Danielle Madsen: "A Taxonomy of Unicorns and Aliens"

A Taxonomy of Unicorns and Aliens

By Danielle Madsen

They stopped putting purple unicorns and green aliens on books spines years ago. My public library, like most nowadays, shelves its fantasy and science fiction collections together.  The faded stickers on the edges of books are the only thing which separate Isaac Asimov and Kim Robinson from J.R.R. Tolkien and Anne McCaffrey. The circulation desks points out that the colorful cover pages, with images of skyscrapers over desolate landscapes or unicorns in forests, don’t leave much room for confusion. And, I suppose, even the books with a less definite premise, psychic powers with a genetic explanation or aliens with god-like powers, might not have been given categorization I would have chosen.

Even if fantasy and science fiction are treated as completely distinct, shelved in different sections, the genres would still be divisible into categories. For fantasy literature, this division is between high and low. But even within the genre, creating sets still leads to trouble when stories use both the real world and a fantastic one. In an overt display of stubbornness, these portal fantasies are called either high or low — while Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is set in a detached, high fantasy land, Neil Gaiman’s London Below depends on the real world and thus gives Neverwhere the classification of low fantasy. The division is maintained because our ability to split the genre down the middle distinguishes it from science fiction.

But there’s no reason that science fiction couldn’t be similarly separated. Certainly most science fiction would be written under the low half of the table, George Orwell’s 1984, Phillip Dick’s Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep? , and Marget Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, all tell stories about some dystopian version of all world. But there are science fiction authors who create complex, imaginative worlds. One only has to look toward Frank Herbert and his Dune Chronicles as proof. And even those elusive portal fantasies have science fiction counterparts. After all, Robert Zelazny’s characters from Lord of Light reached their homeland by way of a spaceship, the Star of India.

But this method of categorization wasn’t chosen for science fiction. Literary analysts instead decided to graph in on a spectrum from hard to soft. But the idea behind the continuum, that a hard sf novel would explain speed of light space travel with elaborate (and only logical if skimmed) explanations of general relativity and quantum theory while a soft sf would point towards the warp button, is based more on the detail of explanations than on their validity. After all, current theoretical physics doesn’t validate it any better than engineering.

And if we are instead interpreting the spectrum as a rating of the explanation’s complexity, fantasy could be plotted alongside science fiction. Though George Lucas’s Star Wars and Robin McKinley’s The Blue Sword would be on the soft side of the scale because of the loose guidelines for the force and kelar respectively, Star Wars would be harder with its explanations of mitochondria counts than The Blue Sword’s with its vague comments about magic coming from the land. On the other side of the spectrum we could put series like J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter which, though completely unscientific, have elaborate rules governing magic.

Our categorization methods, however useful, were ultimately arbitrary creations. So another, equally arbitrary, method might be an effective method to graph both genres. Following in the footsteps of Descartes, I’ll claim that if speculative fiction is extension from reality, it can be plotted on a Cartesian plane. From fantasy’s methods, the abscissa will be the stories world’s distinction from our own. Then, from science fiction’s methods, the ordinate will be the logic in the explanation for these differences.

              

Disclaimer: Arrangement of green sf and purple fantasy novels is completely arbitrary.

As we can categorize science fiction and fantasy by each other’s standards or by of the combination of the two, it would not be logical to claim the genres are distinct. And so maybe peeling off the stickers is the best choice. After all, I wince every time I see the aliens below the titles of Star Wars spin-off novels. Just because the series was set in outer space, doesn’t mean it wouldn’t have been better described by rearing, periwinkle unicorns.