Eric Hennenfent: "The Nature of Explanation"

The Nature of Explanation

By Eric Hennenfent

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            Drawing the line between fantasy and science fiction is something no bookstore I’ve ever visited seemed to have gotten right. Of course, that’s not to say I’m quite sure what ‘right’ is. It seems the more of both you read, the easier it is to form strong opinions on the distinctions between the two, and the harder it gets to defend those opinions.

            Even respected authors and critics seem to have trouble finding the difference. Writer Philip Martin wrote in A Guide to Fantasy Literature that while science fiction justifies its storytelling devices with explanations, fantasy merely asks for acceptance. Of course, with enough reading, that idea breaks down. The Lord of The Rings trilogy may not offer much explanation within its pages, but Tolkien wrote volumes upon volumes of supplementary material outlining every characteristic of the LoTR universe. When one reads elvish in LoTR, it conforms to consistent rules and grammars because elvish is a real language that predates any of Tolkien’s novels. To say that it is a real language isn’t to say that Tolkien didn’t completely make it up, but so long as it follows its own rules, it’s no less legitimate than English or Chinese or any other language. Going beyond linguistics, even magic is often given strict, mathematical rules by its creators. This is where stepping away from the printed page and expanding into the realm of fantasy games and roleplays is useful, because such activities require stricter rules than stories, and provide further opportunity for explanation of the concepts involved. Games like Dungeons & Dragons or Thaumcraft take the rules to a level not-quite-on-par with modern physics or biology, with specific rules for how magic works, where it comes from, and how it can be used. Fantasy may not always conform to physics, but lacking in explanation it is not.

            Interestingly, expansive world-building is something fairly absent from the SF genre. While popular stories like Star Wars have vast troves of specifics hypothesized or calculated by superfans, there’s nothing to parallel The Silmarillion for anything by Asimov, Bradbury, or Clarke. Invoking Occam’s razor, the simplest reason for the lack of massive world-building texts in SF is that there’s no need for them. The history of the human race in an SF text is assumed to be our current history (no backstory needed) rather than that of a completely fictional world (tons of backstory needed). Sure, history has been bent and stretched and supplemented and minified to make it work with the plot, but the story still takes place in our universe. Fantasy, on the other hand, gladly takes place in an entirely different universe. Let’s use the Chronicles of Narnia to examine this. Because our physics doesn’t allow for portals to other worlds in the back of wardrobes, the Chronicles must take place in a completely different universe, one where this is possible. Granted, everything else about this universe is the same as ours, but it’s nonetheless a different world. However, if Lewis had made even the slightest attempt to explain the portal to Narnia with real-world physics (Wormholes maybe?) the story would, in my eyes, cease to be fantasy and start being science fiction. Deciding what counts as “explaining” can still be a difficult task, but the core of it is this: Science fiction can take place in our universe because it abuses the rules. Fantasy is separate because it ignores them.

            Now we come to the point where we have to ask ourselves: What’s this good for? Is this distinction interesting? Somewhat. Is it useful? Probably not. That’s primarily because SF and Fantasy are by nature so tricky to categorize that I have no doubt that you, dear reader, have already thought of a counterexample. So many works blur the line between the two genres that whether “Fantasy” or “Science Fiction” is written on the spine of a book doesn’t really tell you much about its contents. SF and Fantasy can be so intermeshed that trying to convince bookstore owners to shelve them separately is probably a lost cause. Even so – if a reality in which Science Fiction and Fantasy are shelved alongside each other is too much to bear, at least there’s the small consolation that both genres can transport you to an alternate one.