Genre Conventions: What is fantasy?

[barsoomcore]

SF is about the question, "Who am I?", "Who are we?", "What does it mean to be human?", and the method it employs is to speculate who we would be if we weren't who we are or who we would be (and what we would do) if we were someplace completely outside our ordinary experience.

Well said. I agree completely with this definition, and it's basically what I was trying to say in my post.

Note that you've not so much convinced me as come to the same conclusion I (and my lovely and talented wife) have come to independently. We've been discussing this at some length for a while, so it was interesting to discover this conversation and see where thoughts were going.

many of the major themes of Star Wars aren't fantastic at all. The politics, for example, the societal models, the level of tolerance among alien species...

So what? The point is that Lucas is NOT considering the question of identity by speculating on who we might be if we were someplace completely outside our ordinary experience. Star Wars is fantasy. It can have all the mundane themes it wants.

Put it another way -- in order to tell the story of Star Wars as the tale of how a young page came to sit at the Round Table, all you need to do is change the names and a few nouns. You would lose nothing that was essential to the tale itself. It's fantasy.

(I'm using Star Wars here to refer to the movie I saw when I was nine -- it was called Star Wars. They've changed it's title since then, but I'm stubborn that way.)

Try translating the story of Case from Neuromancer into an Arthurian tale. Or Dave Bowman's journey in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Not so easy, is it, and I'm willing to bet that if you DID find a way, you'd lose either something essential to the story itself, or to the nature of Arthurian fantasy.

disagree that fantasy has to be about power, whether metaphorically, symbolically, allegorically or any other way. Perhaps because I see metaphor, symbol, allegory and so on as being relatively recent ways of authoring and dealing with texts...

Can you provide a little more detail here on how you see literary devices as being "relatively recent"? Are you suggesting that, say, Homer, does not employ such devices? Or are you using the term "text" to refer to more than just graphical representations, and considering the entire oral tradition of storytelling that goes back who knows how long?

In either case, I think you're on shaky ground to assert that metaphor is a RECENT methodology, and reject its use thereby. Central to Celebrim's definition quoted above is the assumption that the writer will be using some sort of metaphor (another planet, an alien race, whatever) in order to represent some sort of altered circumstance that affects the human condition. Perhaps you don't want to suggest that such things need be metaphors?

But to return to our previous example, the original film Star Wars is absolutely about individual power. It is about a young man who, powerless at the start of the film, comes to learn his own power and how to employ it. It is every bit as much a fantasy as is The Lord Of The Rings.

Fantasy stories employ a metaphorical representation of power and demonstrate ideas about the individual's relationship to that power. The Ring, the Grail, Ningauble's cave, the priests of the Black Circle, the Great Wheel of Dragaera, the Dominator, Phedre's sexual irresistibility... I think this is the unique quality that fantasy stories provide, the type of story they alone are able to tell.

Dannyalcatraz: if you're asserting that Gibson isn't speculating on who we might be if we were someplace completely outside our ordinary experience, I don't know what to say. I think that's the central theme of all his works -- discussing the very nature of the human experience and how our relationship with technology alters it. From Neuromancer to Virtual Light to Pattern Recognition, I think it's clear this is EXACTLY what he's talking about. I don't know exactly what you mean by "focuses on the individual" but it's certainly of no import as far as classifying the stories as to whether or not there's plenty of description of one person's point of view.

Dream Park is "barely" SF. You MIGHT be able to extract some sort of vague discussion of identity through unfamiliar situations from it, if you wanted to give it more credit than it really deserves. It's also "barely" a fantasy (you could probably argue that the hero (or maybe the GM?) is used to explore a relationship with power, represented through the game itself) but really, Dream Park is a thriller with technological trappings (which are used to explain the fantastic setting of the story (which is used to provide "coolness")).

You seem to want a definition that will allow you to easily find SF or fantasy stories on a bookshelf. I agree with you that "setting-based" definitions are better for that purpose.

But I find Celebrim's and Wayside's ideas much more INTERESTING. They're discussing the nature of the stories themselves, and searching for the essential components of those stories to determine if there is a kind of SF or fantasy story that cannot be told in any other classification. Using them, you'll often find that stories you consider one form are stored at the bookshelf in another form's space, but that doesn't invalidate the usefulness of the definitions themselves.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

1) Interesting ≠ Better or more accurate or even useful.

2) I agree that damn near the entirety of Gibson's output is about the "What does it mean to be conisdered a human being" since his and many other cyberpunk writers focus on AI. I'm a little puzzled about how you came to think I felt otherwise.

So what? The point is that Lucas is NOT considering the question of identity by speculating on who we might be if we were someplace completely outside our ordinary experience. Star Wars is fantasy. It can have all the mundane themes it wants.

