundbreaking. But really. Technobabble may be, for all intents and purposes, the same excuse as “it’s magic,” performed with slightly more elaborate hand-waving, but science-y explanations flatter the sensibilities of some readers who may otherwise have a more difficult time getting on board with a premise that isn’t legitimized by a rational explanation. (As evidence of this dynamic, I submit the classic Dropout, née College Humor, sketch “Why Can’t You Use Phones on Planes?”) We live in fairly rationalist societies—and we should keenly note here the difference between “rationalist” and “rational”—so we like to be reassured that we are not engaging with bald-faced flimflam. The rationalist, scientif-ish explanation places its impossibilities on a continuum with the scientific and technological advances of the modern era. Sure, it’s not possible now, but it could be in the future! This concern has even bled over into fantasy and its sweatily rationalized and rule-bounded “Hard Magics,” whence the Larry Niven corollary “any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science”
The reverse also applies, with the fantasy genre’s monarchs who are destined to reign over all appealing to a human liking for neat and “natural” hierarchy. Even Ursula K. Le Guin, who consistently problematizes hierarchy across her work, indulges some in this trope with the character Lebannen from the Earthsea series, whose ascension to the throne parallels a cosmic return to natural order at the conclusion of The Farthest Shore.
Both of these gestures are different sorts of appeal to legitimacy, the legitimacy of scientific rationality on one hand, and the legitimacy of tradition and historicity on the other. Both have the effect of offering their audience some form of comfort to counterbalance any ensuing strangeness. But people do relate differently enough to these forms of legitimacy that it would be disingenuous to write them off the same thing. As with many labels, the distinction being made is not so much to do with the qualities or inner workings of the things described; rather, they evoke the different ways we feel about the things described. And feelings matter, since they inflect the way that we read—or write.
Because its genre boundaries are defined by the somewhat persnickety standard of rationality, sci-fi has to be a little more choosey about what it will admit to its club. Hence, when Star Wars flubs the definition of a “parsec,” science fiction apologists must rush to disavow it as mere fantasy.
At least, that’s the way it is for now.
Look, can’t we all agree to believe that the whole parsec thing, spoken as it is by gorgeous idiot Han Solo, is just a bit of fast-talk aimed at some desert yokels?
Moreover, can we agree that the Star Wars universe, with its light-speed spaceships, laser-based weaponry, and beep-booping droids, all equally dubious and equally science-y, is as much science fiction as any other good old space opera? Yes, it also has “the Force,” which just goes to show that magic-y concepts, like the Vulcan mind meld or “the Voice” from Dune, fit perfectly comfortably alongside technological ones is speculative fiction. They are all pulling together, doing the same work of making the impossible possible.
There’s a line in the denouement of the musical My Fair Lady where Eliza, a lower-class girl who has been trained in upper-class affectations, explains what she has realized about class distinctions. “You see, Mrs. Higgins,” Eliza tells her erstwhile tutor’s mother, “apart from the things one can pick up, the difference between a lady and flower girl is not how she behaves but how she is treated.”
We can and should apply Eliza’s epiphany to a liberal swath of topics, including the matter at hand. Star Wars is as much science fiction as John Hodgman is a judge. They’re both wearing the right pajamas. The rest is all about how they are treated. As for the treatment of fantasy, or of fantasy elements in whatever genre they might lie, we might do ourselves some good by treating them less literally—they are impossible!—and permit ourselves thereby to take them more seriously. It would be a mistake to take Le Guin’s Lebannen as a literal pro-monarchy gesture, and as much a mistake as to overlook that Darth Vader isn’t just powerful because he wields the Force. His literal, “magical” Jedi powers to move objects with his mind and terrorize the cream of the British Actors’ Guild is less significant than the symbolic, thematic power he is revealed to occupy in the narrative. He’s powerful because he’s a father.
My own dad is also a father, and as such is unlikely to cry uncle anytime soon. That’s alright, though. If he did, it would only mean an end to the fun. He’s the reason I was introduced to Star Trek and Star Wars, and hopped from there to other genre fiction. His influence is probably also to blame for so much of my logic being grounded in references to musical theater. The Force is strong with that one. Dad, argue again soon?
In a recent discussion I was having elsewhere about world building implications of significant numbers of wizards who have spells that massively improve crop yields and allow them to raise up stable structures from the ground, one distinction that came up is that magic is a thing someone does, technology is a thing someone uses. So, if there’s a spell that wizards use to throw a fireball, a wizard can throw a fireball, and maybe even make a wand that throws fireballs. If there’s technology that allows blasters, a factory can make blasters, and anyone can pick up a blaster and shoot technobabble beams. (Probably nobody can just shoot technobabble beams out of their hands, unless they’re a cyborg). Star Trek is by this standard mostly science fiction (aside from Q, who is a fae, and the assorted telepaths, for which we can mostly blame John W Campbell’s fascination with parapsychology), because all the technology is machines people use that work the same for everyone, while Star Wars is science fantasy, because the stardrives and blasters work for everyone, but also there’s wizards with magic swords and wizard powers nobody else can use.
David Weber’s Hell’s Gate series postulates two civilizations
– one powered by science/technology that anyone can use but also w Gifts like telepathy or distance viewing that only some people have
– the second is based on magic. Anyone can use a magical device if it is set up that way, but only a magician can create one
An unexpected first contact resulted in the death of both involved so lots of opportunity to compare and contrast the systems.
The series is not finished and does not seem a priority of the author
You brought up an interesting idea, but I do not think it holds. There are Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson to consider. Robert Jordan invented ter’angreal, magical machines. Some of these could be used only by magicians, others by everyone. Same applies for fabrials of Roshar (Stormlight Archive). In both worlds the magic is seen by the inhabitants as just a part of the natural laws of the place. Nevertheless the works certainly are not Science Fiction, if only for the reason, that there is no connection to history of humanity.
Oh, Jordan is hardly the first person to use magic as technology, and the distinction above isn’t hard and fast anymore than any other. That said, magic in Jordan’s setting is still all about wizards making wizard devices, that only wizards can make, and there’s a fundamental distinction between people who can touch the source of magic and people who can’t. Sometimes magic people make things mundanes can use, but only magic people can make them. *
Well, by that standard Star Wars is definitely fantasy, nothing in it has any connection to Earth or Terran history. There’s plenty of sci fi set in distant space-futures where Earth and all its history are distant and forgotten and have no relevance in the present (often Earth no longer exists or the location is forgotten.), such that it may as well be secondary world fantasy (Anne McCaffery hated when people called her books about people who fought with swords and plowed with oxen and rode dragons and had a completely different culture to anything on Earth fantasy, because it was secretly a distant planet where they had lost their history and technology and etc. Conversely, Naomi Novik’s Temeraire books about Captain William Laurence of the British Navy learning to ride dragons to fight Napoleon’s attempt to cross the English Channel in 1805 is definitely fantasy, despite taking place in a specific time and place in Earth history surrounded by real historical people. Both series have elaborate technobabble explanations for how dragons exist, fly, breathe fire (sometimes) etc. and the main difference is that Anne McCaffery wrote a lot of books about the space future (sometimes with wizards in, only sci fi always calls them psis or psionics) and was thus a sci fi writer, and Novik writes a lot of books about wizards and faeries,often in low-tech settings and is thus classified as a fantasy writer.
*This hard and fast distinction, where you’re either born magic or you aren’t, doesn’t actually apply in most of the real-world traditions/belief systems that are commonly described as “magic[k]”. You don’t have to born special to learn Qabbalah or witchcraft or alchemy or the Tao, you just need a willingness to spend all your time indoors with books and possibly strange substances. Anybody can learn a charm to turn the faeries or bring a little luck, you go to the specialist when you need advanced knowledge, same as doing first-aid vs going to the doctor. AFAIK it entered fantasy partially via people universalizing Merlin’s possible fae or demon parentage and mostly from Tolkien and his Maiar.
