Kat Dancing

There's some really interesting discussion going on right now about What Science Fiction Is. nihilistic_kid says one thing, truepenny another, Ted Chiang another, and matociquala says it doesn't matter. I will hereby add my own unpublished and uninformed musings on the topic.

The first thing I want to do, before tackling the difference between the science fiction genre and the fantasy genre, is to define genre. A genre is a marketing category.

This is not something we like to talk about much, any more than the literary fiction folks like to admit that their categorization does not mean that they are the next James Joyce, but rather that they are best sold to people who like to think they're reading the next James Joyce. We like to think of speculative fiction as something greater. But let's face it: science fiction and fantasy are convenient labels slapped on books to describe the market demographic the publishers think will want to read the book. That the publishers occasionally drop acid first does not invalidate the basic definition. Science fiction is defined by the reader.

So to define science fiction and fantasy, we have to ask: what specific thing does this market demographic want that causes them to buy anything labeled "science fiction" or "fantasy"?

Well, they want an escape.

This is another thing we don't like to talk about. Escapism is such a dirty little word, one that our English teachers kept throwing at us (along with James Joyce. Ew.) But let's admit it: most of the people reading speculative fiction - or any type of fiction - are trying to escape from reality. As Tolkien once said, of course fiction is escapist: is it not the duty of the captured soldier to escape?* We try to escape reality because it's grinding us down, making us loose sight of the larger picture that fiction gives us; some of us will take that larger picture back into the world with us and do good with it, others will use it to hide in so that they have the pretense of change without the actual effort. Doesn't matter. For the subject at hand, the goal is the same: escape.

Fantasy offers the more perfect escape. It is never-never land, where you could be a princess and your boss probably got et by a dragon years ago... and where anything could happen, and good is really good, and evil is really evil. This is probably why fantasy sells better than science fiction, and why fantasy (in the form of folk tales) has been around far longer. The roots of fantasy run deep, right down into our bones, and the stories we read can pluck at those strings and make us shiver straight through. It's why the most powerful stories almost always contain an element of fantasy. It's also why there's so much crap fantasy around. Lotsa power = lotsa people flailing around trying to figure out how to use that power without sacrificing anything themselves. Just think of the bad writers as the two elder brothers.

Science fiction, on the other hand, is a relatively recent genre brought on by the relatively recent Western concept of progress. Suddenly the future became a place, a thing you could reach out to, journey toward, shape: and right alongside it came science fiction, the travelogue for the foreign country of Times To Come. The lure of science fiction is that it describes what could be, rather than never-never land. It could be real. Someday. Just how real it could be depends on how hard the writer works at fitting the unknown to the known and how much his reader base knows (which, in sf circles, is frequently a lot).

Science fiction reaches out and up: it wants the light. Fantasy reaches in and down: it faces the dark. Think of the one as a tree's branches and the other as a tree's roots. It's as good an analogy as any.

But both of these things are defined, not by us the writers, nor by the publishers, but by the readers, who do not know how to say what they want. "I don't like science fiction, it's nothing but a lot of machines," they say, meaning: there's too much light, it makes me feel stupid, I read fiction to get away from mean people who make me feel stupid. "I don't read fantasy, it's a bunch of kings and wars and rubbish," they say, meaning: it's too dark in here, it doesn't make sense that these things still have power over me, I read fiction to get away from things that don't make sense.

It is singularly pointless to argue with such people that science fiction isn't all machines or that fantasy isn't all kings and battles. The words that come from our mouths frequently have nothing to do with what we mean.

Readers are similarly shifty on what is science fiction and what is fantasy, because the definitions above are, in practice, very personal things. One person's "that could happen someday" is another's "that could never happen." And besides, there's plenty of speculative fiction that plays the field, so to speak. Some stories wear the clothes of the future over the bones of the fantastic: Ray Bradbury, for example, or Star Wars. Some stories go play in never-never land but take the light with them, like Charlie Stross's recent fantasies or any number of cheap D&D knockoffs. And then there's China Mieville's work, which is unquestionable fantasy structured in such a way that it appeals as much, if not more, to science fiction readers. This is speculative fiction. People will go on poking at the rules, looking for the bendy bits.

So does it matter at all what we write, when it's all a matter of market demographics and personal definitions?

Well, yes. If you're a writer and you think market demographics have no effect on your work, then I'd like a ticket to your never-never land. There's a perception among some writers that it's terribly low-class and avaricious to consider The Market when writing, and to an extent it's true. You can't let The Market write your book for you, even when you realize that The Market is just fancy talk for readers. But....

When I was a teenager, I read everything, and I mean everything. I read L. Ron Hubbard's atrocious trash, God help me. But there was a special class of books which I called Dent Books, because at a certain point they would upset me so badly that I threw them hard enough to dent the walls. Hubbard's books never got this treatment, because they were simply bad; the Dent Books were good, well-written books... but they got something wrong, horribly wrong, and because they were well-written their wrongness tainted the real thing and I had to throw them away hard and curl up and try to block the very existence of the book from my brain in an attempt to protect my old, real memory.**

You do not want to write Dent Books. Writing Dent Books means you have misunderstood something about your audience and what it wants, misunderstood it so badly that you neither miss it (as Hubbard did) nor honestly deconstruct it, but instead end up writing something called, perhaps, The Phantom Menace, that makes your audience wish to poke out their eyes with sharp sticks simply to preserve their old good memories.

Genre is important: not as marked territory for a Whose Writing Is Art pissing contest, but as a shared group of assumptions which must be either conformed to or challenged, but are ignored only at peril. If you are lucky, you will be reviled; if you are unlucky, you will simply be unpublished. Know your genre. Are you lighting a candle, or reaching into darkness? How much of each, and where? And why?



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*Disclaimer: Tolkien may or may not have said this. LeGuin says he did but cites not her sources. Well, who am I to argue with LeGuin?

**I perhaps took books a mite too seriously in my youth.