Put it another way -- in order to tell the story of Star Wars as the tale of how a young page came to sit at the Round Table, all you need to do is change the names and a few nouns. You would lose nothing that was essential to the tale itself. It's fantasy.

3) A) Answering that question is not an inherent or neccisary feature of Sci-Fi. Going back to the earliest writings of Verne and Wells, as well as the pulp sci-fi of the 40's-60's, sometimes Sci-fi was about themes like humanity's manifest destiny to rule the universe, exploring the void and conquering the unknown, recasting the cold war and other conflicts in sci-fi terms or otherwise dealing with Amerian isolationism in a non-political, generally discounted genre (remember the threat of McCarthyism and how it wrecked both movies and comic books). That is a theme that has not evaporated. Take Niven's "Neutron Star" (1966), a story about answering the question- "How and why was the crew of a state of the art starship turned into pulp?" No questions of deep moral significance- just a mystery. Or CJ Cherryh's Foreigner series, in which humanity does not adapt to the aliens, except one man who is the intermediary between the 2 cultures. Largely, the series is political, almost Machiavellian in its intrigues-that aliens & humans are both sentient beings with internal states ("human") is taken as given.

And even so, there IS revelation: "Who am I" - Luke: the son of the 2nd most powerful man in the Empire, brother to the Princess, and a warrior of extreme power; Leia: Force sensitive at the very least, possibly a proto-jedi. "What does it mean to be human?"- there is a standing assumption that aliens are no different from humans in the sense of being sentient beings with internal states- equal to us in all ways, including our capacity for "inhuman" behavior. Despite their morphologies, they are all "humans."

You might say that this is a typical fantasy theme- the hidden royal, etc. Sure. Goes back to Oedipus at the very least. But if an ancient Greek legend can ask and answer "Who Am I?", then clearly, it cannot be the exclusive purview of Sci-Fi. If the child's fantasy "Pinnochio" can ask "What does it mean to be human?" then it isn't exclusive to Sci-fi.

In other words, Star Wars DOES answer those kinds of questions, even though it doesn't have to.

But to return to our previous example, the original film Star Wars is absolutely about individual power. It is about a young man who, powerless at the start of the film, comes to learn his own power and how to employ it. It is every bit as much a fantasy as is The Lord Of The Rings.

As is the Battlefield Earth series of books. Sci-Fi or Fantasy? (My sources cite it as Space Opera.) As is Greg Bear's classic Forge of God/Anvil of Stars series in which Earth is destroyed, and still humanity gets its revenge...Fantasy or Sci-Fi? Not only is it sci-fi, its considered HARD sci-fi. Stephen Donaldson's Gap series is also Hard Sci-Fi, and contains not only the Nature of Humanity question, but is also a great deal about acquisiton of personal power.

3) B) By comparing Star Wars to Arthurian Legend is to get off to a bad start- you're shoehorning it into flawed comparisons and weakening your assertion that it is fantasy. Its well documented that Star Wars is based in an Eastern storytelling tradition: The original story's main inspiration is Akira Kurosawa's "jidai-geki" samurai drama Hidden Fortress ("The episodic story was, of course, eventually borrowed by George Lucas for both the initial plot of Star Wars and the revived Princess Amidala-centered narrative of The Phantom Menace."- [URL="http://www.criterionco.com/asp/release.asp?id=116&eid=125&section=essay]Click this link[/URL] ). How does this become fantasy when the "jidai-geki" genre is, essentially, historical fiction set in Japan's feudal era, Samurai period-piece dramas. The Force is an expansion on the concept of Chi- which I'm sure Japanese would defend as not magic, but a different and scientific (at least in the sense of being able to be systematically taught) understanding of humans' power over their bodies. Yes, its taken over the top as far as reality goes, but its congruent with Shao-Lin legends, and could be considered poetic license, or even as Lucas himself suggested, an extrapolation of a deeper understanding of Chi. Viewed Lucas' way, The Force is no more Fantasy than FTL.

To my mind, calling the Force purely fantasy is to ignore the expressed view of the auteur who GAVE it to us. Overruling the view of the originator should take EXTREMELY convincing proof.

4) Dream Park/Barsoom Project/California Voodoo Game. Clearly a sci-fi mystery series. The fantasy elements spring ENTIRELY from the high-tech enabled LARPG/Sport. Its like being on Star Trek TNG's Holodeck.

 

[Wayside]

So what? The point is that Lucas is NOT considering the question of identity by speculating on who we might be if we were someplace completely outside our ordinary experience. Star Wars is fantasy. It can have all the mundane themes it wants.