I like to think of Star Wars as a big ole fantasy cake with sci-fi frosting. Looks a lot like sci-fi on the outside. Might even have some western and samurai sprinkles on top, but once you really cut into it…
Damn, I’m hungry.
Look, can’t we all agree to believe that the whole parsec thing, spoken as it is by gorgeous idiot Han Solo, is just a bit of fast-talk aimed at some desert yokels?
To that point, a document that used to circulate on USENET purporting to be a copy of the fourth draft script Lucas went into production with includes a stage direction for that exchange.
Now, this doesn’t say specifically why it should be obvious that the statement is misinformation, and Sir Alec’s reaction on screen is equally inconclusive. But your version has been my headcanon for a long time.
A lot to unpack here.
Genres are ingredients, not walled encampments. Many works fall into more than one genre, and there’s plenty of overlap. That said, George Lucas never claimed Star Wars was science fiction. His own label for it was “space fantasy.” It’s a sword-and-sorcery samurai Western WWII auto-racing movie with Flash Gordon trappings. Like most of George Lucas’s filmmaking output, it’s all the stuff he loved as a kid churned up in a high-tech blender. It’s a nostalgia smoothie.
My first editor and mentor, Analog‘s Stanley Schmidt, defined science fiction as a story that could not happen without an element of speculative science, technology, or social progress. The science doesn’t have to be entirely realistic or plausible, no, but it should have some grounding in scientific concepts, or at the very least pretend to. One can draw a distinction between hard SF grounded in plausible scientific theory and soft SF using more fanciful ideas like psionics or humanoid aliens, say. But the essence is that the speculative scientific element not only generates the problem of the story, but ideally leads to its resolution as well.
I’ve also seen it summed up thusly: Science fiction is about things that don’t exist, but could; fantasy is about things that don’t exist, and couldn’t. SF offers at least the pretense of plausibility, of fantastic things resulting from rational causes like scientific progress or alien evolution, even if they’re narratively and functionally indistinguishable from magic (e.g. gamma radiation turning someone into a big green rage monster, as opposed to an evil curse doing it). Fantasy attributes its unrealities to the supernatural or mystical, or simply portrays phenomena without rational explanation. It doesn’t have to be backward-looking, since there’s plenty of urban fantasy or isekai/portal fantasy with modern trappings.
An online acquaintance of mine, media critic Ina Rae Hark, made me aware of the distinction between syntax, the form and structure of a story, and semantics, the surface vocabulary it uses. Star Wars has the syntax of high fantasy (and samurai/WWII/etc. movies and adventure serials) dressed up with the semantics of space opera, much as Outland has the syntax of a Western dressed up with the semantics of science fiction.
“The emblematic example of Star Wars’ conceptual squishiness is that it misuses the metric of the parsec, referencing it as a measure of time rather than distance.”
That’s a common belief that’s completely wrong and unfair to the movie. The parsec thing was Han Solo’s mistake, not the writers’. The script clearly indicates that Han is speaking nonsense and Obi-Wan rolls his eyes at his obvious flimflammery. Unfortunately, the final scene is edited so that you can barely see the eye roll, so the audience didn’t realize it was supposed to be wrong in-story. The original idea was that Han was a blowhard and a con artist, and that he either didn’t know what he was talking about or was deliberately talking nonsense as part of his con game. But then Harrison Ford became a breakout star, so the sequels reinterpreted Han as actually being the brilliant pilot he only boasted of being in the original. And later canon went to great lengths to “explain” the Kessel Run line that was originally intended to be gibberish.
“But how does a replicator convert energy to matter?”
It doesn’t — that idea was abandoned way back in ST:TNG. It’s blatantly absurd; by E = mc^2, if replicators did convert energy into matter, it would take twice the United States’ annual energy output to create one 10-ounce sandwich. TNG’s tech advisors Rick Sternbach & Michael Okuda established that replicators merely convert an existing stock of raw matter into a new form.
“And why can’t it successfully replicate dilithium of sufficient quality to serve in a ship’s matter-antimatter reactor?”
See above — they don’t create matter, merely rearrange molecules. And they’re limited to replicating objects at molecular-level resolution, since quantum-level resolution would place prohibitive demands on data storage. That’s why they can’t replicate living beings, and presumably why they can’t replicate the intricate subatomic structure of dilithium crystals.
“Maybe it has something to do with how dilithium is also an energy source”
No, it isn’t. From the beginning in “Mudd’s Women,” “lithium crystals” (as they were originally called) were established as part of the circuits that channeled the ship’s power to its various systems, with matter/antimatter annihilation being established as the actual power source only a few episodes later. “The Alternative Factor” (where the name “dilithium” debuted) seemed to depict the crystals as power sources, but the scripted intent was that they were more like batteries, with the console they were stolen from being a charging station. TNG established that dilithium regulates and stabilizes the matter/antimatter reaction and channels the resultant energetic plasma to the engines.
“Or maybe it’s about dilithium possibly being a four-dimensional substance”
That was only asserted in John M. Ford’s comedy/farce novel How Much for Just the Planet? and was obviously intended as a joke. Oddly, Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens repeated the assertion in their early novels and one comic book story, but had abandoned it by the time they collaborated with William Shatner on the “Shatnerverse” novels. It has never, ever, ever been part of Trek canon.
“What is important about the starship Enterprise is not how it goes but where it goes.”
I know plenty of Star Trek fans who would fundamentally disagree with that statement. Personally, I think that’s what makes science fiction science fiction. How the ship goes and where the ship goes are both important. If you stop providing explanations for the former, even if those explanations are of questionable scientific validity, then what you lose is the fundamental ingredient that makes science fiction feel like science fiction, and that’s the core difference for me. Whatever the two genres may have in common, the feelings they evoke in me are different.
One thing that often gets lost in these discussions is that there’s a difference between what the writer knows about the setting and what the writer tells the audience about the setting. Gene Roddenberry wanted Trek to be as plausible as he could make it (allowing for dramatic and budgetary necessities demanding informed breaks from reality like humanoid aliens, Earth-parallel planets, psi powers that could be easily depicted with minimal visual effects, and universal translators), so he consulted with scientists and engineers to get the science and tech at least loosely correct. But he also recognized that, as he put it, Marshal Dillon or Sgt. Friday wouldn’t stop to lecture the audience on how a gun works, he’d just use it. The important thing is that the writers know what they should and shouldn’t do in a plausible setting. They don’t have to explain the science behind it, except for whatever aspects of that science are directly relevant to the story.
A lot of it is just making sure you don’t pull knowledgeable viewers out of the story with obvious howlers, like when the original Battlestar Galactica claimed that the fleet was leaving their home galaxy, but they immediately entered another “galaxy” with no break in the starscape, as if they were simply crossing a state line. Any viewer who understood what a galaxy was would’ve seen that the writers didn’t know what they were talking about, or didn’t care. But Star Trek correctly depicted galaxies as discrete bodies of stars that had enormous voids between them and would take a vast amount of time to travel between. It never stopped to lecture the audience on what galaxies were, just showed it through the storytelling. It’s not about explaining, simply about not getting it egregiously wrong.
There certainly is fantasy that explores and explains how its world’s magical system works, or what the ramifications of a supernatural or divine phenomena are, or what the biology or society of fantasy creatures like goblins or dragons or elves is like. A borderline case is Marie Brennan’s Lady Trent series, which is a pastiche of the journals of 19th-century British naturalist-explorers, but in an alternate world where dragons exist. There’s no magic in that world; the dragons are naturally evolved animals whose abilities have rational explanations, and it’s very much a series about the scientific study of dragons (although I wish there were more of the science and less of the politics that dominates the books). So I would call it an alternate-history science fiction series rather than a fantasy series, even though it’s about dragons.
