Views from Crestmont Drive

The distinctions I suggested yesterday aren’t prescriptions; they’re characterizations or descriptions. In the broad field of SF and fantasy literature, there are deep-seated conventions about whether a given story is SF or fantasy (or horror), depending on its topic. Many topics are obvious: Witches? Fantasy. Space travel? SF. Of course there are gray areas (and sometimes they are most interesting stories), but the vast majority of published novels and stories are easily categorizable.

Most of the items I list as ‘supernatural phenomena’, were they to be subjects of a story in the sf/f genres, would automatically classify their stories as fantasy. Ghosts, angels, witches, demons, gods. There are crossovers; SF that imagines ‘gods’ as non-supernatural beings; even SF that tries to justify ideas like souls or telepathy. And there’s fantasy that is rigorous, in a scientific manner, about how ‘rules of fantasy’ e.g. are manifest.

(I gather however that there various flavors of Christian fiction, and no doubt analogous traditions of literature in other cultures, that assume that guardian angels and demons, not to mention Jesus and God, are in fact real, but let’s not go there just now. Such genres have no overlap with the speculative genres of SF, fantasy, and horror.)

Again, not every ‘supernatural’ phenomenon in my list is automatically fantasy. SF has a long history of taking various ‘pseudo-scientific’ phenomena, such as telepathy and telekinesis, more or less seriously. The hardest of hard SF magazines in the 1950s, Astounding (renamed Analog in the 1960s), gained a rather perverse reputation for taking such notions very seriously, both in fiction and in ‘fact articles’. (Dianetics was one such hobbyhorse of editor John W. Campbell for some years, before L. Ron Hubbard re-named it scientology.)

And to this day, a certain strain of SF, especially movie and TV SF, routinely depicts various extrasensory powers, from Spock’s “mind meld” to Star Wars’ “force” [which it must be said is so flagrantly supernatural it qualifies the movies as fantasy], as givens in their futuristic settings.

Whether particular SF stories take such notions seriously might be a marker between ‘hard SF’ and more credulous ‘space opera’ strains (like Star Trek). There are many flavors of space opera, from those that are routine adventures translated into space, from those that are more rigorous yet presume the existence of, say, faster-than-light space travel, despite there currently being no plausible justification given our understanding of physics.

It would be interesting to collect some hard data, e.g. subjects of stories in anthologies explicitly labeled science fiction or fantasy, as evidence about what the community thinks is possible, or not.

I keep thinking about my Provisional Conclusions, how they might be streamlined or crystallized, and how they relate (as I’ve alluded more than once in this blog) to the insights provided by the fields of fantastic fiction — science fiction, fantasy, and horror. At first glance it might seem a stretch to apply any kind of general worldview onto a set of literary genres. But it’s been an underlying thesis of this blog — and perhaps a central, distinctive, theme of whatever book I might write — that these genres do in fact reflect the range of human reactions to living in a big scary universe that does not necessarily reflect human values.

The two core provisional conclusions are the first two: all supernatural phenomena (gods, ghosts, messiahs, sin, etc etc) are projections of human nature on an indifferent, inanimate universe; and that the *real* universe is vast in ways almost incomprehensible to human beings, for reasons quite understandable given that human beings have emerged via biological natural selection, given to subjective interpretations of reality that are advantageous to survival, and not necessarily for perception of reality.

So: what is science fiction? Science Fiction is about the exploration of reality, of changes in science and technology that affect human existence, of alternatives to reality that challenge humanity’s assumptions of what is real. What is fantasy? Fantasy, in converse to SF, is about imagining worlds in which the priorities of human nature are *magnified*. And horror is a weird hybrid, a sort of flip of SF, in which the perception of the real world in some way threatens human existence, either personally (the serial killer) or existentially (Lovecraftian dread).

These are very first-drafty thoughts. I need to revisit the many definitions and discussion of these genres, in my many resources, and continue to refine.