Ana Curtis: "Science Fiction Brings an Umbrella"

Science Fiction Brings an Umbrella

By

Ana Curtis

If a mundane someone were to ask you who your favorite author is, you could probably say Asimov or Gaiman and get the same response – an eye-roll and a comment to the tune of “oh, that kind of stuff.”  It’s a common mistake: most people seem to classify science fiction and fantasy together.  Though they do have a tendency to blur into each other on store bookshelves, there is at least one outstanding thing that separates science fiction and fantasy.  This difference?  Fantasy is optimistic where science fiction is pessimistic.  You could say they’re the yin and yang of speculative fiction. 

Think about it.  Science fiction is kind of depressing.  If you’ve read Poul Anderson’s “Kyrie” or Brian Aldiss’s “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long,” you know that it can wrench your heart out as well as any other kind of story can – often better.  When we read in “Kyrie” that Eloise’s telepath Lucifer “will always be with her” in an infinite descent of pure agony, we’re forced to see how the science made that happen.  Anderson provides almost excruciatingly correct evidence that this anguish is possible.  Similarly, android David in Aldiss’s story asks, “how do you tell what are real things from what aren’t real things?”  The reader, knowing that David is not real by the story’s standards, is forced to confront the particular sadness of a robot that is too perfectly a three-year-old boy and all the questions that come with him. 

Basically, science fiction forces you to ask questions.  From Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip Dick to Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny (both a science fiction and fantasy writer, as if this weren’t confusing enough), we’re made to ask what makes us human, why we’re here, and what we’re supposed to do now that we are. 

Science fiction is mean.  It forces us to look at a world that ours could conceivably (in some cases more than others) become, and then shows us all the ways that this could go wrong.  Larry Niven once said that "a good SF author invents the car; a great SF writer comes up with the traffic jam.”  This encapsulates the idea.  Good science fiction looks to the future, and great science fiction makes all its flaws obvious. 

In comparison, fantasy seems a bit, well, naïve.  It’s a happy kind of naïve, though, so we go with it.  It looks to worlds that cannot possibly exist, gives us their goods and evils (usually clearly demarcated), and sends our proxy hero(ine) back to a life of happiness and/or contentment.  In Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, Richard Mayhew not only gets what he thinks he wants (to return to London Above), but also what he really wants (a life of adventure in London Below, obvs). 

There’s a reason that Joseph Cambell’s Hero’s Journey ends with “crossing the return threshold”, becoming a “master of two worlds”, and gaining the “freedom to live”.  The hero(ine) ultimately ends wiser, and usually happier, than they started.  Harry in The Blue Sword (by Robin McKinley) not only defeats the Northerners in a magical battle but also marries Damar’s king and bridges the rift between her homeland and Damar.  In a story that begins with a kidnapping that stems from nebulous magic, this is pretty much the best possible ending.

The happy ending is also part of Tolkien’s three steps of fantasy, as found in Philip Martin’s “Fantasy and Belief” essay.  Tolkien argues that stories set in a fantasy take the reader through three stages: recovery, escape, and consolation.  We “recover” the sense of wonder we felt as children, “escape” the restrictions of our mundane world, and then receive the “consolation” of a happy ending.  We are left with new eyes for viewing our world. 

It’s the belief that drives fantasy.  The belief that things will end the way they’re supposed to.  That everything is happening for a reason. 

Science fiction wants you to ask the reason.  It wants to pick apart the minutiae because it believes that everything has a fatal flaw.  To science fiction, questioning is everything.  To fantasy, there is no point in questioning.  That’s just the way it is.  It is, in the end, a personality difference: science fiction says we’d better take an umbrella to the future because it’s going to be a storm; fantasy trusts that a summer dress will be enough.  Readers should figure out what kind of weather they’re in the mood for before choosing between the two. 

               

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