Creating artificial categories, and then deciding what belongs or does not belong in them, is such a fun and useless occupation. I think I could be happy doing this as a profession. Picking out the most important or relevant features of something, matching them to an arbitrary standard – it’s like making something up, plus! As you read my discussion of science fiction, please keep carefully in mind the title of my blog, and decide for yourself whether this essay belongs in it – whether it is at all original, or at all absurd.
[Parenthetically (how odd that I use brackets to enclose a parenthetical! Alas, there is no word bracketly), I have been annoyed by how writers dismiss some science fiction as fantasy, and declare some fantasy to be science fiction. Examples will follow. But there is my motivation, if you needed me to have one.]
I consider science fiction to be a subset of fantasy literature. I also consider Fantasy to be a subset of fantasy. (See how I distinguish the subset from the set, with a capital letter?) Of course, I should say, that Fantasy is a proper subset of fantasy. Obviously fantasy is a subset of fantasy given that all sets are subsets of themselves. Let’s divert for a moment more into mathematics. Set subtraction is defined as follows. B – A is the set containing everything in set B that is not in A ( e.g., {cow, horse, pig} – {pig} = {cow, horse.}.) So, if science fiction and fantasy do not overlap (if their intersection is empty) then science fiction is a proper subset of fantasy – Fantasy. (You may think that I ought to place the capital F on the larger set. You’d be mistaken.)
So, to define science fiction, I should first define fantasy.
fantasy (I needed to begin this sentence with a non-capitalized word) consists of stories about that which is not.
Now, there are already problems with this definition. I read a book a long long time ago, a British book written for younger readers about a plucky group of teenagers who, among other acts, attended a Beatles concert. I was troubled! (Recall how peculiar I was and am; for reference, read my first post about free will.) It seemed to me that the author made a terrible mistake. By including a real group, the Beatles, she (or he) laid her (or him) self open to a charge of falsity. I could (in theory only, in those pre-Internet days) look up the attendees of Beatles concerts (perhaps not even in the days on the Internet, but in theory at least). These kids were not there. Because they don’t exist. Somehow, this crossover with the real world bothered me. It was as though a character had been assigned a phone number, and not one of the phony (no pun intended) 555 ones. A simple call would prove the whole thing a tissue of lies.
The point of this digression is that ALL fiction deals with that which is not. So, we must understand fantasy as being about that which is not in general, rather than that which happens not to in particular. I trust this is sufficient here. But the following examples should make everything crystal clear.
High fantasy (Tolkien, Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson, The Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander, etc) and Heroic fantasy (Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian) feature elves and fairies and dragons – clearly, things which are not. Dark fantasy is sometimes populated by werewolves and ghosts. Light fantasy (Freaky Friday, for instance, which features body switching, or Oh God with George Burns) generally mixes mostly our world with just a dash of unreality. In Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife, it turns out that men’s suspicions that all women are witches are literally true. In my favorite Leiber work (Leiber is actually the originator of urban fantasy; I highly recommend Our Lady of Darkness), You’re All Alone, the protagonist “wakes up” and realizes that almost everyone else in the world is essentially a sleepwalker, going through predetermined actions with no actual awareness (also see my discussion of free will for whether such “philosophical zombies” can even be possible.)
Alternate histories (the all-time master in my opinion is Harry Turtledove) tell stories in which history played out differently (maybe the Axis won WW2, or perhaps Lincoln survived.) Again, this is an example of “that which is not.” But in this case, unlike dragons, these stories deal with that which might have been.
Science fiction (as of yet undefined, but let’s just think of examples for right now) deals in general with that which is not, but could be – could have been, may yet be, could be now if we buckled down. Arguably Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars could happen now with technology we have (except he elongates the lives of his characters with a longevity treatment which I think is more a plot drug than a human drug.) Tales of the far future like Asimov’s Foundation deal with that which may be someday (or could it? I’ll return to that point later.) Tales of other worlds and the odd life that may have evolved there cannot be said to be tales of things that might be, since it would be a nearly-impossible coincidence if aliens exactly like those that authors fancifully describe were actually out there. But aliens as different from us as those in Clifford Simak’s Way Station might exist – just not those particular aliens. But this is not an obstacle – a novel that describes a murder that never really happened is generally not fantasy, because murders like that happen; again, it’s the difference between general and particular which I mentioned above.
So, at this point I think I’ve demonstrated that science fiction, however else we define or limit it, is a subset of fantasy literature. But, what sorts of stories are science fiction, and what sorts are Fantasy?
There are a number of ways we could proceed from here. My final answer will involve a sort of fusion of them. Before we get there, another digression.
Ludwig Wittgenstein talked about categorizing. He used games as an example.
