Genre Conventions: What is fantasy?

[Celebrim]

Science Fiction is a setting that is just the oposite. The future always contains more knowledge and mystery. The further you go into the future the more advanced and powerful you become...understanding controls mystery allowing a leashing of the power through discovery.

Except that this definition would completely exclude post-apocalyptic settings (like David Brin's 'The Postman'), and future primitive settings in which humanity has forgotten much of what it once knew (Gene Wolfe's 'Book of the New Sun' is an example, but maybe not the best one). Also, what would you do with a work like Robert Silverburg's 'Dying Inside' which isn't set in the future at all?

 

[Celebrim]

I'm afraid I'd have to categorize Vance's Dying Earth stories as sci-fi, despite the fantasy feel and the fact that they're the origin of IOUN Stones and the "fire and forget" magic system common to all versions of D&D. Other aspects of the story are clearly sci-fi (setting the stories hundreds of millions of years into the future of Earth is one)- and the "magic" of the stories could just as easlly be explained by Clark's aphorism about high-tech.

I'm afraid I'm not much of an expert on Vance. I've got much of his collected works downstairs, but I've only read one story and it didn't really grab me. 'Sufficiently Advanced Technology' provides a useful way to hand wave away the problems with realism, and its one of the reasons why definitions like OSC's (much as I respect him as a writer) don't fully hold up once we start talking about high sci-fi works like Iain M. Banks culture setting, Charles Stross's works, or for that matter even something as lowbrow as Star Trek. There are alot of reasons in science to suspect that things like FTL travel, production of near infinite energy without waste heat, thousands of native sentient species per galaxy, interstellar trade empires, artificial gravity without rotation, time travel, long distance macro-mass teleportation and so forth are impossible. Maybe not strictly impossible, because its hard to prove a negative, but certainly as best as we know impossible and the more we learn the more fraught with difficulty they appear sort of impossible. Yet, we wave them off as a necessary conventions of the genera and pretend to themselves that someday the god of technology will render the strictly impossible as possible as it rendered the seemingly impossible possible in the past. How can we then continue to think that we are talking about 'this universe' when the laws of this universe are broken whenever it is conveinent to the story?

The answer is that being 'in this universe' isn't really the point.

Look at it from a different angel. If you are setting out to write a story - say a war story - what is the attraction of setting it in space? Why not set the story in the present or past in the universe as we understand it? Certainly some literary snobs seem to think that that is the surest sign of maturity. But what is the attraction of placing the war in space when the fundamental conflicts and story could just as easily be set anywhere? Put most simply, why write science fiction in the first place? The answer is I think bound up in the notion of the 'the alien'. The attraction of writing science fiction is it allows us to introduce the device of the truly alien, whether it be an alien species with appearance and custums different to us, or an alien place physically or psychologically (usually both) where we have no record of mankind ever being before. By using this device, you can hold up humanity as if into a mirror and mentally examine humanity in a revealing way (or what you believe to be a revealing way) that you just can't when you have no basis of comparison or contrast.

That tech is not irrelevant at all. That storyline plus the interstellar tech level trappings put Star Wars solidly into the subgenre of Sci-fi called space opera. The impossible odds, the mysticism, etc., would be completely familiar to any audience in the past 500 years but for the fact that its all wrapped up in technology.

I'm not sure I understand you. Or you saying that the space opera is a 500 year-old genera, or are you merely saying that 'space opera' is fantasy with a high tech spin? Or something completely different? If you are agreeing that 'space opera' is merely the latest verion of a 500 year old genera, then I don't see on what disagree. Let me just say that I don't think that 'alien abduction' stories are fundamentally different from 'being abducted by the faerie people', except that each is garbed in the trappings necessary to suspend a certain level of disbelief in the society of the time. Likewise, 'space opera' is by and large just a genera of romantic fantasy. I wouldn't however feel entirely comfortable with saying that all 'space opera' is merely reclothed romantic fantasy, and that in particular what we see at the beginning of the Golden Age is space opera's beginning to take on those more serious questions like 'who are we?'