Okay, but I'm not sure what this has to do with my response. You say that the moral and cultural biases of Star Wars and LotR are "mundane themes," I say no, they're good candidates for defining science fiction and fantasy in terms of something other than imagery. You say that science fiction is about identity, which I don't buy. Most good literature is about identity (or power) in one form or another, yet most good literature is not science fiction. Fantasy can just as well be about identity, and science fiction can just as well be about power. I think you'd be better off arguing that the problem of identity, for which the problem of power is one hypostasis (or vice versa), underlies both science fiction and fantasy, and that the two differ in the quality of their response to this problem.

Put it another way -- in order to tell the story of Star Wars as the tale of how a young page came to sit at the Round Table, all you need to do is change the names and a few nouns. You would lose nothing that was essential to the tale itself. It's fantasy.

I have to disagree, not least because the Round Table, as I mentioned with reference to LotR earlier, is about white European males, monarchy and so on--the villain of Star Wars, in other words. It's also tied up with a host of Christian narratives that have no basis in Star Wars. I suppose that what I'm resistant to here is the sort of pure classification some people want out of this discussion: I don't think we're likely to find pure science fiction or pure fantasy, so while I can agree that Star Wars certainly has elements, strong elements even, of fantasy, I still see elements of science fiction as well, and I think it's a very borderline story that isn't mostly one or the other (which is perhaps one reason for its success).

Try translating the story of Case from Neuromancer into an Arthurian tale. Or Dave Bowman's journey in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Not so easy, is it, and I'm willing to bet that if you DID find a way, you'd lose either something essential to the story itself, or to the nature of Arthurian fantasy.

I doubt these would be any more translatable than Star Wars is, though I haven't read them so I couldn't say for sure.

Can you provide a little more detail here on how you see literary devices as being "relatively recent"? Are you suggesting that, say, Homer, does not employ such devices? Or are you using the term "text" to refer to more than just graphical representations, and considering the entire oral tradition of storytelling that goes back who knows how long?

I'm suggesting that there's an enormous gap between a classical commentary on Homer and a contemporary one, sure. I don't know how much I should say about the origin of many of the criticals tools we're ingrained with in highschool (which I think Joshua is absolutely right to distrust), since most of that sort of criticism comes to us by way of Christian commentaries on problematic scriptural texts like "The Song of Songs" and troublesome classical texts like Ovid's Heroides and the Ars Amatoria, as ways of making these(often pagan) texts conform to their unique needs as Christian readers. We got a little bit into Christian angles in one of the Star Wars threads in the movies forum and a moderator said knock it off, so maybe it is better to steer clear of the historical foundations of early twentieth-century literary methodology here.

I will say I don't dispute that the words "symbol" or "metaphor" have long histories--I assert that they have long and varied histories, in which time they have had very different meanings and been put to very different uses, much like the word "author." And I assert that as the practice of literary theory itself entered the modern era, these words were eroded in the classical sense you use them to the point that one could ask rhetorically "What is truth but a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms and anthropomorphisms?" The classical way of reading was by identity--how is this like something else? The modern way is by difference--how does this overthrow identity?

In either case, I think you're on shaky ground to assert that metaphor is a RECENT methodology, and reject its use thereby. Central to Celebrim's definition quoted above is the assumption that the writer will be using some sort of metaphor (another planet, an alien race, whatever) in order to represent some sort of altered circumstance that affects the human condition. Perhaps you don't want to suggest that such things need be metaphors?

Oh, I certainly think they aren't metaphors at all, or at least not in any meaningful sense. The concept of metaphor I am attacking, metaphor in the larger allegorical sense of a continuously manipulated parallel or stand-in (and not at the level of description, "her hair was white and soft like dandelions etc."), is one that has no value for me. I would be perfectly content to agree with you that fantasy is about power in this way, but then fantasy is automatically invalidated for me as something worth reading or thinking about. My angle in this thread has been one from charity; that is, I'm not particularly concerned with the popular reading of a work, or even with what its author may have intended. The question for me is: what is necessary to validate science fiction and fantasy as literature? The first part of the answer, naturally, is that we need to be able define them in some way. But the second part, which I have barely even groped toward, is that how we define them has not only to distinguish them from other legitimate narratives (even if I were to accept power and identity, these are not distinguishing features of science fiction or fantasy), but to distinguish them in a way that maintains their legitimacy as science fiction or fantasy (and not other narratives they might contain), which the imagery/setting approach does not do.

But to return to our previous example, the original film Star Wars is absolutely about individual power. It is about a young man who, powerless at the start of the film, comes to learn his own power and how to employ it. It is every bit as much a fantasy as is The Lord Of The Rings.