I totally agree with you, and I didn’t mean to suggest that science fiction needs to explain everything. I just need to be given enough information to feel, as a reader or a viewer or a listener, that I can plausibly buy into it. Warp drive is a great example. The name alone suggests what’s going on – the engine is warping space so that the ship can move faster than light. The in-universe explanation is actually somewhat different and a great deal more complicated than that, but it’s all I needed to know as a young nerd to be able to buy into FTL travel in Star Trek.
When it comes to fantasy, on the other hand, I find that I don’t care too much about the explanations. I’ve read fantasy works that really get into the nitty gritty of magical mechanics, and while I’ve known people who are really into that aspect of fantasy, it sort of just washes over me, because I have a hard time making myself excited about the complex rules of a made-up universe.
For example, I’m a massive Tolkien fan, and I enjoy delving into the history of his legendarium to see how it came together, but when my fellow Tolkien fans start debating how it all actually works, I tend to excuse myself, because it’s not what I read Tolkien for.
There’s also the matter of which audience is going to find it plausible. A lot of sci-fi sounds is aimed to sound plausible to a reasonably well educated reader who isn’t an expert in the subject. The more the reader knows about a particular area of study, the higher the bar for plausibility. I think this is part of why I’m not a huge fan of the harder end of sci-fi where the authors attempt to explain how things work in scientific detail, particularly astronomy and physics, the other being that my brain then tries to shift to academic journal reading mode, which is quite different from fiction reading mode. I’d much rather they hand-wave warp drive or artificial gravity, be consistent in how it works, and get on with telling an interesting story.
As I said, it’s a fallacy to assume that hard science fiction requires the writer to explain things to the audience. There’s a difference between what the writer has to know to build a plausible setting and what the reader has to be told about how it works. I write hard SF, and there’s a lot of stuff I don’t explain in the actual stories, instead posting annotations on my website or afterwords in the books that go into greater detail on the technical stuff than the stories proper. The only explanations that should be in the story are the ones directly relevant to following the plot.
Fantasy can overexplain things too, if a writer is too much in love with the detailed worldbuilding they did and insists on putting every bit of it on the page. It’s not about genre, it’s just a matter of authorial self-discipline.
I think I misunderstood your comment the first time I read it. You’re saying the fact that you know too much about astronomy and physics makes it hard for you to enjoy harder sci-fi, because you’re busy scrutinizing the details of the science instead of just enjoying the story? Oh, well, I don’t really have that problem, partly because I’m just an enthusiastic amateur when it comes to topics like astronomy and physics (making me the perfect target audience you mentioned) and partly because I am willing to let a lot go if I am enjoying the story, just as long as I can buy into the fundamentals. I also give authors points for trying to get things right, even if I know they didn’t, especially if the work is dated.
Of course, later showrunners had less concern for the science than Roddenberry, and many things that seemed plausible in the 60s are utterly laughable now (and vice versa; computers are way smaller and better than sci fi authors dreamed sixty years ago, for instance. )
Re:Brennan, her dragons are in the same technobabble space as Novik’s, which get a similar treatment via inserts from in-universe naturalists; both are definitely fantasy. Now, the one that’s framed as a treatise on how dragons were real but are now extinct, that one’s alternate history sci fi. I forget the title and author, it’s from the 80s. I’ll look it up when I’m not at work
I don’t see what makes Lady Trent fantasy, since there’s nothing supernatural or magical in it, just alternate history and evolution. And it’s very much science fiction in the most literal sense, fiction about the process of science and the impact of its discoveries upon society. Yes, it features organisms that are called dragons, but so does Pern, which is science fiction because the dragons are alien life forms on an exoplanet colonized by human spacefarers.
For that matter, my own “Aleyara’s Descent” in the May/June 2023 Analog is set in the preindustrial past of an alien world, and its species include bat-winged pterosaurians that I refer to as dragons. The story has a fantasy feel because of that and because the alien characters have a rich mythology, but it’s hard science fiction, set in the same hard-SF universe as most of my other original fiction. (It’s also a science fiction story in the sense of a story about science, since it’s basically the tale of how its title character invents the Scientific Method in her civilization’s Bronze Age.) Something can have the look and feel of fantasy while still being science fiction, just as something like Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica has the trappings of science fiction but is fundamentally fantasy. Again, it’s the difference between syntax and semantics, surface and substance.
Using your definition above, fantasy is about things that cannot happen. Lady Trent’s adventures cannot happen because a)there’s no place or time with the history or indeed geography of her world, and b) despite the technobabble, hexaped vertebrates don’t and can’t coexist with an ecology where all vertebrates have at most four limbs. There are no non-draconic hexapeds in Trent’s world (nor Captain Laurence’s), and that’s not how evolution works. Moreover, there’s the whole business about the eggs hatching pseudo-humanoids via human blood being applied to them, which isn’t how biology works at all. Then there’s the matter of their bones, etc. Compare on the one hand Pern (which has a whole ecology of hexaped vertebrates alongside the introduced Earthlife and is canonically an alien world colonized and then cut off from Earth) and on the other the Earth of Temeraire, which unlike Lady Trent’s world is definitely our Earth in every detail, except there are dragons. The dragons have always been around and are natural creatures. They have internal hydrogen* sacs which allow them to fly, some are venomous and have been bred to produce deeply corrosive venom that can damage materiel as well as flesh, a few breathe fire by presumably natural but unknown means. Are all three science fiction by your standards?
*Described in universe as a kind of lighter air, because it’s only 1805, while Lady Trent’s world is the equivalent of the 1880s when she’s having her adventures.
While I do not know the specific ins and outs of hexapeds, etc., I would like to invite you to consider the scientific categorization world upon its encounter with the platypus. A mammal that lays eggs (along with unusual, if not unique, sensory mechanisms, poison claws, and also… glows under ultraviolet light) – for reasons of general precedent and category definitions (well; also many “natural wonders” *had* turned out to be multiple things spliced together], it was initially assumed to be fake.
There are, perhaps, fewer things that absolutely *couldn’t* exist in our world than one generally assumes based on what *does* exist.
If anyone here plays Connections at the New York Times website, these features of the platypus came up yesterday. :)
“Using your definition above, fantasy is about things that cannot happen.”
That’s not my definition, just an observation I’ve heard, and of course it’s a gross oversimplification; no discussion of a complex subject like genre can be reduced to a standard that can be summed up in a single sentence. That’s why it’s just one of several takes I offered, so it’s completely missing the point to cherrypick it as “the” definitive standard. It’s just a rough summary of the differences in approach, whether a story purports to base its imaginary elements in knowable science and technology or in the magical and mystical.
It’s also invalid to say something is fantasy merely because it has implausible scientific details. Magic and flawed science are two entirely different things. A ton of science fiction has implausible science. Asimov’s Empire/Foundation universe had psionics and handwavey hyperdrive, but that didn’t make it fantasy, because those things had logical scientific explanations within that fictional universe, and were not the result of paranormal or supernatural forces.
The difference between the genres is not about this cherrypicked detail or that one, it’s about the overall tenor and approach of the work. Brennan created an alternate world that’s different from our own but has no supernatural phenomena, and told a story about a natural scientist pursuing scientific exploration and using scientific reasoning to advance the knowledge of her society in ways that advanced and transformed it. That is the very essence of what science fiction is. The word “science” does not refer to facts and figures, it refers to the process of finding them out. Lady Trent is a fiction series about the process, politics, advancement, and social impact of science itself, more so than most science fiction. It seems a travesty to say it can’t be called science fiction just because it has dragons in it.
