Genre Conventions: What is fantasy?

[Desdichado]

I wouldn't say that fantasy has to get rid of any laws of reality to be 'in genre'. My loose, working definition of fantasy is the presence of magic. That alone does it for me. Fantasy is a template that can be applied to any base genre. It could also be thought of as a metagenre.

What's the difference between "magic" and "breaks the laws of reality?" Is a story not a fantasy that features unicorns or faeries but no magic?

And fantasy can only be applied to other genres because it is defined differently than many other genres. A mystery, for example, is defined by the way the story is told, as is a sitcom, or a romance, for instance. Because neither fantasy nor sci-fi are really defined by anything in the structure of the story, but rather by the setting in which the story takes place, you can easily have a fantasy sitcom or a sci-fi mystery or a fantasy romance, etc.

Every set of writer's guidelines I've seen for novels rightly says that any magic system you create for a novel to be published has to be rigorous and self-consistent.

I don't see how this is complicated.

Neither do I. That's good advice. But I'm not sure what it has to do with the question at hand...

Worrying about what defines a genre is fine for academics and publishers, but I don't see it as a practical excercise for the rest of us. In my opinion, all a genre is, is a percieved pattern in a set of stories. The best stories redefine a genre for the simple reason that genre is artificial. If a story is beloved, it gets wedged into the closest genre, breaking any constraints it has to to set the taxonomist's mind at ease. I guess my position is that genre is a matter of convenience. I might say that my story is fantasy or hard science fiction when discussing it, but ultimately, I don't believe in genre in the strict sense that critics and such do.

Actually, I think it even more practical for us; the fans, who like to talk about the center of our hobby. I certainly don't think it matters much to publishers; every bookstore and library I've been into in living memory lumps all the sci-fi and fantasy together anyway. And few critics spend much time in the ghettoes of genre fiction; it's always been the fans that give genre fiction its life in the first place.

 

[Wombat]

Yet in Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke that children are developing psychic powers by the end. Equally in Olaf Stapeldon's The Star Maker there appear to be a lot of psychic powers (psychic melding, thought projection, etc.) going on. Both of these books are considered classical works of Science Fiction. Equally Philip K. Dick includes many wildly improbable technical elements in several of his stories, very far from "true" science fiction, because he is more interested in social commentary, and yet he is also acknowledged as one of the masters of Science Fiction.

I think the problem is that there are a lot of definitions out there.

Let me take one counter example for you. Bernard Cornwell is famous for his Sharpe's Rifles series. His books are found under General Fiction. However, is Arthurian trilogy is found in the Sci Fi/Fantasy section of nearly every bookstore I have been in. Why? Because they are about King Arthur? Hardly -- you find T.H. White's The Once & Future King and all of Rosalind Miles' books on the same topic in General Fiction. Because there is magic? Well, there is no identifiable, or at least provable, magic in Cornwell's books, but there is magic in the works of many authors found in General Fiction.

In the end, genre hairsplitting is vaguely amusing, but no one will ever agree on definitions.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Ah, If only I could draw Venn diagrams on this board:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Horror, etc., are all subcategories of fiction (within the Venn Circle of Fiction, you'll find circles for Fantasy, Sci-Fi, & Horror)- ignoring all other subcategories of Fiction for purposes of this discussion.

The circles for each genre, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, and Horror, overlap the 2 others, but do not envelop the 2 others. There are portions of each circle that do not touch any other. In other words, you can have pure Fantasy, fantasy with horror elements or fantasy with Sci-Fi elements. Likewise, you can have pure Horror or with Fantasy or Sci Fi elements added, and pure ("Hard") Sci-Fi or add Horror or Fantasy tropes.

Space Opera would be a circle within Sci-Fi that partially overlaps the portion of Fantasy that overlaps the circle of Sci-Fi. In other words...Space Opera is a subset of Sci-Fi which may or may not have fantastic elements. Generally, it has the trappings of science-fiction, but is more about telling an interpersonal story without regard to the scientific probability of its scientific elements. The science doesn't matter- just the story. Technobabble gets us past any and all real-world barriers to the storyline.

Two of the biggest sci-fi franchises- Star Trek and Star Wars- are classic space opera. Dune could also be categorized as such.

