Aaron Victor: "Stubbon Smart People"

Stubborn Smart People

By

Aaron Victor

            Now do not take the title as an insult and I am by no means trying to make the generalization that smart people are stubborn, on the contrary I am stating that depending on how stubborn a person is decides how they read speculative fiction stories. Before looking into where the line is drawn between science fiction and fantasy, it is important to ask the question “does it really matter?” Whether a story is sf or fantasy decides the questions you ask yourself while reading it. When reading Alice in Wonderland, you won’t ask yourself the physics behind her falling down the hole or the logistics of eating a small cake and growing to five times your size. 

Alice falling down the rabbit hole and surviving the endless fall.

 

The same goes for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (DADES?), you can assume the androids are mechanical and thus you have no logical reason to assume that there is any type of magic involved.

            Now that we have decided that the distinction matters, it is important to decide what type of story that is being read. Here is where the stubborn nature of people reading the stories cloud how the story is read. For example, whenever we read a book in this class I would always start reading with the mindset that the story is a science fiction story. This seems highly counter-productive because of the points that the questions you ask yourself when reading the story change depending, but instead I am as stubborn as possible and stick to my mindset until I am proven wrong. A tell-tale sign that a story has gone from sf to fantasy (the story hasn’t actually changed but my perception of it has), is when the reader no longer makes an attempt to rationalize the world that the story takes place in.  In Alice in Wonderland, the moment when she falls down the rabbit hold and lives is the moment at which you are sure that the story is fantasy and not sf.

Of course there are still 2 other types of readers, the ones that start with the idea that a story is fantasy and those who start with no ideas. The point at which a story goes from fantasy to sf can only truly be told at the end, because you are not sure that you can understand the whole story in the context of realistic science until the end of the book. So you have to keep analyzing waiting for something that goes against your knowledge and if you can in no way rationalize it, then it really is a science fiction story. This is problematic because you will read through the whole story and then decide which of the types it is, so if the story is sf then you have read the whole story in the wrong mindset and must re-ask the separate set of questions involved. If you are one that keeps an open mind to the type of story you are reading, then throughout the book you have to keep asking yourself what type of book this is and analyzing it given the current knowledge of the book.

One interesting side effect of being stubborn when reading a speculative fiction story, is if the reader is told that a story is one either sf or fantasy, they will read the whole story in that mindset until the end when they are positive the person was wrong or right. At that point, the person who read the story, if they were lied to, would have read the story asking themselves the different set of questions and would have a completely different view on the story.

            The separation of sf and fantasy is an important one that differs between people. Depending on the mindset you start reading the story with combined with your natural stubbornness to want to change mindsets decides when you deem a story to be sf or fantasy, changes your perception on a story. The basic line between the two is drawn when the reader can no longer understand the story in the views of realistic science, then the story is deemed fantasy. When the line is drawn however is decided on a person to person basis depending on their level of stubbornness to view a story in one way or the other.