After all, I’ve been saying all along that genres are not walled camps, but can overlap. You can tell a science fiction story in a fantasy universe, by making it about the process of discovering and understanding the fantasy aspects of the world. If magic existed as part of the laws of a universe, there could be a science of magic exploring its functioning and root causes. Why not? 150 years ago, quantum physics would’ve seemed like magic, a bizarre and impossible thing. But since it’s an integral part of the laws of nature, science was able to confirm its existence and explore its workings, and now it’s the foundation of modern science.
And Lady Trent, again, doesn’t even have magic or a tangible divine presence. It just has fanciful biology, which is no different from a ton of science fiction series out there. If the imaginary creatures had been, say, hairy green humanoids with antennae, nobody woud’ve questioned that it was science fiction. But since they have the name and attributes of dragons, somehow that makes it pure fantasy? No. At the very least, it’s a blend of the two genres — a work of science fiction in a fantasy universe. Though I still say it’s more like alternate-world science fiction than actual fantasy, since nothing in it is attributed to supernatural forces.
Your story is science fiction because it takes place on an alien world among aliens, orbiting a sun in our same galaxy, whence people from our own world’s future will someday go, in the context of your larger science fiction universe. In a broader way, your story, like the Pern books, is science fiction because you and McCaffery are science fiction writers. These specific stories are categorized as sci fi because that’s what you write, and if you put out a book with wizards and faeries in, everyone would assume it was a Warlock in Spite of Himself type scenario and look for the nanotech behind the curtains. Lady Trent and Temeraire are fantasy because Marie Brennan and Naomi Novik are fantasy writers and their books are classified as fantasy. There are certainly authors who work heavily in both genres, but the particular authors under discussion aren’t them; you and McCaffery write spacefuture stories, and people read them in that context. Brennan and Novik write stories about witches and faeries, and people read them in that context. So that’s another part of how sci-fi and fantasy are distinguished.
Glynn Stewart is an author that definitely plays with that; the first book of his that I read looked at first like secondary world steam-age fantasy, but it turns out to be a cut off colony world and all the magic was really old ultratech, and it was 100% sci fi, and he has a sci fi series that’s all spaceships and all. And then he turns around and writes the Starship Mage books, which is about wizards in spaceships and doesn’t pretend to be anything else. (“You got your fantasy in my sci-fi” is a gimmick at least as old as Shadowrun in the 80s, but seems to be undergoing a boom right now. “You got your sci-fi in my fantasy” is older, but not as common these days, and mostly the scifi is clockpunk or steampunk; the only totally space-future sevondary world fantasy setting I can think of is the Starfinder RPG)
“At the very least, it’s a blend of the two genres — a work of science fiction in a fantasy universe. Though I still say it’s more like alternate-world science fiction than actual fantasy, since nothing in it is attributed to supernatural forces”
Again, the same can be said of the Temeraire books; the principal distinction is that Captain Laurence is a naval officer instead of a scientist, so we only get the science in excerpts from the works of his occasional associate Sir Edmund Howe, and that the scientific state of the art is some 80 years less advanced than it was when Lady Trent started her career. Are they historical science fiction as well? Certainly nobody else has ever described them as such AFAICT.
“Lady Trent and Temeraire are fantasy because Marie Brennan and Naomi Novik are fantasy writers and their books are classified as fantasy.”
Reductionist nonsense, mistaking stereotype for truth. There are many writers who work in both SF and fantasy, or both SF and horror, or both horror and mainstream mystery, or both fantasy and mainstream romance, or any number of different genres. As I said, genres are ingredients, not walled camps. Or they’re options on the menu. Plenty of writers like to explore multiple different genres, styles, etc. Most creators don’t want to be stereotyped as one thing our entire lives. We want to experiment, to explore, to challenge ourselves by trying new things.
Look at the title of this thread. It’s not asking us to invent excuses to force everything into inflexible boxes. It’s asking us to consider the overlap between genres, the fallacy of building barriers when it’s all a continuum.
“Again, the same can be said of the Temeraire books… Are they historical science fiction as well? Certainly nobody else has ever described them as such AFAICT.”
What has that got to do with Lady Trent? Every work is its own distinct entity. You can’t judge one person by the actions of another, and you can’t judge one work of fiction by the parameters of another. Everything deserves to be defined for what it is, not for what other thing it reminds you of.
Sci-Fi and Fantasy are merely subgenres of fiction. And like most subgenres, there is no clear delineating line. I imagine many people simply think of Sci-Fi as movies and books set in the future, with spaceships and laser blasters, while Fantasy contains elves and orcs and is set in a fantasy world. Myself, I think of the Sci-Fi genre as containing stories which utilize science and technology and is somewhat hypothetically possible. Fantasy, to me, contains stories that revolve around magic and is not remotely possible in real life. Either genre can bleed into the other, but I think most people “will know it when they see it,” in terms of characterization.
What a silly discussion. Of course, ALL SF is fantasy. You’re welcome
“Ruddigore-ing”?!? I’ll remember that line (and be thinking of suitable pun-ishments for its author) long after I stop screaming….
I can’t tell from your cite when Miéville made his comment, so he might or might not have preceded Brust’s tweet to the effect that no attempt to separate science fiction from fantasy can survive an encounter with the works of Zelazny — but Zelazny’s work precedes Miéville by some decades.
There are authors of what looks to me like fantasy who have magic so systematized and mechanized that it reads like science fiction — but not necessarily good science fiction, which (as a commenter noted above) doesn’t have characters stopping the action to tell how things work. (YMMV — there are probably people still who live for the complicated tech talk.)
Part of the problem there is the (assumed) preexisting knowledge base of the reader: an author can say “the spaceship is powered by antimatter” and assume that anyone reading knows what antimatter is and has at least a vague idea of how it might be used to generate power/thrust. If you say “This spell relies on the Law of Contagion”, only members of a few little-regarded sects and mythographers will know what you’re on about, and if you say “The spell is all about slood transfer” nobody will know anything about it at all unless you explain, because you made that term up and it doesn’t refer to anything outside your world building.
One of the most basic rules of writing drilled into me since grade-school English is that you should never assume your readers know anything. Your audience is not one person (at least, you hope it isn’t), but a lot of different people with different areas of knowledge, so the goal is to write for all of them. You make sure anything relevant to the story is explained, at least to the extent that’s necessary to understand the narrative. A reader doesn’t necessarily have to know what antimatter is beyond the fact that it powers the ship and you’re in trouble if you run out of it. If any other attributes of antimatter are important to the story, then you explain them in the story. And by the same token, if the meaning of the Law of Contagion is important to understanding how the spell works, then you tell the readers what it is rather than assuming they already know.
On the other hand, there’s value in mentioning things the readers don’t understand, because it can add texture and depth, making it feel like there’s a larger world beyond what we see on the page or screen — like when Captain Kirk passingly mentions historical dictators like Ferris and Maltuvis without explaining who they were, or says Dr. Daystrom won the Nobel and Zee-Magnees Prizes. But that only applies to things that the audience doesn’t need to understand to follow the story.
Star Wars isn’t space fantasy cos of the parsec thing, it’s because of all the wizards.
The best I’ve personally been able to come up with as a dividing line is that the unrealistic elements in sci-fi are presented as scientific (Vulcans evolved telepathy the same way Klingons evolved forehead ridges), while the unrealistic elements in fantasy are presented as magical/mystical (a wizard casts a spell that grants him telepathy).
My overly simplified division is, SF deals with the possible, and fantasy deals with the improbable.
I shelve them together in any case.
