Philip Marchand: How Fantasy Took Over Science Fiction

"Harry Potter rules. The unflagging energy of his creator, J.K. Rowling, writing volume after volume, sustains this phenomenon. The success of the latest movie version, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, confirms it.

On the whole, Potter’s seems a benign rule. Educators, publishers, literati are reassured by the success of the Potter books that young people, even in their media-saturated, video-game-enhanced existences, can still read if they feel like it. Critics have generally been respectful of Rowling’s literary achievement. Perhaps the only fervent objectors have been religious fundamentalists who take wizardry and magic seriously, as the handiwork of the Evil One.

You don’t have to be a fundamentalist, however, to wonder what this triumph of fantasy in our popular culture portends. An atheist such as W.P. Kinsella ignores his own core beliefs and practically makes a living out of a sub-genre of fantasy, i.e. baseball fantasy. He has never lacked for a readership.

One effect of this triumph seems to be the increasing presence of fantasy, or elements of fantasy, in works of science fiction, a genre traditionally opposed to magic and even to such folk-scientific phenomena as UFOs. In a way, the trend to fantasy is not due simply to its superior commercial appeal, as demonstrated by the Potter books, and by Kinsella, but also to developments in science itself. “We have reached the point where contemporary science is so far out, to most people it is indistinguishable from magic,” comments well-known Canadian science fiction novelist Robert J. Sawyer. “The notion, for example, that black holes might provide not only links between space but links to time is grounded in current theoretical thinking.”

The recent movie Star Trek is a case in point. The latest movie version is much more space opera than science fiction. It even features a sword fight between the good guys and the Romulans. What really marks the movie as more fantasy than science fiction, however, is its use of our old friend time travel. As Sawyer admits, it’s very hard to avoid using the device these days — he has used time travel, although with gritted teeth, and with a certain scrupulosity. “We pay attention to what physicists actually know,” he says of himself and his sci-fi colleagues. “We don’t wield it like a magic wand.”

A striking example is the 1985 novel Contact by the late astronomer Carl Sagan. There was no more dedicated anti-supernaturalist than Carl Sagan. The fervour with which he speculated about black holes, however, left the suspicion that these phenomena were, to him, the equivalent of magic doors in fantasyland. The suspicion was confirmed by the novel and the movie made from it, in which the heroine, played by Jodie Foster, voyages into space and ends up, literally, in another realm, where her deceased father apparently resides.

It was a striking example of the kind of wish-fulfillment Sawyer maintains is characteristic of fantasy and magic, as opposed to the devices of science fiction. (Ray Kinsella playing catch with his dead father at the end of Field of Dreams is classic wish-fulfillment.) It is hard, evidently, to avoid such wish-fulfillment. Somebody like Sagan throws traditional, religious otherworldliness out the front door, and it comes knocking at the back window."