Absolutely? I don't think so. It's too easy to make everything about power. There are always forces in play, but the idea of power itself is already a metaphor for force or, better yet, one of force's hypostases. I could say Star Wars is about a number of things that you might try to reduce to power--it is this reduction I resist, the reduction of all events to narrative types, of all objects to symbols, of all forces to powers or even of all acts to forces. The weakness of this approach is one of the reasons myth criticism died under its own weight even while it was poised to be the next big thing in America c.1950. This is also why I resist the very idea of genre, and even while considering it here, resist reducing something like Star Wars definitively to one genre. It's sort of like calling Anakin a whiny brat: yes, he's that...sometimes. But that isn't the whole story.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Not to put too fine a point on it, A LOT of modern non- sci-fi, non-fantasy Japanese Fiction- the very kind with which Kurosawa (whose Hidden Fortress was Lucas' starting line for Star Wars) would have been familiar- is about self-discovery, and going from power to powerlessness, and vice versa. Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, Shuaku Endo, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Soseki Matsume, Junichiro Tanizaki all explore such themes as some in this thread would ascribe to fantasy or sci-fi.

Why? Something about a warrior tradition that Japanese culture seeped in for 100's of years that evaporated in a couple of mushroom clouds.

Since then, those and other Japanese novelists have explored what it means to be powerless in contrast to former greatness, how the powerless claim or reclaim power, how one can gain or regain honor and status in a warrior culture suddenly reduced to a nation of merchants- figuratevely castrated by high-tech gaijin.

In 1970, Mishima took his obsession with Japan's warrior culture to the point of committing seppuku on national TV (he and some of his "followers" had captured the station) at age 45, all because he so deeply felt the post-WW2 powerlessness of his country.

All this without being fantasy or sci-fi, just fiction.

In fact, many great novels explore issues of power, issues of self-discovery, and what it means to be truly human: The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, Deliverance, Heart of Darkness, Grapes of Wrath, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, Crime and Punishment, All Quiet on the Western Front.

Does this make them fantasy? Does this make them sci-fi? Clearly not.

Thus, since a story that addresses isssues of power isn't neccessarily fantasy, and a story that asks and answers "Who Am I?" or "What does it mean to be human?" is by no means neccessarly sci-fi, those criteria cannot be used in any meaningful sense to distinguish those genres from others.

 

[barsoomcore]

Wayside, Dannyalcatraz: I assume you are not both deliberately ignoring the definitions I have put forward, but I'm at a loss to understand why you are attacking definitions I never put forward.

To be clear -- I have not said (nor do I think) that SF is about identity, nor that fantasy is about power. Please, if we are going to continue this discussion, it is necessary that you read the (I think) very explicit definitions I have given.

(taken from Celebrim's post, which I quoted and stated my agreement with)

SF is about the question, "Who am I?", "Who are we?", "What does it mean to be human?", and the method it employs is to speculate who we would be if we weren't who we are or who we would be (and what we would do) if we were someplace completely outside our ordinary experience.

(from my post above)

Fantasy stories employ a metaphorical representation of power and demonstrate ideas about the individual's relationship to that power.

Please, I have no interest in defending arguments I haven't made. I apologize if I was unclear.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

SF is about the question, "Who am I?", "Who are we?", "What does it mean to be human?", and the method it employs is to speculate who we would be if we weren't who we are or who we would be (and what we would do) if we were someplace completely outside our ordinary experience.

Fantasy stories employ a metaphorical representation of power and demonstrate ideas about the individual's relationship to that power.

Perhaps I'm conflating your position with someone else's, perhaps I'm misunderstanding it...

But the quoted statement about SF IS about Identity, and the clause "is to speculate who we would be if we weren't who we are or who we would be if we were someplace completely outside our ordinary experience" is about...setting? So ID + Future Setting =SF? If so, then what distinguishes SF from other liturature that asks about identity is...setting.

And the quoted statement about fantasy is equally applicable to Japanese historical fiction set in the Feudal era. It is equally applicable to the Sci-Fi Epic Chung Kuo series by David Wingrove. Thus, it is not sufficient to distinguish fantasy from other literary forms.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Dannyalcatraz
BUT WAIT: Harry Turtledove's aforementioned Darkness books examine the very ground Ms. Frank lived upon in a fictionalized way. That's not the series' exclusive focus, but it is amply covered in the epic 6 book (3900+pgs) series.

And this is fantasy simply because it has magic, not even as a central story element? Shouldn't this be one of your exceptions, if you're approaching fantasy as a set of imagery?

No, Magic IS a central portion of the Darkness series. Turtledove transforms the Nazi slaughter of the Jews into a nation's bid for necromantic energy. The Manhattan Project becomes research on the deeper theories of magic within his world, and when understanding is realized, this fantasy world too sees cities destroyed from afar by the actions of but a few mages. The air-forces of the nations here are foul-tempered dragons with riders. The main weapon of choice is a "Stick"- essentially a magic ray gun, charged by mages, occasionally recharged by necromancy.