See also Battlefield Earth...

*shudder* I'd rather not. Once was enough. More than enough. I'll say this, LRH's introduction to the story is a laugh riot. Too bad the joke is on him.

 

[Wild Gazebo]

Many (perhaps even most?) post-apocalyptic settings are phantasy. The difference emerges from the application and ideology of the characters concerning the past and present coupled with the setting's realm of imagination and/or (fictional)reality.

Science Fiction post-apocalyptic settings involve a belief that there is a rebuilding in the same fashion that was accomplished in the past. The methods are the same...there are no mysteries there are unknowns. Knowledge has been lost...but WILL be rebuild...if given enough time.

In a phantasy post-apocalyptic setting power isn't so much rebuilt as discovered or developed through some sort of vergence. There is an intuit belief that the past always contains more knowledge than the future...which is the BIGGEST phantasy in phantasy.

 

[Corinth]

Publishers, advertisers and the general public disagree with all of this academic dialogue. The distinction, for them, really is all about the trappings. If it looks like X, then it is X and that's how the labels get applied- and those labels stick.

 

[Wild Gazebo]

Yep.

edit: And to be fair, there are cross genre compostions, genre bending fiction, and even satirical works examining genre. So, most of this literary classification is really quite irrelevant--to most people.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Celebrim
If you are agreeing that 'space opera' is merely the latest verion of a 500 year old genera, then I don't see on what disagree. Let me just say that I don't think that 'alien abduction' stories are fundamentally different from 'being abducted by the faerie people', except that each is garbed in the trappings necessary to suspend a certain level of disbelief in the society of the time. Likewise, 'space opera' is by and large just a genera of romantic fantasy. I wouldn't however feel entirely comfortable with saying that all 'space opera' is merely reclothed romantic fantasy, and that in particular what we see at the beginning of the Golden Age is space opera's beginning to take on those more serious questions like 'who are we?'

We don't agree. What you call fantasy, in the case of Star Wars in particular, I call Space Opera, a subgenre of Sci-fi, which has commonalities with classic opera. However, where opera has its spirits and dragons and magic, Space Opera uses tech to leap the bounds of improbability.

Like classic opera, space opera is all about conventions. In both, there is no question that the good guy will win, whatever the odds. The bad side will ALWAYS lose. Evildoers actions will rebound upon them.

Where they differ is that opera invokes fate, the Norns, Divine Justice, etc., concepts based in human mythology, whereas space opera depends on speculative tech-usually moreso than hard sci-fi.

Yes- you're right that Star Wars has a fantasy feel to it- it was, after all, based on the Samurai movies of Akira Kurosawa. But the setting makes all the difference. It is a self evident truth that any tale can be told in any setting. I've seen most of Shakespeare's plays, ranging from straight up to cultural retellings (Ran), to modern (West Side Story, Romeo Must Die, 10 things I hate about you, and Richard the 3rd in a Naziesque setting). Wrath of Khan was a retelling of Moby Dick, as was Of Unknown Origin.

After all, there are only 5 major plots: Man against Man, Man against Self, Man against God, Man against Society, and Man against Nature. All the rest is details and backdrops.

Edit: The Science of Star Wars is airing RIGHT NOW (1AM CST, May22) on Discover. Unless it were a show about swords and trebuchets, I doubt you'd see "The Science of Lord of the Rings" on any channel.

 

[S'mon]

Conan and Fafhrd simply offer different definitions of what is heroic than the Judeo-Christian tradition, but that doesn't mean that Conan and Fafhrd aren't heroic examples. In fact, Conan and Fafhrd are the same sort of characters as Theseus and Oddyseus - both of whom are explicitly within the story moral models despite the fact that we (from our moral perspectives) might find thier treachery less than virtuous. There are several different ways that one can define 'virtue'...

But what I was responding to was your statement "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" - you're now stretching it to include any tale with an heroic protagonist! Including myths like the Odyssey, apparently. The idea that Conan or Fafhrd/Mouser are 'morality tales' in any sense, even a "non Judaeo-Christian" sense, seems ridiculous to me. This kind of swords & sorcery fiction takes a highly modernist approach which deliberately eschews the very things you claim to be characteristic of fantasy.

