What We're On About: Genre (In)Distinctions in SF/F Literature

Welcome to the official blog of Speculative Fiction Studies!  Here's what that means for you, gentle reader:

The forty-eight students (and one fellow faculty member) whose writing makes up the December 2014  block of postings are the proud and oft-befuddled members of my two Speculative Fiction Studies classes at The Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy.  All of them seniors, all of them self-professed lovers of sf/f (or at least sufficiently curious about it to endure a semester of play in the genres), they spent eighteen weeks reading from H.G. Wells to William Gibson; from H.P. Lovecraft to James Tiptree; Jr., from Asimov to Zelazny and back to Beagle and Tolkien and uncounted points between.  They used their knowledge of STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math) to identify ideas for their own hard or soft sf worlds and write stories set within them.  They learned sf history from the Gernsback Ghetto's earliest days.  They read literary theory from Samuel R. Delany and Ursula Le Guin.  And yes, they do know that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic -- and, in fact, they know that to a certain way of thinking, this is exactly the problem with genres and labels. 

Their challenge, as a final assignment for the term and a final tribute to the sf/f reader culture, was to compose a blog post where they take on the question raised by a very important person (at least, to my mind):  associate literary agent Bridget Smith of Dunham Literary, Inc. 

I have the honor of being Bridget's client, so getting my students in touch with an avid reader of sf/f and who is also professional working in publishing seemed only natural.  I asked her to compose a question to which she really wanted an articulate, well-read answer.  Then, because I'm perhaps a bit of a sadist, I tasked my students with giving her just such an answer.  Frankly, Bridget hit them with a real doozy, the water-cooler center of so much of fandom and its debates:

Since science fiction can include wholly invented alien lifeforms, fantasy uses scientific theories to explain story elements, and superheroes derive supernatural powers from pseudoscientific origins, how can we draw the line between fantasy and science fiction? What’s the value of making that distinction?

You may notice me commenting on their posts in critical fashion -- that's just part of my job, I'm afraid.  I encourage you to comment on their work as you see fit. . . but remember these are students, bright and well-intentioned, and they deserve our best treatment.

Best regards,
Tracy Townsend

Tariq Sachleben: "CATS!!! Or Why _Lord of Light_ Isn't Categorically Ambiguous"

CATS!!!

Or

Why Lord of Light isn't Categorically Ambiguous

By Tariq Sachleben

I promised you guys a cat, so I'll go ahead start with one.

… maybe that’s a pop-tart. Maybe it's both. (It's probably both, and you'll likely want to consider its feline attributes before making any decisions that could impact it.)

Similar ambiguity is often seen with the placement of Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light into either Fantasy or Science Fiction. I appreciate the title of Jo Walton's editorial: "Fantasy disguised as science fiction disguised as fantasy: Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light" (full article available here). As Walton points out, Lord of Light's "gods" serve as the primary rubbing point between the two genres as their abilities are comprised of both Science Fictional (ie technological or rational) and Fantastical (ie superstitious or magical) elements. To contribute my two cents to the issue, the gods' underpinnings are entirely logical and within the treatment of Science Fiction, however the leap of faith required to accept those rationale is larger than typical and more closely approximates Fantasy. This dissonance seems to irritate Walton.

One could probably make an analogy between our two misfits, the Nyan Cat and Lord of Light, assuming "cat" is replaced by "Fantasy" and "pop-tart" by "Science Fiction" for the book. However, I'm at the point in my argument where any analogy would break down. Why? Because I find the earlier dissonance unnecessary due to the fact that I see Fantasy as an extension to the Hard-Soft scale of Science Fiction. My reasoning is straightforward: while the Hard-Soft scale is typically defined by the amount of exposition that is dedicated to explaining plot elements, a congruent metric is the number of assumptions needed by a reader to accept a given plot. If my logical inversion is unclear, consider that lots of well written Hard Science Fiction doesn't age well. Using the common definition, the best explanations that can be given are to say that the exposition isn't relevant to modern audiences or that the author's conclusions are faulty given modern knowledge.  I don't find these reasons compelling in this form, as they fail to explain why Hard Science Fiction can be valid and still fail to engage its audience. Using the assumption based definition, we can strengthen the second statement to say that with the passage of time, an author's rationale can become faulty, irrelevant, or trivial due to its logical grounding, making it difficult, if not impossible for a modern audience to engage with the story.

Then by what mechanism does Fantasy work into this? Good question, dear reader. It is possible to quantify the assumptions necessary for a piece of Fantasy to be believable. To generalize in a word - lots. So many in fact, the story becomes impossible in the Given World. At first glance this would appear to put works of fantasy at the very, very soft end of the scale. However, I would argue that fantasy stories go beyond the limits of the Hard-Soft scale (and, yes, I do see the Hard-Soft scale as finite). Allow me to introduce the Rational-Fantastical scale of Speculative Fiction. (Back to why the Nyan Cat analogy doesn't work, a similar chain of logic would imply that cats and pop-tarts are categorically equivalent!)

Of course, there is now the issue of where to draw lines between the different subgenres. Hard Science Fiction vs Soft Science Fiction is trivial: who knows? The distinction was blurry to start with and it remains blurry still! Similarly, the divide between Soft Science Fiction and Fantasy is nearly indistinguishable, but due to a different cause. To understand the reasoning, you need to understand what I call the Theory of Fantastical Relativity. Due to people having different experiences (by the theorem of "Duh!"), where one sees the difference between rationally vague and entirely fantastical can fluctuate widely. This makes the divide hard to pin down. One example of a piece of literature that seems to exist firmly in the transitional region is the comic book X-Men. "Genetic mutations" is the given rationale for characters' powers, however not everyone is willing to accept this at face-value. Any scientist will inform you that while genetic mutations are incapable of causing the transformations shown in the comic, they will likely give you cancer; the average reader of X-Men probably doesn't care. As for the divide between High and Low Fantasy, I would say it still exists, and that the extended scale suggests that a similar divide exists within Science Fiction.

To quickly tie things back together, Lord of Light exists within the same border zone as X-Men. While its treatment is closer to the style of most Soft Science Fiction, its rationale can float either way. Now, unfortunately word count limitations prevent any further discourse, but before I go …

 … I thought you could do with another cat.