The series has 3900+ pages; events within it are relayed by a group of POV characters, one of whom is this world's equivalent of a Jew, and thus, hated, hunted and reviled by many. Her struggles to remain hidden are gripping, and even there, magic is involved.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Dannyalcatraz
And De Sade would be very intrigued by Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel series.

How so? They don't really seem comparable to me, just from looking these Kushiel books up, reading a chapter and so on. I don't claim to know them well by any means, so is there something particuarly Sadistic (in the literary sense) about them?

FYI: The two main characters are an ascetic monk-warrior (D&D terms Ftr/Monk Dagger specialist), and the courtesan he first guards and then falls in love with. She is much in demand because she is god-touched by the pain-loving fallen angel/diety Kushiel. About 1/2 to 2/3rds of the books' intimate scenes revolve around the giving of pleasure through pain.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Dannyalcatraz
To try to answer your bigger question: I have not personally seen a type of fictional literature that either sci-fi or fantasy HAVEN'T ventured into.

Thomas Mann's Faust, Joyce's Ulysses, Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot, Maurice Blanchot's Thomas the Obscure, Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge? It seems a little naive to say there's nothing genre fiction hasn't done. I don't need to be a big fan of the stuff to know it hasn't done what these books and many others have done. Or if you really believe there is some genre fiction that accomplishes what any of these books accomplish, I would be intensely interested in hearing about it. The only comparable example I have experience with is Dune, which is still a major cut down from the parody of Messianism in Ulysses, or the tragic elements of Faust.

As I said- I haven't read everything. Quoting myself (emphasis is new):

To try to answer your bigger question: I have not personally seen a type of fictional literature that either sci-fi or fantasy HAVEN'T ventured into. I'm not saying I've personally read everything, but within the scope of my own personal library of books and visual media...

I compared the body of sci-fi and fantasy of which I'm personally aware to the various GENRES I know of- not particular works, but genres of fiction. I also didn't say that they had equaled the efforts of masterpieces of other genres. But since you ask...

Certain books in Moorcock's Eternal Champion cycle includes a great deal of Joyceian stream of consciousness, at times more like Finnegans Wake than Uylsses. There are messianic and religious themes all through the cycle. In several arcs, the Eternal Champion dies to save others. And then again, he toys with the question of the nature of the Eternal Companion, and the Eternal Object- in turns a demon-inhabited black sword (Stormbringer, Mournblade and 1M others), the Runestaff, a Needle Gun and the Holy Grail. He toys with words and their meanings, sometimes radically.

I've not read Thomas Mann's Dr. Faustus. From reading a few synopses, it seems 1 part retelling of Goethe's Faust (man sells soul to devil) and 1 part political analysis of post-WW2 Germany. The Faust legend has been told and retold many times, and the form didn't even originate with Goethe. The recasting of real world events for the partial purpose of dissecting them has been done in many specultative fiction writers. Star Trek revisited the Cold War and Viet Nam. Most notably, Harry Turtledove has written many thousands of pages on fantasy versions of real world events- WW2 in both fantasy and sci-fi settings, several retellings of the Civil War, and even the Revolutionary War.

Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot? Another I'm unfamiliar with. The nearest I know of from my PERSONAL library is Barbara Hambly's 6+ book account of Benjamin January, a free man of color who is medical doctor, musician and part time detective, set in 1840's New Orleans. I know its a poor comparison- Hambly is telling her story straight up, not delving into the meaning of words, or some such. But, if that's what you're looking for, read Dick, Moorcock, Vonnegut, or Robert Anton Wilson.

Maurice Blanchot's Thomas the Obscure I compare to Stephen Baxter's Manifold series. In each, the same characters go through a set of events revealing as much about their inner states as about the universe outside them. The books are interrelated, but are also divergent and non-sequential.

Rilke? See Phillip K. Dick or Kurt Vonnegut.

So... I reiterate: What GENRES (not individual books or authors) have been left untouched by sci-fi and fantasy mimics?

 

[barsoomcore]

Dannyalcatraz: I'm having a very hard time understanding your point. Could you try summing up your position? I THINK you're suggesting that SF and fantasy are NOT genres at all, but categories that depend purely on textual details -- names and descriptions -- as opposed to any particular story qualities.

Assuming that by "genre" we mean a specific TYPE of story that can be distinguished from others without recourse to textual elements.

I'm not one hundred percent sure what I think about it. It seems to me that there ARE SF and fantasy types of stories that are different in their structure than other types of stories rather than just in their textual details. That is, that there are stories that CANNOT be told in any other form without losing something essential to their nature.

