Sattvic Ray: "It's with the Readers"

It’s with the Readers

By

Sattvic Ray

It only takes a trip to the movie theater to find that the distinction between science fiction and fantasy is often tossed into the air. Mix together science fiction, fantasy, and action, and you have a high-grossing movie. The Avengers, for example, combines the mythical world of Norse gods with Tony Stark’s high-tech inventions. Why do viewers of these movies not cringe at this kind of mash-up? Don’t people want their science fiction and fantasy served separately? Evidently movies are good at pulling it off. The idea of taking an essentially good-vs.-evil story and giving it a biological or technological flair has been repeated over and over (perhaps too many times?) in film (Spiderman, Iron Man, etc.).       

When it comes to written works, however, my experience, at least, is that the genres are a lot more distinct because they draw from different literary traditions. Science fiction has evolved its own set of tropes that are generously borrowed around and built upon within the genre. Completely unrelated stories may share features such as wormholes, artificial life, or teleportation. Fantasy often calls upon elements of Greek and other mythologies, making ample use of fairies, angels, centaurs, and what not. Stories of the fantasy genre also tend to emphasize the importance of belief and morality, and are often formed around the Hero’s Journey, the quest that the main character must pursue. 

But even in literature, science fiction and fantasy can get mixed up, as in Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light. To me, Lord of Light seems like an extended version of one of the “false god” episodes of Star Trek (for example, “Who Watches the Watchers?”).  In episodes like these, the crew beams down on an alien planet and finds that one of the alien species has built a religion around sophisticated technology, and uses it to control another alien species (or even its own). As such, Lord of Light, to me, is primarily about the relationship between technology and power. However, a fantasy reader might pick up more on the Hero’s Journey aspect or the moral implications of the story. Books like these, which straddle the “border” between fantasy and science fiction, can serve as a conduit for science fiction readers wanting to get into fantasy, or vice versa. 

If books which artfully combine the two genres are not only popular but also benefit both genres, what is the point of trying to separate the genres in the first place? The distinction between the genres doesn’t have to come from experts who, after painstaking research, work out careful definitions of each genre. I think that the benefit is ultimately for the readers. When someone is out looking for a good science fiction read, they have some expectations based upon their current experience with the genre. Perhaps they’ve read a good book about life on a futuristic space station, and want more (the same applies for people who like to read, and want to keep reading, fantasy). In other words, the technical differences between the genres don’t really matter (in fact, they may or may not exist in some situations). It’s what the genres mean for the reader, which can sometimes be very personal definitions, which matter.