This seems headed in the right direction but is subtly dismissive. Plenty of people have no difficulty accepting story elements lacking rational explanations, but rather actively seek stories which provide explanations that can be examined for plausiblity and consistency beyond their immediate Watsonian contexts. (Exhibit A: the comment sections at this here website.) And plenty of people read or watch with more escapist aims, preferring story elements that just make sense in context. (Most consumers of genre fiction actually fall into both categories, depending upon the work in question and their current situation. But that’s a completely separate discussion.)
So here is a proposed rule of thumb regarding the sci-fi / fantasy continuum:
The greater the expectation by the creators that a work’s expected audience will examine key speculative elements in contexts beyond that work, the more likely it will be classified as science fiction. Conversely, the greater the expectation that the expected audience will engage those elements based on Rule of Cool (or sister tropes), the more likely it will be classified as fantasy.
Example: hyperspace/warp/teleportation and apparition are equal in both their unreality and their usefulness in keeping characters moving around a world at the speed of plot; but only the former is likely to have a (commercially & critically) significant number of people willing to discuss whether gaps in modern science might allow it to be feasible, so stories invoking FTL travel via any sort of overt technology are more likely to be positioned as “science” fiction.
To this debate, I can only reply
(As one who loves Fantasy I Sci-fi)
We ought not to nitpick
About our beloved spec-fic
There more to both than meets the eye
Isn’t it as simple as, sci-fi is about who we could be, while fantasy is about where we’ve been? Nitpicking imaginary/theoretical technology is a distraction.
Star Wars worked because it updated our fairytales and mythologies to something more identifiable and relevant to the 20th century.
Star Trek worked because it imagined a future where we finally achieved world peace, freeing us to explore our potential.
One-sentence generalizations can never be full answers. There’s no reason fantasy has to be backward-looking. There’s plenty of urban fantasy and magic realism in modern settings, addressing modern social issues and concerns. And there’s science fiction in a historical context, like steampunk and alternate history, exploring alternative ways the past could’ve happened. (Above, I mentioned my Analog story “Aleyara’s Descent,” which is basically a work of historical fiction set in the past of an alien world in my main hard-SF universe.)
“Star Wars worked because it updated our fairytales and mythologies to something more identifiable and relevant to the 20th century.”
Except most of the stuff it’s based on is from the first half of the 20th century — Flash Gordon serials, Kurosawa movies, Westerns, WWII movies. I’d agree, though, that SW is about looking backward and celebrating nostalgia, while Star Trek is about looking forward and celebrating the potential of the future.
Naturally there’s always nuance to be found, or what would we talk about? :)
But I think we’re saying the same thing about Star Wars. The story goes that Lucas initially wanted to do Flash Gordon straight-up, but he couldn’t get the rights. Whether or not that part is true, he saw that sci-fi, or space opera at least, was a mythology that resonated with modern audiences in a way that medieval tales of wizards and dragons no longer did. But he didn’t really change a whole lot– paraphrasing “Once upon a time…” and taking it from there.
“he saw that sci-fi, or space opera at least, was a mythology that resonated with modern audiences in a way that medieval tales of wizards and dragons no longer did.”
I don’t think that’s really what he was thinking, given that just 4 years later he created a fantasy franchise about a 1930s archaeologist seeking ancient supernatural relics, and 7 years after that he tried to get a high fantasy franchise off the ground with Willow. He had no resistance to fantasy as a genre, he just happened to make a space opera first.
The success of Star Wars led to many sci-fi/fantasy projects getting greenlit that wouldn’t have been considered before, in somewhat the same way that The Matrix would soften the ground for Hong Kong-style action in Western films.
What happened after the fact proves nothing about Lucas’s intentions beforehand. You’re kind of contradicting yourself — if the genre already “resonated with modern audiences,” there’d be no need to “soften the ground” for it. It’s not a film’s genre that determines whether an audience will respond to it; rather, a well-made, successful movie creates an interest in seeing more films of that genre. (Which is why The Matrix was successful as a cyberpunk action movie starring Keanu Reeves when Johnny Mnemonic just 4 years earlier was not.)
Ah, what a tangled web I weave.
I brought up the Matrix comparison by way of talking about aesthetic trends, not sci-fi specifically. The style of martial-arts action popularized in that film had been standard in Asian films for decades but remained stubbornly the stuff of B-movies in the West (Bruce Lee notwithstanding). Couching it in a sci-fi context made it ‘acceptable’ and once that barrier was crossed the door was open for more traditional settings (and Asian star talent) to also find worldwide success, as seen with Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.
In THAT way, more or less, the success of Star Wars enabled a wide variety of straight fantasy projects as well as sci-fi properties to make their way to the screen. It’s accepted that Alien wouldn’t have gotten a greenlight if 20th Century Fox hadn’t been eager to make another space movie right away, but I don’t think we would have gotten Conan the Barbarian or Dragonslayer without Star Wars either.
I don’t dispute any of that. I’m just saying it’s the opposite of your original assertion that the 1977 audience already preferred space opera to high fantasy and that Lucas was responding to that existing preference he was somehow aware of.
Ah, gotcha. I should have said that Lucas recognized a potential appeal in space opera that people didn’t know they wanted until they saw it, and he got it across by (cliche) grounding it in reality, making everything onscreen look used and functional– less fantasy and more sci-fi in appearance, if not in text.
Of course there’s more to the alchemy of how and why Star Wars worked, but if I knew that I’d be making movies instead of talking about them. The only blockbuster sci-fi franchise at the time was Planet of the Apes, which was the opposite of space opera in practically every way.
I still don’t buy the premise that Lucas started with fantasy and changed it to be more sci-fi. As we know, Lucas basically thought up Star Wars because he couldn’t get the rights to Flash Gordon away from Dino De Laurentiis. Flash Gordon, in the original comic strips and Buster Crabbe serials, was already a sword-and-planet space opera blending fantasy tropes and futuristic technology. Star Wars was basically a pastiche of that, the same way Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon is a pastiche of Star Wars.
And the fact that De Laurentiis was already developing a Flash Gordon movie before Star Wars existed — indeed, had been trying to get one made since the 1960s — puts paid to the assumption that Lucas was some kind of singular visionary who perceived a market nobody else saw. Not only that, but if anything created an interest in space opera, it was Star Trek. Lucas reportedly used ST’s success in syndication as a precedent to try to persuade potential investors that a space opera movie could be profitable. There’s a reason he named his movie “Star [4-letter word]”.
I love Flash Gordon (1980), but it looks like it was made in the 60s.
And to add to that, it supports my impression that it, and other sci-fi/fantasy film projects of the late 70s/mid-80s, wouldn’t have gotten made if SW hadn’t kicked the door open.
To add to the “confusion”, I would even throw phantastic horror into the mix, so everything that has to do with ghosts, vampires, werewolfs etc. And given how blured the lines between all these (sub)genres can be, many examples have been mentioned already, I decided for myself to call the whole thing “phantastic tales” a while ago. Within this there are many subgenres with overlaps and blurry lines and only if a story goes clearly (for me) into the extremes, like e.g., “The Martian”, then I would call it for example Science Fiction, or define “Lord of the Rings” as Fantasy.
So, as much fun as this discussion can be, I am out of it. :-)
I get really annoyed when people define fantasy as being epic fantasy. The genre is so much broader than that. Haven’t any of you read the Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, or Little Big? It changes the whole argument.
Exactly. It’s the same as defining all science fiction as being about spaceships and robots. It’s mistaking a well-known subset for the whole.
There is a bumper sticker that says, “In fantasy, dragons can hover. In science fiction, they cannot.”
Acknowledging that Star Wars has the “pew-pew” going for it as sci-fi, also remember that Joseph Campbell spent some time at Skywalker Ranch.
