Megan McKeown: "Making It Up"

Making It Up

by

Megan McKeown

In my mind, whenever I am asked the question of whether a piece of writing is sci-fi or fantasy, I automatically try to decide whether the piece is based more on technology and science or on magic.  But, this is just the question my brain has been trained to ask since I learned what these genres were as a munchkin.  This question can become particularly hard to answer as certain scientific advancements become hard to believe, or as magic becomes explained in a more and more rational way.   It’s hard to draw a straight line between science fiction and fantasy, but there are some certain aspects of each genre that can be looked at in order to sort a piece of literature into one of these two categories.  

I think that too often, fantasy is associated with just being magical.  Fantasy may have a tendency to lean in a more magical direction, however, I don’t believe that this is what makes it fantasy.  In a fantasy story, the author has invented a new world that is, although not necessarily completely different from our world, definitely original.  There doesn’t have to be “magic” in the traditional sense, but it should consist of at least one element that is completely from the mind of the author.  The world can draw inspiration from something in the world that we live in, but is really the product of the author’s imagination.  As a result, fantasy tends to be more trippy and difficult to believe.

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkein is a very clear example of fantasy.  Although the setting may be inspired by the ever so majestic mountains of Switzerland, Middle Earth, as well as the vast majority of creatures inside it, come completely from Tolkein’s imagination.  If the story actually did take place in the Swiss mountains, and all the creatures were all humans, and the dragon was something scary we have in this world (like a monkey with Ebola), a case could be made for this as a sci-fi story.  However, at this point the book had to be manipulated so much to take place in some time in our world that it lost all of the elements that make it unique.  It isn’t the story anymore.  Thus, it could not take place in any version of our world, and is considered fantasy.

I am in no way trying to say that sci-fi is unoriginal, but merely that the setting for a fantasy piece, although it can be inspired, is imagined.  For sci-fi, I think that the story is set in our world in a different set of circumstances.  It takes our reality and extrapolates on it in order to create something unique.  In a sci-fi story, a reader should be able to believe that in some other time, when man technological advancements and social changes have taken place, the events of the story could have taken place.  

It is very easy to come up with examples of literature that makes using this idea to determine the genre very hard to do.  For example, Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman is set up in the real world.  It is, in fact, set in the very real city of London.  However, London Below is not something that could happen in our world, no matter what kind of technology there is to help us out.  Thus, this would still be considered fantasy.

Another borderline story to consider is Ray Bradbury’s “The Million-Year Picnic”, which follows a family settling on Mars.  In this case, I would call this science fiction.  Although it technically isn’t our world as in our planet, this story still takes place in a futuristic version of our universe.  Theoretically, sometime in the future, all of Earth could turn to ruins.  In this case, if a family owned a private space ship, they could fly it to Mars.  And if there had been previous settlement attempts, they could come across things such as abandoned cities as they did in the story.  In this way, although it is definitely a stretch, a world in which this is the case is imaginable.  Therefore, I would label this story as sci-fi.

I think that fantasy is the invention of the author, while sci-fi is the author creating a situation based on our world.  With the right changes, sci-fi could happen sometime in the future.  However, fantasy is straight up impossible.  This is the number one way that I distinguish fantasy from sci-fi.