What is a game? Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations) mentions various traits that might make something a game. (I paraphrase here; in fact, I might be making some of this up. Philosophical Investigations is absurdly expensive, so I here rely on decades-old memories.) A game might be something that has rules, that features two or more players, and competition, and that has winners and losers, and that uses special equipment. Monopoly would fit all these. But surely not all of them are needed. Twenty Questions requires no special equipment. Solitaire has just one player. Cooperative games don’t involve competition at all.
Can we pare the list down to just those traits that all games must possess? Wittgenstein and I think not. Yet, if we can think of two games – let’s say Conway’s Game of Life (look it up, but not now; you’ll never stop playing and come back here!) and a footrace – games that have nothing in common – then why call them both games? Surely a definition must provide necessary and sufficient conditions that link all instantiations.
Wittgenstein concluded (as I recall) that it was sufficient that both examples have traits which are shared with other examples that share traits with the original games. In other words, while a footrace has no rules (well, it sort of does; you have to start at the same time and you can’t murder each other, but there are no detailed rules for how to run or alternate turns or roll dice or things) but it has two players and is competitive and features a winner and one or more losers. Life has rules but has only one player and no winner and no competition. But both are games because both are comparable to Monopoly. Make sense? (To go back to set theory, imagine a Venn diagram featuring three sets that have no triple intersection, like {1,2,3}, {3,4,5}, {5,6,7}. The first and third have no elements in common, and are thus disjoint. But both share an element with the middle set. I may have cousins on both sides of my family who are not blood-related at all, but they have me as a cousin in common and thus could come on a Cousin’s Weekend.)
So, what about science fiction? I have several characteristics in mind.
Consider Star Wars. We have space ships, aliens, planets, blasters, and more. These are science fiction tropes – the usual suspects. Yet, think of how the movie deploys them. We never get even a ghost of an explanation of how the ships work. Light sabers seem quite impossible – light just doesn’t work that way. The exotic worlds and aliens might as well be elves and dwarves; their characteristics have little to do with how evolution would work in different environments. And all of this is not poor writing, by any means – it is by intent! Star Wars is, in my opinion, Fantasy that uses science fiction tropes. It has no intent to show how the universe might actually be (the Force is pure religious fantasy). It deploys creatures in exactly the same way that Tolkien does. Yet, we might say that tropes are enough. We might say “magic swords=fantasy. Laser swords = science fiction – even though they could incidentally only work if magic were real.
Other than tropes, what have we? I think we could look at intent. Let’s go back to Foundation. It is clearly Asimov’s intent to show how science – in particular, the not-yet-existing science of psychohistory – might impact human life (even though the worlds of Foundation are not linked to earth in any real way, but their inhabitants are human beings. Later books would make a connection.) The faster-than-light ships that make the story possible do not and almost certainly cannot exist. So, what’s more important? Intent, or possibility?
Here we reach one of the complaints I promised to circle back to. Larry Niven seems fond of claiming that various works of science fiction are in fact fantasy – whenever he finds something in them where the science is not solid. (Niven is a proponent of hard science fiction – science fiction that takes science very seriously and provides often tedious explanations of how it all works. Some would define hard science fiction as dealing with the hard sciences of physics and chemistry and astronomy, and soft science fiction as dealing with the soft sciences of psychology and sociology, etc. I use the term hard science fiction to describe science fiction that doesn’t just use science but is really about science. Characterization in hard science fiction – check out Niven’s books like Ringworld for examples – often takes a back seat. Because I think fiction is fundamentally about character, even though I love science I much prefer soft science fiction.)
Should Foundation be relegated to Fantasy? Nonsense! It is a story in which science is fundamental to everything that happens. I would call it hard science fiction – with some impossibilities.
What about A Princess of Mars (magazine serialization title Under the Moons of Mars), the first novel in Edgar Rice Burroughs wonderful Barsoom books? Unlike Star Wars, this book explains John Carter’s greater strength in terms of the lighter gravity of Mars (which makes no sense really because he has been psychically projected to Mars and his body is back on Earth in a cave, but don’t get me started.) The breakdown of atmosphere-making machines drives the plot (Mars has too thin an atmosphere to support life as we know it). What little was known about Mars (the canals, for instance, which never really were meant to be waterways) is included. So – science fiction! Yet women on Mars lay eggs, but still have large breasts. As mentioned above, John Carter projects himself to Mars unconsciously by thinking about it hard. And almost none of the details are right or plausible, even given the state of science at the time. The intent is not to look at how science affects human life, but to use science fictional tropes to tell a traditional kind of fantasy story. And yet…..it isn’t entirely a traditional kind of fantasy. Unlike Buck Rogers serials, science isn’t completely foreign to the goings-on. I might argue that, just as in the best examples of earth-people-on-other-planets-of-our-solar-system (and those best examples would be Robert Heinlein’s juveniles like Red Planet), and regardless of Burroughs main preoccupations (male power fantasies, though not as distressing as E.F. Bleiler thinks), the Barsoom novels invite us to expand our imaginations as to what it might be like to be on another world. Burroughs, you see, doesn’t just recreate Earth and call it Mars. Barsoom is memorable and feels real – and new.
