Danny Atten: "Speaking to the People Inside Your Head"

Speaking to the People Inside Your Head

By

Danny Atten

             Deep inside each of us, there are two kinds of people.  While one kind often shows through, each one of us does indeed contain these two natures, no matter how carefully hidden one may be.  The two kinds of people are, quite simply, those who love science and those who do not.  At IMSA, where science is in the name of the academy, science-y people are kind of a common theme.  Not all are, though, and that’s a good thing; everywhere needs a little diversity.

             Depending on the kind of person you are, you may like different kinds of fiction.  According to Philip Martin in “Fantasy and Belief” there is a definable difference between science fiction and fantasy.  For him, science fiction can stretch the limits of science, but always returns through some logical reasoning back to the basis of the story, which is, of course, science.  According to him, “science fiction pushes science to its limit – and sometimes twists it to the edge of reason – to create new futures or other worlds. Yet those imaginary worlds are connected by a line of reasoning, however tenuous, back to our known laws of science.”  The fiction stretches science in the story, but still relies on it, keeping it present in the story.  Fantasy, on the other hand, departs from science and relies instead on belief.  According to Martin, “in fantasy, wonder and wishes overcome knowledge and explanation” and for the reader, “belief rules over science.”  Fantasy brings out the child in all of us that just accepts the world for the way it is.  It brings out the part of us that accepted Santa’s presence with awe and excitement.

            So that brings me to my own ideas.  Drawing on my wonderful experience during this past semester, I’ve concluded that while science fiction draws on reason and science, fantasy departs from it.  “Uh, duh,” you might say, but this is an important distinction.  Science fiction speaks to the part of us that gets googly eyed at science, while fantasy speaks to the part of us that sees science and says “screw that.”  Reading the different genres develops the different parts of us, and different readers enjoy the different genres because of that.  Science fiction gobblers love sf stories because they like to play the detective to figure out the workings of the story, while fantasy readers like those stories because they like to sit back and relax, accepting the craziness of the story as is.

            Whether you’re a science fiction fanatic or a fantasy nut, both genres have their merits, as both develop different kinds of creativity.  Science fiction, for example, develops logical, reasonable creativity.  It allows you to speculate about the changes of the future, but it also forces you to create certain rules for the story that follow scientific reason.  Take, for example, Isaac Asimov’s “Reason.”  In the story, Asimov created a worker robot on an off-world energy-mining station.  Asimov’s ideas about energy beaming in the form of intense laser beams were creative, but they still held true to scientific principles; we can convert light energy from lasers into other forms of energy.  While the energy beaming wasn’t the point of the story, Asimov still created rules of his story that are traceable through logical reasoning back to scientific principles.  Like Asimov, we are able to be extremely creative in science fiction, so long as we stick somehow to reason.  Science fiction develops the creative part of us that is logical and intelligent.

            Fantasy, on the other hand, allows us to create without restriction.  So long as it’s imaginable, it can exist in a fantasy world.  Fantasy develops the crazy-wild part of us that looks at a dog and says “Darn, that would be awesome if it had wings and were called a boomplesnoot.”  (Don’t ask me where that came from; I don’t have an answer.)  Fantasy allows us to do really whatever we want, developing in us free creativity.  Look at Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman.  The characters live under London, defying all logic or reason in their adventures.  Fantasy allows us to be us in the truest, weirdest sense.

Be it science fiction or fantasy, speculative fiction as a whole develops us as persons in different ways.  Because each genre develops us in different ways, there is a clear and logical distinction between the two.  Overall, though, it’s important to note that no matter what you prefer, reading stories helps to develop creativity and personality in its truest sense.