As far as the Force goes, let us respectfully recognize that faith-based systems play a part in everyday life now and throughout history. Including faith-based elements in the story (or letting the story re-tell them) doesn’t per-se make it fantasy/magical. Commander Sisco’s interactions with the Bajorans acknowledged their faith systems, whatever name Fleet or Bajor attached to The Prophets/Wormhole Beings. Dr. Franklin on B5 ignored a family’s faith restrictions to the detriment of his patient.
If the question is whether a given story could plausibly happen, I direct our collective memory to recall that near the time of the Trek TOS filming, not all of the bridge crew would have been allowed to sit at the same lunch counter, much less serve together as a highly-trained crew. Speculation, indeed.
BTW, the local university has runner bots underfoot everywhere delivering food orders, so that’s a not-so-fantasy element of Star Wars.
The magic word, the science word, the story-word is “if”. If the environment got hotter, got colder; if humans had a moon base, a Mars base; “if” wishes were horses . . . Writers make up the structure in which the “if” can happen and send it on its merry way.
Is the tessaract in A Wrinkle in Time any less science-y than the “wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey”-ness of the TARDIS or the warp drive of the Enterprise? Having tried to wade through physics speculations about time and space, I’m inclined to say no, but I get lost about twenty minutes in.
If you tell me a story about it, though . . .
“As far as the Force goes, let us respectfully recognize that faith-based systems play a part in everyday life now and throughout history”
But they never allow adherents to move things without touching them. The fantasy isn’t in the element of relgious practice, it’s in the way Luke Skywalker can haul his spaceship out of the swamp without even a shovel, let alone heavy equipment, just by the power of his Jedi magic. Similarly Wrath Becomes Her by Aden Polydoros is a fantasy not because many of the protagonists are Jewish but because it’s about building a golem to fight nazis, and that’s not something that really happens.
“Including faith-based elements in the story (or letting the story re-tell them) doesn’t per-se make it fantasy/magical.”
That depends on whether you depict it as a belief or as an actuality. If a story set in Ancient Athens has people praying and sacrificing to Athena to save them from a crisis, that’s just historical fiction. If Athena actually materializes in the flesh and performs a miracle, that’s fantasy. If Athena turns out to be one of a group of aliens that the Ancient Greeks worshipped as gods, and her miracle the result of alien technology, that’s science fiction.
I would argue that the Force is not a faith-based system, because faith means belief in something unprovable, whereas the Force is a proven physical reality that requires no faith to believe in. There’s a reason Lucas called it the Force, as in a force of nature like electromagnetism or gravity, rather than the Spirit or something. It may be inspired by ideas from Eastern spirituality, but it’s an integral part of the physical laws of the SW universe.
I tend to believe that part of the distinction between SF and fantasy is historical, in that people with STEM backgrounds (Asimov, Clarke, de Camp, Smith, inter alia), while people without wrote fantasy (Tolkien, Lewis). Fantasy[1] has a longer history than science fiction, as science as a concept didn’t exist until after the Renaissance[2], and it’s impossible to conceive of science fiction as a genre existing before science as an intellectual pursuit.
So did science fiction fork[3] from fantasy in the late 19th or early 20th Century or did it originate, ex nihilo, at that time or somewhat earlier (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Cyrano de Bergerac[4])? I’d argue mostly[5] the former, with the distinction being that science fiction is concerned with deliberately created artifacts (primarily) and fantasy with things intrinsic to the universe: anti-gravity boots may be no more scientifically than psychic levitation, but it’s still a made thing, not some feature of the universe accessed by the correct mindset, cantrip, or potion.
OK, so SF requires made things, and fantasy doesn’t. Does SF jump into areas that violate known science? Absolutely! Yoon Ha Lee’s calendarical systems in the Hexarchate series are direct violations of special and general relativity. Becky Chambers books, while delightful, pretty much ignore little things like Conservation of Energy.
———-
[1] I’m leaving aside the question of whether it’s sensible to classify works from 500 or more years ago as “fantasy,” when magical creatures of various sorts were routinely excepted by most people.
[2] I’d argue that “science” as a pursuit started no earlier than Galileo, who was the first person who developed the formal concept of the study of nature by observation, experiment, and hypothesis.
[3] In the software development sense. See, for example, the different variants of Nethack ([1] “Variant,” Variant – NetHack Wiki, https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Variant (accessed May 8, 2024).
[4] Leaving aside that Cyrano de Bergerac’s methods for traveling to the Moon are completely impossible, this wasn’t known that time.
[5] Mostly, but not entirely: part remains by whom it’s written, and part is decided by publishers and critics. On a vaguely related topic, see magical realism vs fantasy.
“[1] I’m leaving aside the question of whether it’s sensible to classify works from 500 or more years ago as “fantasy,” when magical creatures of various sorts were routinely excepted by most people.”
If by excepted, you mean accepted, I think that is still true now.
I’m going to blame my phone, and its tiny screen “keyboard.” Yes, it should be accepted.
By that standard, Tolkien’s Legendarium could qualify as SF! Various characters state, at several points, that key plot-relevant objects—-glowy swords, knapsack-stable trail snacks, a few pieces of jewelry—were objects crafted as tools, and that those who described them as magical simply lacked the advanced knowledge to recognize them as Sufficiently Advanced Technology.
Of course I’m being somewhat facetious here, but that sort of proves part of the point you are making. Tolkien’s stories are fantasy because that is the tradition he was working from and the context in which he expected the readers to experience them. In contrast, Asimov, Clarke, et al. are SF because those authors were deliberately approaching their works from a different perspective and expected their readers to do so as well.
This thread is making me more convinced that the SF-or-fantasy debate keeps going in circles because much of it proceeds from a category error. Many seem to be treating genre as a type of narrative structure, when it is probably more useful to treat it as a description of the ways in which authors and audiences expect to interact with a story
“OK, so SF requires made things, and fantasy doesn’t.”
No genre “requires” anything. There are general trends and norms, but no absolutes. Creativity is not about remaining within rigid, unvarying limits, but about exploring new possibilities and putting ingredients together in experimental ways. Genre is just a way of classifying overall patterns and tendencies, but it’s descriptive, not proscriptive.
And I don’t think this categorization works at all. There are many made things in fantasy — Galatea, the Golem, the One Ring, the Pensieve. And there’s certainly science fiction that isn’t about technology, that’s more about worldbuilding or cultural interaction between species or exotic natural disasters, say. What makes Frankenstein science fiction is not that the Creature was made; its innovation was that the Creature was made through the application of science rather than sorcery or divine power.
And plenty of science fiction is about “things intrinsic to the universe,” like black holes or exotic subatomic particles or the native species of alien planets. Science fiction is often about the harnessing of fundamental physical forces and phenomena or the exploration of exotic natural environments. Again, the difference is about whether those intrinsic things follow natural laws that we recognize or are the result of supernatural or magical phenomena.
Yes! My favorite example of this is Jullie Czerneda’s “bio-science fiction” (for lack of a better term). In all of her science fiction works, the thing that initiates and drives the story/plot is the biology of the alien species at the center of the story. Her “Species Imperative” trilogy is probably the most literal example of this concept, but it is also the driver of both the WebShifters and the Clan Chronicles novels as well. In the Web Shifters, the Web Being Esen-alit-Quar (Esen for short, Es in a hurry or between friends) has an entirely different personality depending on which species she is currently shifted into. Her intellect remains the same, but the expression and behaviors are determined by the species.
I can’t describe the impact of the biology of the Species Imperative trilogy without spoilers, so I just note that it is a galaxy-wide impact. And the Clan Chronicles were born of a study of minnows Czerneda conducted as a biology student/researcher.
Yes, she’s one of my favorite authors. Why do you ask? ;-)
Just to add to the pedantry I’d like to point out that George Lucas himself has explained that the Millenium Falcon’s legendary speed is not due to its propulsion but rather to its navigational computer. It was able to plot a hyperspace route for the Kessel Run that was only twelve parsecs long – a shorter traveling distance than any other ship had been known to achieve.
