Science Fiction vs. Fantasy

Posted on January 30, 2019 by Clint

This is the kind of topic that probably deserves more than a little discussion, but seeing as this week has us in some distractions I’ll just start off for now with the thesis statement, so to speak, and then maybe write some more next week.

The topic itself burbled up due to Dawn and I having a conversation after she was remembering how bookstores often lumped Science Fiction and Fantasy works into the same section. They might still do this, though there are fewer and fewer bookstores still around to check. Her declaration that such was fine because “they’re basically the same thing!” got yours truly in a huffy, refutative state. Not so! cries I, with all the weight of my absolutely no degrees in literature behind the argument.

But here’s my take: lumping SF and Fantasy together is lazy, but also is not simply a matter of sorting dragons and elves in one bin and spaceships and lasers in the other. Science Fiction versus Fantasy is not about the props and settings, but about how concerned a given author is about the technical details of their world and the impact any alterations (from what we in our world are used to) might have on how people live.

By this metric, I maintain Star Wars is pure fantasy despite its spaceships and lasers because it really has no time or interest in explaining how hyperdrives work; all you need to know is that the Millenium Falcon’s hyperdrive is not currently working. Oh, I know there are technical manuals out there that have been published in the 40+ years since the movie’s release, but I feel like they are willfully missing the point. Star Wars is, excuse the expression, light-years removed from something like the original novel of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, where for better or worse a great deal of time is spent detailing how a submarine might function and how its existence impacts society. Eventually there is a giant squid attack, but it’s hardly the central focus of the story.

Now there’s something to be said for tendencies. Stories with what we’d consider possible future technology tend to explain that tech more often, and on a deeper level, than stories with wizards and dragons, even if Clarke’s Third Law still has a ring of truth to it. ESP tends to get more time devoted to its workings than magic crystal scrying, even if they functionally do the same thing. Ask yourselves, though… what was the last setting you read that really tried to make a study of how magic being real might have impacted Earth’s history? I mean without some amount of handwaving I would find that a herculean task, likely beyond my scope of confidence and knowledge to tackle. Hell, I remember when I was going to try to write about a race of intelligent cephalopods that evolved underwater and got hung up pretty darn early on the tech tree due to the fact you can’t really have fire. Think about how much of human technology depends on being able to easily produce and harness fire. And sure, I could posit some phlebotinum substance like “phosphire” which is as easily observed, used, and reproduced by octopus-folk as fire was for us, but the more you’re trying to lean into Science Fiction the more that feels a bit like cheating.

Well, I didn’t say it was a very concise thesis, but there it is. Change my mind.

7 thoughts on “Science Fiction vs. Fantasy”

  1. ConcordBob

    Good analysis. I also have 0 degrees in literature. I think SF deals more with projecting what our existing society would be like if we could develop tech that is an extension of what we have developed. We have harnessed steam power, electricity, communications, rocket power, etc; what if we could have FTL travel, inter-stellar communication, etc.

    In fantasy, we start from worlds with a different core set of capabilities. I agree that fantasy is less concerned with “how” something works….it just works.

    It’s nice to see the full-scale size image of the tiny poster shown in the cityscape. You guys are the best!

  2. Clint

    Thanks Bob, it’s very good to have you on board 😀

  3. Lar Townsend

    An interesting take on the impact that magic might have had on Western history is the Lord Darcy series by Randall Garrett. The title character is basically a Sherlock Holmes of that world – it is set in that world’s 1960’s and 70’s, although the “tech” has a Victorian feel. He works with a “forensic sorcerer” who is the primary vehicle for delivering knowledge about magic in the world

  4. Clint

    Interesting, though I wonder if there’s any specific reason given for tech to have advanced basically unchanged up to the late 19th Century but then stalled out? I mean stylistically it would be appropriate for a Sherlock Holmes style character but is it any deeper than that? Is it a Shadowrun sort of situation where the introduction of magic was a sudden occurrence at around the Victorian era of that world?

  5. Andrew Moore

    I think I read those stories and I believe that one of them dealt with this, sort of.

    A certain percentage of the population can’t see magic, but it is a small percentage and very few of them are rich enough to ‘matter’. But one of these magic blind people in one story was a noble who was trying to prove that the magic he can’t see could be duplicated by anyone … and got reasonably close to actual science before he was killed for totally unrelated reasons.

    As part of the story a discussion took place where they basically said that so much time and effort had been spent to study magic that nobody thought to try duplicating everything to find a non magic way of doing things. It would have been a waste time and money that only benefited a few people, most of whom were not rich enough to make it a practical concern.

    But they still took that noble’s research into Crown ownership since it might provide some benefit given time. Probably militarily given the world at the time (A non magic weapon or spy gadget would slip right through any magical search) but they talked more about helping the poor magic blind people in the story.

  6. Lar Townsend

    Andrew is right. “Scientific” magic was discovered in the 14th century, and much of the energy that was put into traditional scientific discoveries in our world was instead put into magic, thus slowing the advance of traditional science. Most people viewed the technological research of the noble as a bizarre hobby… Why try to do things without magic (and violating magic’s scientific rules) when it is quicker and easier to do them with magic.

    The world also seemed more peaceful on a global scale, so some of the drive to advance that we had in our world may have been missing.

  7. Clint

    That’s a good point on conflict driving tech. The Victoriana still seems to be a convenient coincidence but I do like the idea of flipping the script since in our world the Victorian period was a time when the idle rich were dabbling heavily into occultism.

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