Kathryn Kuna: "A Collection of Sometimes and Oftens"

A Collection of Sometimes and Oftens

By

Kathryn Kuna

When you attempt to define a genre, you’re left with a collection of “sometimes” and “often” and “tends to”. A genre, especially one as broad as science fiction or fantasy, resists categorization, and especially resists absolute definitions, with any definition becoming a collection of descriptors that usually apply. If it has robots, it’s generally science fiction; if it has dragons, it’s typically fantasy. Science fictions tend towards pessimism, while fantasy tends towards optimism. Fantasy can be constructed around a quest, like the Hero’s Journey, while science fiction gets its plot from its foreign setting. Science fiction explains, fantasy believes. 

Science fiction gravitates to darkness, while fantasy bends towards the light. In science fiction, the endings range from the comforting “driven mad from hearing the final screams of your dead best friend on never-ending loop” in “Kyrie” by Poul Anderson, to the equally reassuring “forced to kill teenage girl due to weight restrictions” in “The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin. In fantasy, the endings are much less likely to drive someone into a deep depression, ranging from “finally processing your grief through 26 magical monkeys” in “26 Monkeys Also the Abyss” by Kij Johnson to “having your family reunited” in The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany. While fantasy doesn’t guarantee a happy ending, there is significantly less chance of the world ending/protagonist tragically dying. 

 Pessimism is more useful in science fiction, as it often serve to  illustrate potential dangers and pitfalls in society, with Samuel Delany speculating in “Some Presumptuous Approaches to Science Fiction” that “science fiction is not about the future; it uses the future as a narrative convention to present significant distortions of the present”, where fantasy, according to J.R.R. Tolkien, helps to restore imagination and wonder, with a happy ending serving as an embrace of “that we most yearn for – an acute awareness of the beauty of the real world”. Fantasy is dedicated to belief, to the rediscovery of the world and to acceptance that “the world is full of strange things, things that make no sense”, as explained by Kij Johnson. Science fiction often has a purpose – to scare away and correct behaviors that seem dangerous to humanity, hence the pessimism.  

Fantasy, on the other hand, is less concerned with predictions of doom and gloom, but of giving back childhoods and creating joy. The morality is black and white, with good and evil existing. In science fiction, the distinctions between right and wrong are less clear, or designed to create a point. In “The Cold Equations”, there is no bad guy, or good guy, just the cold reality of of nature. Circumstances drive the plot; evil villains are not necessary. Contrary to science fiction, fantasy often requires inciting events or people. The fantasy world is simply one that the characters inhabit, not a lesson or a conflict. In Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman, not only are there clear bad guys, those bad guys are two torturers who cackle and only find joy in destroying ancient porcelain and murdering people. The Hero’s Journey, a popular story structure, requires an inciting incident, a “call to adventure”, and elements of it appear in both Neverwhere and The King of Elfland’s Daughter,  but is largely absent in science fiction novels such as Philip Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light. Fantasy and science fiction tend to be structured differently, from science fiction’s “the world is inherently flawed and these flaws are causing conflicts” to fantasy’s “evil bad guys are causing problems or random calls to go on quests”. 

Of course, all of these characteristics don’t apply in likely hundreds of speculative fiction novels. Novels exist that are clearly fantasy or science fiction that meet none of the trends or commonalities. Oftentimes, the easiest way to tell what genre a story is by its tropes, with science fiction and its metatext, and fantasy and its criticism of derivativeness and worship of Tolkien. Each genre has a rich history that they don’t fail to use and this history and tropes may be the critical value of categorization; the readers know what tropes to expect and how the story will unfold. In science fiction, a main driver will never be elves. The value of the divide of science fiction and fantasy is of expectations, and of managing them. People like the comfort of a familiar plot and the safety of the confines of a genre, even in genres like fantasy and science fiction that dedicate themselves to imagining alien worlds and entirely new species.