But clearly I'm having some trouble getting at exactly what that essential something is. I'll admit my ideas are not worked out very fully, and I appreciate your thoughts and challenges to them.

Let me offer a response to your question, however. The fact that a story with SF or fantasy trappings (text) appears to in fact conform to the story structure typical of some other genre is NOT evidence that there does not exist a story structure typical of the SF or fantasy genres. It simply means that the story in question may not be a SF or fantasy story. I don't see the point of this line of questioning, frankly.

Putting up example stories and demonstrating that they are not SF or fantasy stories according to the current working definitions doesn't really help the discussion much, either. That a given story is not a genre story doesn't invalidate the genre definition. The genre definition is invalidated once it becomes clear that it is not defining anything that can be meaningfully called by the title of the genre. Which is of course a circular process, but that's the nature of definitions, right?

For example, the fact that Harry Turtledove's books are very close parallels to real-world historical conflicts tells us NOTHING about whether or not they are SF or fantasy (or neither). That doesn't enter into the discussion at all. The issue at hand is what is the nature of the stories themselves, how they are told, not what they are "about" (at a textual level). One can use real-world historical events to tell any kind of story one desires. The question is, is Mr. Turtledove telling a story that fits our definition of a fantasy or a SF story? And if not, is that significant for the usability of our definition?

Remember, it's of little concern to me if my definition matches the way in which books are distributed in a bookstore to any great degree. I'm happy to change the names those definitions use if it turns out that while they DO define certain kinds of stories, maybe those story types don't meaningfully conform with the genres at hand.

I think they do, but it's far from certain, I'll grant you.

 

[Wayside]

To be clear -- I have not said (nor do I think) that SF is about identity, nor that fantasy is about power. Please, if we are going to continue this discussion, it is necessary that you read the (I think) very explicit definitions I have given.

I'm still not clear what you're saying then. Do you agree with Celebrim, while not taking his position--hence being in no place to defend it? Or do you think SF and F (I'm just going to go with the capitals from now on, typing them out is getting tiresome) employ some procedure, whether speculation about identity or metaphorical representation of power or something else, without being about this procedure? If the former, what is your actual position (or tendency--you may, like me, not have an actual position here, rather a goal)? If the latter, I would say that a particular SF or F story need not itself be about the procedures it employs, but that SF and F in a general sense, if those procedures are their distinguishing characteristics, are most definitely about them.

No, Magic IS a central portion of the Darkness series. Turtledove transforms the Nazi slaughter of the Jews into a nation's bid for necromantic energy. The Manhattan Project becomes research on the deeper theories of magic within his world, and when understanding is realized, this fantasy world too sees cities destroyed from afar by the actions of but a few mages. The air-forces of the nations here are foul-tempered dragons with riders. The main weapon of choice is a "Stick"- essentially a magic ray gun, charged by mages, occasionally recharged by necromancy.

The series has 3900+ pages; events within it are relayed by a group of POV characters, one of whom is this world's equivalent of a Jew, and thus, hated, hunted and reviled by many. Her struggles to remain hidden are gripping, and even there, magic is involved.

Call me crazy, but this doesn't sound like F to me. It has magic and all, but it honestly doesn't strike me as F, I suppose in the same way Star Wars doesn't strike barsoomcore as being SF despite its trappings.

FYI: The two main characters are an ascetic monk-warrior (D&D terms Ftr/Monk Dagger specialist), and the courtesan he first guards and then falls in love with. She is much in demand because she is god-touched by the pain-loving fallen angel/diety Kushiel. About 1/2 to 2/3rds of the books' intimate scenes revolve around the giving of pleasure through pain.

That sounds rather cliche, certainly, but it doesn't sound comparable to Sadism as a genre. I'm thinking of de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom, Octave Mirbeau's The Torture Garden, de Lautréamont's Maldoror. It sounds to me like there may be some similar imagery in the Kushiel books, but, first, I don't accept that imagery = genre, and second, even if it did, unless the Kushiel books involve sex with goats and more unutterable depravities, I don't think the imagery, whatever similarities it might have, would be comparable. In fact I would go so far as to say that genuine Sadist literature need not have anything to do with sex or the idea of pleasure as some kind of ego-satisfaction.

As I said- I haven't read everything.

Nono, of course not, and naturally neither have I. In fact one of the things I've found most interesting about this discussion so far is hearing from you about these various series of SF and F books I'm unfamiliar with, all of which I've been checking out and reading bits from.

I compared the body of sci-fi and fantasy of which I'm personally aware to the various GENRES I know of- not particular works, but genres of fiction. I also didn't say that they had equaled the efforts of masterpieces of other genres. But since you ask...