Yeah, that’s a later retcon, and there have been others. Solo offered an explanation, of course, and there was an episode of Rebels, I think it was (or else The Clone Wars), where the characters had to get through a similar obstacle in space and Hera (or whoever the pilot was) explained something about finding the shortest route through in a way that sounded like an oblique handwave for the Kessel Run.
But as I said, I think the original intent was that Han was a con artist or a fool and the writer’s intent was that he used the term “parsec” erroneously. Presumably Lucas retconned that after Han was revised into a more heroic character.
Solo: A Star Wars Story’s retcon is that the Falcon actually did the run in 14 parsecs, not “less than 12,” which is more in line with the “con artist or fool” interpretation. The idea that the path is affected by black holes/navigation hazards dates back at least to A.C Crispin’s Han Solo Trilogy in 1997, and may well have appeared earlier.
I was pondering this same issue the other day. I initially hypothesized that fantasy was better able to consider questions of the interaction of different cultures, but immediately realized that makes no sense because 1. I credit Star Trek for my earliest understanding of the fact that there are different value systems across cultures, and 2. Much of fantasy’s take on cultures is more than a little bit tinged with racism, including some I hold very dear. I guess my point is, “It’s complicated”?
Thank you for a very interesting piece, which I have bookmarked to read again at greater leisure.
I might argue that the real question distinction between Star Wars and Star Trek is not whether one is fantasy and one is SF, but whether one is a kids’ show and the other is for adults.
But that’s a distraction. What I really want to say is that I think a lot of what we see in the book world today is that genre has become a straitjacket and a source of division where there shouldn’t be any. The aforementioned Le Guin (of course) expresses it well: ‘Genre, a concept which could have served as a useful distinction of various kinds of fiction, has been degraded into a disguise for mere value-judgment. The various ‘genres’ are now mainly commercial product-labels to make life easy for lazy readers, lazy critics, and the Sales Departments of publishers.’
And if the image has attached successfully you can see that for me it’s not just about SF and fantasy, but more besides.
And if it hasn’t: it’s just a Venn diagram with three circles for SF, fantasy, and historical fiction… with my series exactly at the intersection of all three.
Harking back Lady Trent and Temeraire, both are fantasies, but IMO the former is more of a straight fantasy because it’s set in another world, which echoes our own but clearly isn’t. The latter is a historical fantasy because it is set in our world and follows our history (albeit shakily).
(To be honest, I have reservations about the world-building of the latter; the presence of air power for 2 millennia is going to change history so much I doubt the Napoleonic Wars would ever have happened. Given Novik’s short story set in the universe where Mark Anthony teamed with a dragon, I doubt the Western Roman Empire would have fallen when it did. My guess is the Roman Empire (East and West) would have survived and the Old World would be split between Rome and China.)
I would not describe either as science fiction (or, indeed, science fantasy).
I see Lady Trent’s world more as alternate history of a sort than fantasy. It’s not an alternate that could plausibly have branched off from our history, since it’s more of a pastiche of real history with the country names changed and dragons added, but other than that it’s a naturalistic universe governed by rational laws of physics and biology rather than gods or magic. It’s historical/geopolitical fantasy, but I still say it’s functionally a work of science fiction within that fantastic world, because it’s a story very, very emphatically about science itself. As I said below, it’s possible for something to be science fiction in a fantasy setting.
Yes it is different and should be. As an Authors PA in the Fantasy/Epic Fantasy arena do ing marketing to )SCI-FI)folks who do not give a rats patutti about fantasy makes it difficult. All of the companies that gather information have lumped them together. If I could just get a name/e-mail list of JUST Fantasy readers that would be wonderful
This reminds me of a conversation about the difference between the violin (classical music) and the fiddle (bluegrass).
What does one do wiith Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy stuff? It’s magic as technology in an “alternate” 19th Century England.
If I had to, I’d classify it as sci-fiction by the loose definitions floated in the comments and in the essay. But, mostly, I don’t worry about it.
I really think the point of the piece is that we don’t have to force everything into a specific genre cubbyhole, that dwelling too much on sticking labels on everything is misguided. There are many things that blend elements of fantasy and SF in different ways. Just as there are works that blend SF and horror (Alien), fantasy and police procedural (Keith R.A. DeCandido’s Dragon Precinct series), Westerns and steampunk (The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. and Richard Dean Anderson’s Legend), etc.
I think that if something is set in a universe where magic or divinity unambiguously exists, yet is investigated using scientific methodology and developed as technology, that would constitute both fantasy and science fiction. It’s in a fantasy universe, but it’s fiction about science and its application.
Here comes one cents worth…
This is a very subjective subject and to try and give it empirical definitions is a waste of time, and the real cause of the arguments.
When I was a kid, there were clearly marked sections of the bookstores and libraries for “Fantasy” and “Science Fiction.” I liked spaceships, lasers, and aliens, so you know where I went. I deplored wizards, spells, and magic, so avoided that section.
Later they became combined and I struggled to find my preferred literature. Quickly it became evident that there were marked similarities no matter what we called it.
Today I still prefer spaceships, lasers, and aliens so choose to call what I read as Science Fiction. But there is tons of room in that category for fantasy equivalence.
Each reader will call it what they want. Let it be.
I’d love to engage with my own diatribe, but instead I’m just going answer no to the question and spend the time saved by reading some sci-fi. Enjoy.
I still subscribe to Robert Heinlein’s views on sf and fantasy in his essay on “science fiction: it’s Nature, fault, and virtues”.
You can find the essay in Damon Knights’ “turning points” collection.
If Anne McCaffrey were alive she would quickly correct you for even slightly hinting at the fact that she was fantasy. From David Brin in Dragonwriter: “It happened one day when we were both being interviewed by a reporter who referred to the famous McCaffrey Dragonriders of Pers as fantasy novels. Oh how Anne bristled! With clenched restraint, she corrected the reporter: “I don’t write fantasy. I am a science fiction author.” The only fantasy-like aspects of Pern is the presence of psionics, which has been present in all forms of SF, even the harder SF authors like Niven and Asimov. This greatly stems from the cold-war era real-world scientific research interests of the CIA and KGB. Otherwise, Pern is very much SF – the superficial appearance of the native life forms to dragons is merely cause of the confusion by those who don’t know any better.
Indeed, I read that McCaffrey sincerely believed psionics to be a valid science, so she considered her novels about telepaths and such to be strictly science fiction, even when she depicted psychic powers achieving completely fanciful things like time travel.
“This greatly stems from the cold-war era real-world scientific research interests of the CIA and KGB.”
I think, rather, that the widespread use of psionics in SF stems largely from the fact that John W. Campbell was also a firm believer. He was a hugely important and influential editor who cultivated many of the biggest names in SF at the time, and he encouraged his writers to tell stories about subjects that interested him. So his proclivities had a disproportionate influence on SF literature, for better or worse.
Another psionics muddle (and my favorite expression of psionics as psience) are Julian May’s Pliocene Exile series and the Galactic Milieu, where psionics are tied directly to the fundamental forces of the universe. In Pliocene, it falls more toward the science fantasy pole, while in Milieu it’s about as hard as one can get on the topic, further complicated by her incorporation of Tielhardian metaphysics.
Interesting. One thing that bugs me about psionics, both in fiction and in real-life claims, is that there’s hardly ever any attempt to explain how psionics would work on a physical level. It’s just asserted that it can do things without any theory of the underlying cause, which makes it functionally no different from magic. So if there’s fiction out there that actually tries to present a specific physical mechanism for psionics, that might be worth looking into.
