Odd Comic Couple; Science-Fiction and Fantasy

Notes from New Sodom: The Marriage(s) of Science Fiction / Fantasy
December 2nd, 2009 by Hal Duncan
The Great Debate

“The question of whether a certain story of imagination is a fantasy or a science fiction work would depend upon the device the author uses to explain his projected or unreal world. If he uses the gimmick or device of saying: ‘This is a logical or probable assumption based upon known science, which is going to develop from known science or from investigations of areas not yet quite explored but suspected,’ then one could call it science fiction. But if he asks the reader to suspend his disbelief simply because of the fun of it, in other words, just to say: ‘Here is a fairy tale I’m going to tell you,’ then it is fantasy. It could actually be the same story.”
Sam J. Lundwall
Down in the ghetto of Genre, in the SF Café that is our literary salon, in this scene of zines and forums, conventions and clubs, there’s a Great Debate that kicks off every so often. The diversity of the clientele maps to a diversity of opinions — convictions, even — and few of these are as contentious as those addressing the differences or lack thereof between science fiction and fantasy. To be fair, the taxonomy of literary genres is a game that appeals to the geek in me as much as anyone, but the diversity we’re dealing with in the SF Café is obscured by the very word genre, its meaning muddled by a conflation of openly-defined aesthetic idioms with conventional forms that are closely-defined and marketing categories that are all but empty of definition.

There’s genre and there’s genre.

Across the city of Writing — and in the SF Café most of all perhaps — we’ve forgotten that the word genre derives from the Latin generis, meaning family, that if a genre is a family of fiction, then a work can be a member of that family by marriage or adoption as much as by birth. Aesthetic idioms are constantly reshaped by writers marrying one technique with another, adopting unfamiliar aims, methods born in other idioms entirely. This is genre as one big open clan. I’ve joked that being a “Celt” is actually fuck-all to do with birth; all you have to do is drink with a Celt, and that’s you initiated into the clan whether you like it or not. It’s like Richard Harris becoming Sioux in A Man Called Horse, only less painful than hanging by your nipples. (Although the hangover the next day…)
But then there’s genre. Buying into a bullshit of blood-lines, many are proud of the traits inherited with the tartan — so proud of their clan name they’ve forgotten that family can be openly defined, that the in-laws with different names are still family if we accept them as such. For certain feuding factions indeed that very notion is anathema. The clan name is everything, and a pox on any cur who slights it. Any pure-bred work of Science Fiction (or as they will call it, science fiction) is entirely unrelated, they’ll insist, to that damnable Fantasy (or as they will call it, fantasy). There’s Campbells and MacDonalds, and ne’er the twain shall meet.

But all we really have, others will say, is a tartan of a marketing category with an empty definition. The presentation of this stuff as a genre of Science Fiction is just bagpipes-and-haggis branding. In truth, it’s an open idiom, a genre of works which may be in various genres, an extended family of fictions better described as Hard SF, Space Opera, Cyberpunk, Technothriller, and so on. Fantasy is in the same position, a tartan label slapped on a box containing the closely-defined forms of Epic Fantasy, Swords & Sorcery, Urban Fantasy, Paranormal Romance, etc..
http://www.bscreview.com/2009/12/notes-from-new-sodom-the-marriages-of-science-f...

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