Science Fiction vs Fantasy
A couple of months ago I talked to some people who claimed to be from a "Sonic Eclectic Magaizne". they did have a website, and said that they were interested in articles about contemporary art and entertainment. I offered my.... "experience" in reading and science fiction movies. One of the guys mentioned Avatar, and asked if I could write an article about that. I answered that since I had not seen it, no, but I could write an article on science fiction in general.A deal of sorts was hammered out; my article would be shown on their website if I could get it to them in a week. I would not be paid, but I figured that this might be a good start.
Sadly it all came to naught. I have not heard from them for several weeks now, and I've kept checking their site but my article has never appeared.
Ah well. I guess that's the hazard of meeting people via Craigslist.
I thought it was an OK article, so I'm putting it up here. A Brief Look at Science Fiction and Fantasy
In the last century or so fiction has given rise to two leviathan genres that stride the world of literature to this very day. One is home to visions of the future: Lasers, Hyperdrive, Warp Factors, Robots, and alien creatures. The other gazes at the past, with sorcery, demons, swords, and chain mail. Yet, for all their differences, so-called science fiction and fantasy have influenced each other since their inception, and today it is sometimes impossible to distinguish the two, perhaps not in setting; but, if one were to strip away such things as techno-babble and wizard’s incantations, I believe that the themes, the archetypes, the goals and characters would be very similar, if not one single collection. A look at my bookshelf, then. I see such works of high fantasy as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Vance’s Tales of the Dying Earth, Salvatore’s Spear Wielder’s Tale, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Marx’s Capital sitting alongside visions of the future: Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984, and Well’s War of the Worlds.
What, you may ask, do these works have in common? How could such things as warp drive and galactic conquest possibly compare to unicorns, centaurs, and warring kingdoms?
Consider, if you will; are not the results and goals of Mordor and Oceania alike, if only differing in their faceless soldiers, their rules, their monarchs? Vance’s work may not be very well known today, but his characters, -driven to wander upon their dying world according to their own temperaments and goals- could be herded onto starships and set to drift amongst the stars and unknown planets. The story of Scalzi’s soldiers could easily be placed amongst human knights in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, if only for a moment one forgot the use of nanotech and scatterguns instead of bows and laces.
Consider the type of enemies most common to both genres. In fantasy the hero calls upon the powers of good and law to smite demons; In science fiction bug-like aliens are often the threat against which the military hero much wage war upon. Both are inhuman, both are (from our perspective) irredeemably evil, and both are encountered in huge numbers of individual-less swarms.
John Steakly's Armor fends off a group of bugs whilst a paladin delves into the depths of hell itself.
Of course, these stories are their own not just because of their characters but their settings and tools as well. Where would Aragorn be without Narsil to wield, Gandalf to advise, and Frodo with The One Ring to defend? Still, though the methods and tools differ, the themes; of a humble or even lone hero standing against all odds, coming through at last to final victory, the tools; strange, mysterious weapons and unknown artifacts, are the same. But, the reason the genres share so much is that modern fantasy and science fiction were, in fact, indistinguishable from each other in their early days.
Mary Shelly's Frankenstein uses a combination of necromancy and mad science to create the titular golem-esque monster. Like many myths of renegade sorcerers Frankenstein's monster runs amok, killing his loved ones before they destroy each other in an almost mythical suicide pact. The Time Machine created the time traveler concept, but also combined a Utopian society with a strange race of semi-humans. Jekyll and Hyde again used the mad scientist concept, but combined it with a sort of ying/yang idea, the concept of light versus dark in battle for a man's soul, itself an ages old religious and mythical concept. HP Lovecraft came a bit later than Verne and Wells, but he also drew upon science fiction and fantasy in his most well known collection, The Call of Cthulu.
All of these titles in the late 19th and early 20th century combined elements of what we now know as separate science fiction and fantasy, but to the writers of the time there was no such distinction. If one wanted to write “escapist fiction” in 1901, one had only the nascent concept of “Scientific Romance”, which was the term used for such stories in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. The success of such early writers spawned a number of magazines and publications, particularly in America, from which many people sent their own outlandish stories, which ranged from galactic conquest to robotic utopias. Such writers as Heinlein and Asimov began here, and Science Fiction began to multiply and expand as a genre.
It was in this vein that Robert Howard broke the mode with his swords and sorcery series Conan the Barbarian. The titular warrior, ...”Conan the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet...” was a complete subversion of the heroic myths that came before it. He was a wandering swordsman, strong in muscle, fairly intelligent, but not an academic. He was a womanizer, a drinker, a boisterous loudmouth full of himself. He was not some goody-two shoes out to save the world, but a gritty, blood-soaked barbarian, determined to have as much of a good time as he could in this world.
This work of Swords and Sorcery laid the groundwork for later fantasy authors such as Tolkien or Vance. Tolkien himself further divided fantasy from science fiction, creating a subgenre of swords and sorcery that is known today as High Fantasy, consisting of epic battles between good and evil, wizards, lost kings and empires. From Tolkien the genre of fantasy has entered a golden era, which I for one, believe lasts to this very day, in Salvatore, Dungeons and Dragons, George Martin, and World of Warcraft.
Science Fiction has also evolved, coming into several sub-genres of military, hard, soft, and utopian fiction. All make guesses at how mankind will evolve over the years and deal with futuristic concepts.
So today they are now two different, yet similar genres of writing; both use modern concepts and then expand them to include futuristic or historical viewpoints, both have outlandish stories, tools, and heroes, and both are well-loved today in literature, and will continue to be for many years to come.