Shanarra books CLEARLY have a sci-fi element. The lost civilization before the timeline of the storylines produced robots and computers with AI (see Antrax). And yet, unless Brooks pulls a Niven or Clarke- style switcheroo that explains EVERYTHING in terms of science (Trolls, etc are the result of genetic experiments, spells work because of a "Krell Machine" or nanomachines), it is clearly a world of magic- and thus, predominantly fantasy.

 

[sword-dancer]

In a discussion with Zander on the latest "do you use psionics" thread, he refers to a long-standing debate and editorial summarization by the editors of the Realms of Fantasy wherein fantasy was defined as a set of images; fantasy has to have knights in shining armor, swords, dragons, and stuff like that, or it isn't fantasy, it's fiction. Specifically, the point was that psionics, because it was coined by a nominally science fiction author, and because it surrounds itself with "pseudo-scientific-sounding jargon" it is a science fiction concept. .

Would somebody like to state ad nsexplain me why these aren`t fantasy:
Is Glorantha not Fantasy(because the knight with a big sword is thoroughly lacking)?
Would you call the Deryni Setting of Katherine Kurtz Science Fiction?
How would you call the Westria series of Diana Paxon?
The Mind Magic in Mercedes Lackeys >Valdemar(or other in this world) stories?
The Solomon Kane Stories from R.E Howard or the writting of Clark Ashton Smith?

Zander then went on to point out stories by authors like Weis, Hickman and Poul Anderson that play around with the standard genre conventions, put them at odds, and compare and contrast them, stating that if the trappings of the genre didn't actually make the genre, then the stories wouldn't make any sense.

The Story from Oger the Danske don`t make sense?
or Midsummernightsdream, Haddon etc don`t made sense?
How would he call The Lions of Al Rassam or other Books from Guy Gavriel Kaye?

 

[The_Gneech]

Well, of the ones you list, the only one I'm familiar with is Solomon Kane, who is solidly, grimly, bloody-handedly in the "weird tales" category of fantasy-as-broad-category, but also dabbles in the "sword and sorcery" category. (S&S tends to be a little more removed from historical reality, but doesn't HAVE to be.)

-TG

 

[Voadam]

Well, for the most part the definitions predate Star Trek anyway. Like I said, folks like Arthur C. Clark, Ben Bova, Isaac Asimov; they're the ones who formulated the categories.

The definition of words change over time with usage. If they defined the genre and categories thus then they have lost control of the term and their technical definitions and categories no longer apply to the word as currently used.

Sci-Fi = very high tech IMO as someone who has not studied the technical definitions but enjoys the genre. This definition does not exclude fantasy. Fiction set in dragonstar would be both sci-fi (for the tech) and fantasy (for the magic).

My webster's new world dictionary defines sci-fi as "fiction of a highly imaginative or fantastic kind, typically involving some actual or projected scientific phenomenon."

 

[Space Coyote]

And yet I expect to find star wars novels in the sci-fi sections of the library and bookstore, not the fantasy sections.

I don't deny that it has significant fantasy elements with the force, but I still classify it as sci-fi. Again its the space ships and blasters.

After seeing the first Star Wars movie when I was a kid, I was discussing the movie with my brother. I knew that my brother loved reading science fiction movies and watching sci-fi movies, but he didnt particularly care for Star Wars.

I asked him, "How come you dont like Star Wars, I thought you liked science fiction?"

To which, he replied, "I do. But Star Wars is not science-fiction, it is science fantasy."

He described science fiction as stories that had some scientific merit to them (i.e stories or technology that are *plausible* based on current knowledge of science), but happen to be "fictional" stories. Whereas Star Wars, had a lot of things that were deemed "fantastical", thereby making it science (-related, because it dealt with things like spaceships, lasers and aliens), but sheer fantasy.

 

[RSKennan]

What's the difference between "magic" and "breaks the laws of reality?" Is a story not a fantasy that features unicorns or faeries but no magic?

You can add to the laws of reality without breaking them. You can suspend them without breaking them. Magic as I define it is a set of laws that exist outside of the laws of reality. Two sets; reality, and magic. They don't have to cancel each other out. This distinction is probably just a nitpick about the use of language from where I stand.