I’m wandering a lot. I doubt I’ve made much of a consistent point. Perhaps I’ll try, before the end, to summarize and bring it all together. Then again, perhaps not. That’s a great thing about blogging. I can handle my material however I want. This topic is all over the map, so my discussion is also.
I think science fiction shouldn’t be defined merely as fiction that has sci-fi tropes, nor just as fiction that shows how new technologies and scientific discoveries may affect humans. (Harlan Ellison didn’t like the term sci fi, which was, I believe, coined by Forry Ackerman, who loved “pop art” type expressions. Ellison preferred “sf” for science fiction, and proposed that sci fi (which he would reserve for what he thought of as low-brow science fiction) be pronounced “skiffy.” Most serious fans and critics of science fiction as literature use “sf” exclusively.) I think there is also the question of mood.
I would like to draw a contrast between the dominant mood of horror fiction and that of science fiction.
In horror fiction, people have no control. The world is unknowable and attempts to think one’s way out of problems are doomed to fail. Frankenstein is sometimes considered the first modern science fiction novel. But it has the mood of a horror novel. Yes, the monster is created by “science” (actually more alchemy; Baron F gets himself ousted from scientific respectability by studying the works of wizards lime Paracelsus) rather than by magic or demonic summoning. But knowledge is not power and control is an illusion. The Baron is wrong wrong wrong to try to seize the power of God (and that of women, by the way) by creating life. (Asimov referred to the fear of science transgressing the domain of God as “that damned Frankenstein complex!”) In H.P. Lovecraft’s best works, the “elder gods” are really space creatures, not gods. Does this make his work sf? Maybe. But the mood is pure horror. Control is an illusion and attempting it is a path to madness. The unconscious mind dominates horror fiction. Symbolism abounds and nothing is what it seems. Fear is generated by the fact that we are helpless pawns of a universe in which our powers and ourselves are tragically, even comically, meaningless.
The dominant mood of sf is control. We can learn, and know. The universe is fundamentally knowable, and problems can be solved with the rational mind. Things make sense, and await our probes and investigations. There are rules, and beings from here to Andromeda galaxy must all follow them.
I would argue that a novel like Matheson’s I Am Legend, which uses a horror trope (vampires) but explains vampirism as a virus and offers hope that science can solve the problem, is science fiction – at least by mood. (It’s still quite scary.) Whereas Lovecraft, who deploys science fiction tropes like aliens from other worlds, but doesn’t even pretend to suggest that understanding them is advisable or even possible, is pure horror.
What about alternate history? It is typically classed with science fiction. Like Wittgenstein’s game examples (or mine, whatever), it’s hard to see what traits alternate history stories share in common with other books classed as sf. They rarely feature tropes of sci fi (though in a great fusion series, Turtledove tells of a WW2 interrupted by alien invasion!) They don’t at all address how new technologies or scientific discoveries affect human life. Yet, by mood they are more like sf than other fantasies. They are exploring the way that history, almost as a science, might unfold under other initial conditions. Maybe the science here is closer to mathematics. Sensitive dependence on initial conditions and chaos theory – the butterfly effect, and all that.
Okay, time to wrap up. I guess I will try to summarize and offer some kind of usable conclusion.
- Science fiction is a subset of fantasy: fiction which deals with that which is not.
- Science fiction typically deals with that which could be, or might have been. It should take science seriously, but it doesn’t have to be entirely possible.
- Science fiction ought to deal with the effect on people – individuals and cultures and organizations and societies – of technologies and discoveries. But it doesn’t absolutely have to.
- Science fiction (and here is my original and absurd contribution – all of the above is available elsewhere) is as much defined by mood as by content. It is the literature, not necessarily of the possible, but of the rational, the conceivable, the understandable.
Final tally. Is Star Wars science fiction? If you like, but I’d say no. A Princess of Mars? Yes. The Call of Cthulhu? No. The Shrinking Man (also by Matheson, dealing with the utterly impossible shrinking to subatomic size of a man)? Yes. Tolkien-like fantasies where the elf-haunted worlds are other dimensions or other planets? No. Alternate histories (Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick)? Yes.
(A side note. Perhaps you’d like to consider the Barsoom books Fantasy. I won’t fight you. But…what about books that genuinely represented science as known at the time, but are hopelessly outdated now? Like War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells?
Well, Wittgenstein aside, I think a definition to be meaningful at all has to be permanent. Intent is what matters. War of the Worlds? Absolutely!)