Certain books in Moorcock's Eternal Champion cycle includes a great deal of Joyceian stream of consciousness, at times more like Finnegans Wake than Uylsses.

Now this is an odd thing to say. Have you read the Wake? (And if you haven't, let me just say, I don't think it's worth the trouble, personally, and if you ever do decide to read it, join a reading group: even Joyce all-stars like Fritz Senn read it in groups.) I examined a few numbers of the series but wasn't able to find anything comparable. Stream of consciousness is hardly Joyce's invention, though because of parts of Ulysses, especially "Penelope," and of course the Wake, it's sometimes called "Joycean," like the technique of the central intelligence, free indirect discourse and so on. Let's call these Postmodern Fiction (Joyce is often called a modernist but I find it more accurate to say he's at the beginning of postmodernism). In terms of pure narrative I doubt any SF or F would "work" built around Joyce. Stylistically, I think it's possible, though, at least initially, the SF and F crowds wouldn't know what to do with it. As a genre, let's group Ulysses with Flaubert's Parrot (it isn't detective fiction, I don't know where that angle comes from; it's actually more about desire than anything else), and maybe Blanchot in a general sense, though I think any SF or F written like that wouldn't scan. Rilke, I don't know where the comparison with Vonnegut or Dick comes from, since I do have some experience with these guys. In terms of style there's nothing, in terms of plot there's nothing. I was thinking of the Notebooks in a Seinfeld way I guess, since it's a book in which nothing happens.

I've not read Thomas Mann's Dr. Faustus. From reading a few synopses, it seems 1 part retelling of Goethe's Faust (man sells soul to devil) and 1 part political analysis of post-WW2 Germany. The Faust legend has been told and retold many times, and the form didn't even originate with Goethe. The recasting of real world events for the partial purpose of dissecting them has been done in many specultative fiction writers. Star Trek revisited the Cold War and Viet Nam. Most notably, Harry Turtledove has written many thousands of pages on fantasy versions of real world events- WW2 in both fantasy and sci-fi settings, several retellings of the Civil War, and even the Revolutionary War.

I was thinking more of how Mann uses a famous German philosopher's descent into madness for Lewerkühn, and also his use of Schönberg's musical innovations as the sort of genius worth selling one's soul for. I didn't mean the actual Faustus narrative at all (I really should've been clear on what exactly I had in mind when typing these questions out, sorry about that). I have yet to see any SF or F touch the kunstlerroman genre.

So... I reiterate: What GENRES (not individual books or authors) have been left untouched by sci-fi and fantasy mimics?

Let's also toss tragedy in here. Dune relies heavily on tragic elements, to the point where, at least in the first few books, I don't even think of it as SF (with God Emperor I'm not sure what I'd call it). The science there is more like a convenient plot device, and unlike Star Wars, the societal models and general layout of Dune favor F over SF. But I don't think of it as F either, no more than I do the Hipollytus (someone mentioned Racine's Phedre as being in the F/power camp earlier).

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Ok...here goes nothin'!

Another thought on the discussion of how defining the genres by their trappings invalidates them as literature:

It doesn't invalidate them as literature. It invalidates them as genres that are meaningfully distinct from each other. *snip*

Yes, it invalidates science fiction and fantasy as literature if science fiction and fantasy are nothing more than an aesthetic.*snip*.

Its an argument that cuts both ways. Assume that a particular sci-fi or fantasy novel can be considered to be a fully realized representative of another genre, distinguished only by its setting. Assume also that you can find similar sci-fi or fantasy novels invading most other genres. You assert that this invalidates sci-fi and fantasy as distinct genres because they aren't doing something unique. However, by the mere existence of a novel that is both fully sci-fi and fully a romance (for example), then the genre of ROMANCE as well is no longer doing something unique. To expand the argument- any prose that successfully bridges 2 or more genres destroys each genre's uniqueness by its very existence by cross germination of features.

But we know that cannot be the case. There are innumerable works that cross genres of all kinds, yet we still feel that those genres are extant. Genres are not so neatly defined as species.

Re: Turtledoves's Darkness series:

Call me crazy, but this doesn't sound like F to me. It has magic and all, but it honestly doesn't strike me as F, I suppose in the same way Star Wars doesn't strike barsoomcore as being SF despite its trappings

You've got dragons and necromancy, what more do you want?

How about the fact that in at least one region of the world, the Gods of a particular nation push back the necromantic spells powered by the slaughter of innocent Kaunians (the race analogous to Jews) upon its wielders, slaying them: Direct divine intervention in the form of immediate retribution. That do anything for you? The weapon that otherwise works has the rules of the game voided on it. How about later magics that depend on "bargains with the powers below?"

I have yet to see any SF or F touch the kunstlerroman genre.