To the second question; it depends on how it's explained. Are they computer projections that are able to interact with reality? Just because something looks like magic doesn't mean it is. It's all in the telling.

And fantasy can only be applied to other genres because it is defined differently than many other genres. A mystery, for example, is defined by the way the story is told, as is a sitcom, or a romance, for instance. Because neither fantasy nor sci-fi are really defined by anything in the structure of the story, but rather by the setting in which the story takes place, you can easily have a fantasy sitcom or a sci-fi mystery or a fantasy romance, etc.

I can’t argue with that, except to say that I don't see boundaries to the genres the way that some people do.

Neither do I. That's good advice. But I'm not sure what it has to do with the question at hand...

I left out a few dots. I've got to work on that. I was referring to the loose use of the idea elsewhere in the thread that magic was simply defenestrating reality. It's not; it's as systematic as any other element of a story’s reality.

Ultimately, I think that a given story’s system of reality is all that’s important. I can see both sides- for genre, and against it, but for me, thinking in terms of genre in any but the loosest sense (that of trappings alone) is needlessly constraining.

As long as the rules of the setting are consistent enough to tell a good story, the rest is pedantic, IMHO.

Actually, I think it even more practical for us; the fans, who like to talk about the center of our hobby. I certainly don't think it matters much to publishers; every bookstore and library I've been into in living memory lumps all the sci-fi and fantasy together anyway. And few critics spend much time in the ghettoes of genre fiction; it's always been the fans that give genre fiction its life in the first place.

There are fantasy and science fiction critics. They exist. They may have less clout among the shining literati, but they exist, as this thread proves.

Regarding publishers, they need to be able to classify the books for catalogs. I didn't say editors, but a publisher as a commercial body needs to decide what to tell buyers.

Regarding the usefulness of genre to everyone else, I was just chiming in with my opinion; I'm not trying to tell anyone how to spend their time.

I won't go further into my perspective since I don't have the time, but suffice it to say that I don't see the "rules of genre" as something that need to be rigorously walled off, because that leads to creative cannibalism and imaginative bankruptcy. The boxes are only there if you want them to be. I know how the experts classify these things, and I even see their logic, I just don’t care to box things in.

 

[Celebrim]

Fantasy is the genera of fiction which primarily seeks to address the question of, 'What is the meaning of good and evil?', and similar abstract moral questions by incarnating or extantiating the abstract principals as tangible things, and then producing from there a narrative structure which serves to illustrate the principal in question. A fantasy is at its heart a morality tell which serves to warn against or promote certain sorts of behavior.

Fantasy is different from science fiction - and in particular soft science fiction - in that science fiction is typically not about morality, and instead is more interested in the question, "What does it mean to be human?", and the invented characters of science fiction (aliens, robots) serve not as embodiments of some moral principal, but rather as means by which humanity can be compared and contrasted with things that are not human in order to understand the fundamental things which make humans 'human'.

Swords, sorcery, space ships, ray guns, telepathy, and so forth have nothing to do with it. Those are just incidental and conventional trappings of the art form. Likewise, it has little to do with whether or not the invented things are 'realistic'. Science fiction remains science fiction even if its blatantly unrealistic. Fantasy remains fantasy even if its given a futuristic and technological setting.

 

[Desdichado]

Fantasy is the genera of fiction which primarily seeks to address the question of, 'What is the meaning of good and evil?', and similar abstract moral questions by incarnating or extantiating the abstract principals as tangible things, and then producing from there a narrative structure which serves to illustrate the principal in question. A fantasy is at its heart a morality tell which serves to warn against or promote certain sorts of behavior.

That's fairly easily demonstrated against. I can think of dozens of works of fantasy that never even attempt to do that just off the top of my head.

Swords, sorcery, space ships, ray guns, telepathy, and so forth have nothing to do with it. Those are just incidental and conventional trappings of the art form. Likewise, it has little to do with whether or not the invented things are 'realistic'. Science fiction remains science fiction even if its blatantly unrealistic. Fantasy remains fantasy even if its given a futuristic and technological setting.

But that I agree with; indeed its the main thrust of my argument.