Now, like I said, your definition somewhat fits a wide range of high fantasy, not just "Christian fantasy" like Tolkien & Lewis - I would say Moorcock's humanist swords & sorcery fits it pretty well, for instance. But stories of amoral heroes battling other amoral characters or evil wizards has IMO almost nothing to do with "'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".

 

[Wombat]

But what I was responding to was your statement "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" - you're now stretching it to include any tale with an heroic protagonist! Including myths like the Odyssey, apparently. The idea that Conan or Fafhrd/Mouser are 'morality tales' in any sense, even a "non Judaeo-Christian" sense, seems ridiculous to me. This kind of swords & sorcery fiction takes a highly modernist approach which deliberately eschews the very things you claim to be characteristic of fantasy.

Have to agree with this. I mean, I love Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser, but the notion that their tales are all about Good vs. Evil, or any other specifically moral centerpiece, is rather ridiculous. Those tales, which are definitely fantasy, are more about rollicking good times, close work with swords and danger, and Boys' Own Adventures writ large and bawdy. Yes, I would agree that several fantasy works deal with Good vs. Evil, but not all or even necessarily the majority. The Conan tales might be labelled as having a social darwinist feel to them, but that is about as close as you come to Good vs. Evil, and given the many hands that have written Conan stories after the fact the tales go all over the board.

And then what of Lovecraft? Does he count as horror or as science fiction? His antagonists are aliens in an alternate dimension who would crush all of humanity, not out of any hatred of humans, per se, but rather simply because humans cannot fathom the reality that the Great Old Ones represent; still, later writers try to impose morality or at least elemental identifications on several of these beings.

And for all of this you will always have books that defy definition. Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun will never really feel "set" in any category. It is at the end time of our planet, in that the sun is red and will soon go out altogether. There are space-travelling aliens with strange devices that defy description. There are sword fights. There are strange monsters and maidens in distress. There are psychic powers. There are dungeons and torturers. There are doctrinaire communists versus ardent royalists. There moral considerations, considerations on what makes one human, and literally hundreds of embedded stories -- where do these books fall in a category?

I think the problem with these definitions is that no one will agree. Offered for your consideration are three possible solutions:

1) Call it Speculative Fiction and include everything we consider sci fi, fantasy, and horror, withouth further differentiation.
2) Breakdown between Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, based primarily on gut reaction or publisher's whim.
3) Subdivided into 200+ micro-genres that everyone gets confused over and can never remember.

I am willing to walk into a bookstore and find the SciFi/Fantasy area, which usually has Horror right next door. I am quite willing to look for the books that I like, withouth worrying about which books truly belongs where. The most important distinction I can think of is Authors I Like versus Authors I Do Not Like. **shrug**

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I'd categorize Lovecraft's "C'thulhu Mythos" stories as horror with a sci-fi element.

From your description, I'd categorize Wolfe's "New Sun" stuff like Vance's "Dying Earth" stories- Sci-fi with fantastic elements, with Clark's "Sufficiently Advanced Tech" words in mind.

Leiber's duo and Howard's Conan are solidly fantasy- I'm unaware of any sci-fi elements in either series. There are, however, horror elements.

 

[Celebrim]

We don't agree...Yes- you're right that Star Wars has a fantasy feel to it- it was, after all, based on the Samurai movies of Akira Kurosawa. But the setting makes all the difference. It is a self evident truth that any tale can be told in any setting.

You're right. We just don't agree, and that answer makes it pretty clear that there isn't much in the way of middle ground between us, so its unlikely we'd ever be able to convince the other one of anything. I simply can't agree that the setting makes all the difference, and that setting alone or fundamentally defines a genera. The fundamental story and the questions it revolves around remains the same no matter how you dress the story. If I take 'Beowulf' and dress him in powered battle armor and have him fight an alien monstrousity, it's still the same story. If I move Hamlet to Alpha Centauri, and have his father a digital ghost, it's still the same story.