Back in college, I concocted a theory of psionics for a potential fictional universe. I postulated that there was a fourth family of quarks and leptons beyond the three known, including particles called psions and exchange particles called psi-mesons. They resonated somehow with brain waves and thus could be controlled mentally. But they wouldn’t have allowed violating physical laws like psychic powers often do in fiction; for instance, if a telekinetic wanted to levitate a massive object, it would take as much metabolic energy as it would to lift it with one’s muscles.
No argument there, but as it had been brought up already by others, and my point had not, I thought to highlight that.
Now let’s start a real fight:
Is it sentient, sapient, or sophont?
Depends. “Sentient” properly means possessing feelings and awareness of one’s existence, while “sapient” means possessing human-level intelligence and higher consciousness. Fiction tends to use them interchangeably, but there’s a growing scientific consensus that most animals and even insects have at least a rudimentary form of sentience/consciousness, so that probably needs to be redefined.
As for “sophont,” that’s easy, since it’s a noun while the others are adjectives A sophont is a sapient being, a person regardless of species.
Thank you, Kristen, for your thoroughly enjoyable essay. On the matter of “relegation,” I recently found this address by James Blish in 1970:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sbj_ClgiQ4c&t=2s
On the distinction ChristopherLBennett points to between the “syntax, the form and structure of a story,” of Fantasy and that of Science Fiction, does anyone here remember who wrote an essay suggesting that Science Fiction should start out with a question (What if…) and follow though to what might be its consequences, while Fantasy needn’t? Was that Niven? Was it Asimov?
I agree there is more variation within each genre than between them, and there are many fine works that straddle the line or incorporate still other genres, but when you work in a bookshop you have to have categories. It will not do to stock The Hunger Games next to The Once and Future King!
I know I tend to fall into the camp where sci-fi is determined by the number of rivets it has, and fantasy by the number of trees it has. After all, what is the fundamental difference between a specific people group having nanobots in their bodies that can interact with the atmospheric nanobots around them to be able to move things with their “mind” and another people group having magic powers that let them lift things with their minds? One would be considered sci-fi (possibly a softer sci-fi, but still sci-fi) and the other would be firmly in the fantasy camp.
Additionally, there’s many long-established “sci-fi” books that have very fantastical elements: Dune, Ender’s Game, The Matrix, etc. There’s also “fantasy” books that have very scientific elements to them, too: Dragonriders of Pern, His Majesty’s Dragon, His Dark Materials, etc. With Pern, you even have the fact that they tried to pivot to a sci-fi setting at some point, too. With the way that these can all blend and mix, I simply see no meaningful difference between Science Fiction and Fantasy in this day and age,a nd even throughout the entire history. Yes, some science fiction stories try to lean more towards the science and realism, and some fantasy books entirely slough off any resemblance it might have to reality, but that doesn’t mean that it’s much more of a spectrum than many people try to determine with them.
Star Wars is sci-fi with a healthy dollop of fantasy. His Dark Materials is a primer in multi-world and string theory wrapped up in a fantasy shell. Ender’s Game has an alien species make contact with Ender telepathically to the point where they create a whole epilogue to a video game in his computer system. As much as folks might like to separate the two, it just won’t work at all.
A highly enjoyable essay, elevated above the usual by the links to Pirates of Penzance and College Humor. Thank you!!
Much of what we call science fiction is actually historical fiction with a futuristic “skin” applied over it. Star Trek owes much to the age of sail and explorers like Captain Cook, and the strange worlds to the far off lands found by European explorers. The transit times between stars are similar to the transit times of surface ships across oceans, not because science points to the ability to travel FTL, but because those transit times are comfortable to the authors and readers. There are advanced weapons and shields, but space combat feels like the clash of early 20th century dreadnaughts. And some of the time the technology, as Clarke famously said, feels like magic.
I would argue that science fiction, if you use the definition that Stanley Schmidt espouses above, is actually quite a small body of work. Most of the rest is fantasy and allegory set in the future or in space.
“Much of what we call science fiction is actually historical fiction with a futuristic “skin” applied over it. ”
Much, but not as much as you’re indicating.
“Star Trek owes much to the age of sail and explorers like Captain Cook, and the strange worlds to the far off lands found by European explorers. ”
Despite the original pitch being “Wagon Train*to the Stars”, none of the episodes of the original Star Trek are meaningfully connected to any Age of Exploration tropes or events. Several episodes are allegories for [then] current events, but that’s been at least half the point of sci-fi since Frankenstein and arguably earlier, depending on your position on stories of moon people.
“The transit times between stars are similar to the transit times of surface ships across oceans,”
Transit times in Star Trek are at the speed of plot. Transit times in other sci-fi media range from microseconds to millennia, depending on the story and the technology therein.
“I would argue that science fiction, if you use the definition that Stanley Schmidt espouses above, is actually quite a small body of work. Most of the rest is fantasy and allegory set in the future or in space.”
I would argue that you have a skewed sample of sci-fi media. There’s certainly plenty of Historical Fiction IN SPACE!! out there (although Trek isn’t it), including 99% of the works of famous sci-fi authors like David Drake and David Weber, but there’s a really vast amount of “but what if [x]” out there as well, including the works of such famous sci-fi authors as Anne McCaffery (previously mentioned), Larry Niven, Ursula K LeGuin, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Lois McMaster Bujold, and many more
* in the specific sense of the then-current TV show
What people today tend to miss is that the “Wagon Train to the stars” pitch wasn’t specifically about it being a Western. After all, half the shows on the air at the time were Westerns, so that pretty much cancelled out as a significant factor. The reasons Roddenberry referenced Wagon Train in his pitch were, one, that it was a pseudo-anthology show driven by guest stars of the week, which was the format he had in mind for Trek before it became more centered on its three leads, and two, that WT was a critically acclaimed, long-running adult drama, and he wanted to tell network execs that he was aiming ST to be a similarly smart and classy drama rather than a goofy kids’ show like most sci-fi TV of the day.
However, TOS was indeed a frontier narrative in a lot of ways, using tropes from Westerns as well as the Age of Sail, historical dramas, and the like (unfortunatey including a number of alien cultures based on stock Orientalist and tribal tropes, e.g. the Klingons as “Space Mongols,” the Argelians as pseudo-Arabians complete with belly dancers and mystics, and the Feeders of Vaal as childlike, scantily clad South Seas islanders).
I think you’re applying Stan’s definition a bit too narrowly there. Yes, a lot of SF, especially in the mass media, is just conventional stories with a veneer of futurism. But I think even in series that tend toward that, there are a reasonable share of stories that couldn’t take place without the speculative element. For instance, you could never tell a story like Voyager: “Tuvix” and explore the philosophical and ethical questions it raises without the sci-fi gimmick of a transporter combining two people into one. It’s a completely absurd gimmick scientifically, but it allows a story impossible to tell in a conventional setting.
On the subject of travel times comfortable to the audience, I think the reason modern Trek productions tend to show interstellar journeys as a matter of hours or less, instead of the weeks they was usually presumed to take in TOS, is that modern writers and viewers are accustomed to an age when anywhere on Earth can be reached within a day and communicated with instantaneously, unlike TOS’s writers who were old enough to remember a time before jet travel and communication satellites.
Why bother to analyse them, or even attempt the impossible? Just enjoy, and thank God for authors and their imaginations! This world is already dystopian enough that it’s a blessing to escape into others
Dragonriders of Pern is not fantasy. Anne McCaffery very pedantically called herself a science-fiction author. The only way that you could barely call it science fantasy is because of the inclusion of psionics which was actually quite common in even the hardest science fiction of the time
“Science fiction is the literature of ideas . . . It’s the appeal of ideas being central, rather than characters or relationships.” – Iain M Banks
Believe it.