Yash Thacker: "The Tightrope of Speculative Fiction Classification"

The Tightrope of Speculative Fiction Classification

By

Yash Thacker

Orson Scott Card, the author of Enders Game, has had experience with writing in both, fantasy and science fiction genres once said, “Science Fiction has rivets, fantasy has trees. That’s it, that's all the difference there is, the difference of feel, perception.” This is a clear depiction of the difference between Science Fiction and Fantasy. While fantasy tends to ignore scientific basis of things that occur in the story, and just state a broad topic, where as in science fiction authors tend provide significant scientific details as to why something can occur. However, there are still times where fantasy may use scientific theories, and some parts of science fiction stories may seem fantastical, this is where Orson’s point about perspective comes into play. The perspective in which the story takes place, and looking at how the author presents the story. They may present it in a scientific manner or in a vague manner where the reader just accepts whatever is occurring using this you can determine if the story is a fantasy or a science fiction.

Looking at The Last Unicorn for example, the perspective in which this story is told is very fantasy like. The unicorn is introduced as majestic and magical creature, “Unicorns are immortal… knowing themselves to be the most beautiful creatures in all the world, and magic besides.” However, other than this we get no explanation as to where this unicorn comes from or how she came to be there, later in the story *SPOILER ALERT* she is turned into a human and we get no sense behind the logic of how this occurs, it just happens. This is a characteristic of fantasy, where there is no logical perspective taken, the author just has the reader entrust that this magical world exists and magicians, unicorns, harpies have supernatural powers that others in the world also accept.

In contrast, when we read stories such as, Rossum's Universal Robots (R.U.R) we use “scientific” words and descriptions about the creation of the humanoid robots. When Domin explains how the humanoid robots are made he says, “Then? Then it was a question of taking life out of the test tube, speeding up its development, shaping some of the organs, bones, nerves, and whatnot, and finding certain substances, catalysts, enzymes, hormones, etcetera; in short, do you understand?” Then he goes on to talk about the processes that lead them to the achievement of recreating emotionless robots. Here we see how the author takes time to develop a background for the reader so that they are able to understand what is occurring in the story as well as, get a logical basis of how this could actually occur if the technology was feasible.

In some cases, where alien or foreign (out of this world) objects/organisms interact with humans; this is where you tread the line between fantasy and science fiction. This can be seen in the short story The Colour Out of Space. In this story, the author’s presentation of the “alien” could have led to the story to be classified differently than it was. In the actual story, the author provides a bit of scientific background on the “alien” and therefore this is classified as science fiction. However, if he had taken a different approach and hadn’t provided a scientific background behind an “alien” and just said it had supernatural powers then this would be classified as fantasy. 

As you can see, classifying a story either in the genre of fantasy or science fiction requires you to not only look at the prominence of science within a story, but it also requires looking at the way the author has presented the information to the reader.