Well, I can honestly say that I too, know of a SF/F story in which an artist grows from novice to master. There are analogous plotlines, however

If you consider a mage to be fantasy's equivalent to an artist, there are MANY works that follow that theme. Sci-Fi channel aired a piece of crap tracing Merlin from a youth to master of magic. A similar path is trod in Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea books-NOT the Sci-Fi channel's butchery of it (youngster eventually becomes Archmage of the world). Piers Anthony's early (1st three) Xanth books have a character who is on the verge of becoming an outcast when his true nature is uncovered as one of the most powerful mages ever to live...and it takes him some time to master and understand his ability.

In Sci Fi, one example of a story like this being told is Orson Scott Card's Ender series, where the genetically engineered child becomes one of the most dangerous military geniuses in the universe, and thereby saves humanity from the insect-like "Buggers".


Re: Flaubert's Parrot:

it isn't detective fiction, I don't know where that angle comes from; it's actually more about desire than anything else

Blame a shoddy reviewer, then. Tell me more about it.

Re: Kushiel:

That sounds rather cliche, certainly, but it doesn't sound comparable to Sadism as a genre.

Its definitely not as graphic as the Marquis' own work, but even though handled with a lighter touch, I'm sure he would find the divinely masochistic courtesan to be an interesting woman- possibly even his unreachable ideal.

Re: Genres SF/F havent touched.

Let's also toss tragedy in here

Not bad. Lets see-a tragedy in the "everybody dies" sense: Moorcock's 6th Elric book, Stormbringer, has our anti-heroic hero destroying everything he loves to defeat his foe- friends, family, empire...and then is slain in the last few pages by the demon-sword he has borne throughout the series. Asimov's Nightfall, (called by some the greatest Sci-Fi story ever written)

But lets go further and deeper-

Tragedy did not mean a play with an unhappy ending. It did mean a noble hero ran into obstacles to what we would think of as happiness. These obstacles could be based on personal excess (as of pride) or a conflict between one set of laws and another. Necessity (ananke) and mortality constrain all of mankind but, even more so, tragic heroes.- N.S. Gill; bio

Many books in Moorcock's Eternal Champion series fit this description, especially the Elric arc. He is never at rest, he and other "Champion Avatars" quest fruitlessly for "Eternal Tanelorn" (Moorcock's version of earthly paradise? heaven?). Elric's use of mind-altering drugs prevent him from noticing the ebb and flow of events leading to his overthrow as Emperor of Melnibone when he could have done so easily. The love of his life is his first cousin, Cymoril, and she is forever used as a pawn/wedge against him by another relative, Yrkoon the Usurper. Elric surrounds himself with opportunists who use him, and his true friends are rare- usually since he winds up killing them to sate Stormbringer. Like Achilles, Elric cannot see any other options before hm but the obvious path of conflict. Elric, Corum and several other avatars die in their pursuit of happiness, usually betrayed by those closest to them.

In a more positive vein...I stumbled across a couple of definitions that might be of aid in this discussion. However, since I found them at 5AM, I didn't remember to note their attributions. Originators, I apologize.

Science Fiction is the fiction of Ideas. Fantasy is the fiction of morals.

The originator felt that Sci-Fi was fiction that generated new ideas about science & technology and how they effect change upon society, in terms of general expectations, quality of life, the nature of consciousness/humanity.

Similarly, Fantasy follows forms like Greek Tragedies or religious fables in that it was about Good versus Evil. Fantasy Heroes are often overthrowing a more powerful evil than has ever been seen (LOTR), conquering the evil within (Earthsea), or acting as the human tools used to enact the will of fate/the Gods to bring down people who have done evil to raise themselves up.

While useful, we have already seen exceptions to these formulations. We have seen fantasy that explores the nature of humanity (Pinnochio), and Sci Fi that has heroes overthrowing incredibly powerful opposition (Ender series, Battlefield Earth series, a lot of sci-fi from the 50's). I still think add some freshness to the debate.

 

[Desdichado]

Dannyalcatraz: I'm having a very hard time understanding your point. Could you try summing up your position? I THINK you're suggesting that SF and fantasy are NOT genres at all, but categories that depend purely on textual details -- names and descriptions -- as opposed to any particular story qualities.

I certainly believe that, whether or not Dannyalcatraz does. There are many cases in which fantasy and science fiction stories merely borrow narrative details from another source, not fantasy and not science fiction. How are those about particular story qualities?

Oddly enough, given the forum on which this is being discussed, any definition that relies on particular story qualities also excludes any roleplaying game. Dungeons & Dragons cannot be a fantasy roleplaying game, unless it had some method of enforcing a fantasy narrative on the game, which is naturally absurd.