The Spectrum of Speculative Fiction

Once upon a time, fantasy (FY) was (to most people) fairy tales, and science fiction (SF) was some weird geeky stuff about rocket ships and robots and aliens like giant mobile boogers. Neither, most of your parents and grandparents thought, was for grownups. You could go your whole life (well, decades on end) and never watch SF or FY in movies, on television, or read it in print. It was marginalized.

These days, specfi is mainstreamed, and it is big time entertainment. The Hunger Games? Classic science fiction. Twilight? Dark fantasy. Super heroes? Depends on how they play them, if they are science fiction or fantasy.

I was literally raised on this stuff and do not have to think about it. Daddy read me I, Robot for bedtime stories, and my first ever book report was on Heinlein’s Star Beast.

Science fiction and fantasy can be collected these days as speculative fiction (since the 1970s, a term coined by Alexei Panshin) but I do not agree with those who shoehorn in horror: it is categorized today as supernatural thrillers and reads like thrillers. SF/FY is literally read by different methods than most other fiction (see James Gunn on that).

Now, you should remember that the niche (or ghetto) of “science fiction” was created by Hugo Gernsback (for whom the Hugo award is named) back in the 1920s. Before then, for a century from the early 1800s there was simply imaginative fiction (Shelley’s Frankenstein or The Last Man, Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race). It was for Jules Verne in the second half of the century that the term “scientific romance” was coined, but let me tell you the level of science was often what we call science fantasy — fantasy with science fiction trimmings. There was also the consciously medievalesque work of William Morris, which was not always fantasy.

Let me give you the standard defining differences in the genres. But always remember, every genre shades into other ones. There is no tight pigeonholes.

Science fiction is supposed to be a story with a technological or pseudo-tech speculation. The culture may not change an iota, especially when it is set in the present or past, or the speculation item fails / is destroyed / is hidden by the end of the story. Classic examples would be H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man or Mary Shelley’s The Immortal Englishman. All science, or at least scientistic words flung around.

The dirty secret of SF is that 80% of what is common, really is not possible and everyone knows it, but we are not giving up starships and anti-grav and self-mobile nanobots.

Of course, SF can fail as a story and turn into:

• The Electric Chicken-Plucker Prospectus (talk about an invention overwhelms a slight or non-existent plot)(many Verne stories),
• The Tourist Guide to Mars (talk about the setting overwhelms &c)(Verne’s “Off on a Comet”),
• Soc666, the Course of the Beast (showing off the sociological change overwhelms etc.)(“Looking Backward” and a zillion other lectures thinly disguised as fiction).

Fantasy is different because the SF people do not want it around (they prefer to forget that they are a subset of fantasy, especially when they invoke FTL travel, time-travel, telepathy, &c). Fantasy dates back to BC. All constructed (rather than believed) fairy tales, imaginary voyages (The Odyssey), and such were fantasy.

Fantasy is said to be speculative fiction that relies on irrational speculative elements, because, really, there is no magic, there are no dragons, Middle Earth never existed.

The snag here is that fantasy is expected to still be written with rational world-building. You are supposed to figure out how your dragons fly and what powers and limits your magic. Also, some people live on different Earths than the hardcore SF folks: to them, telepathy is real and there is no reason that on another world something like a dragon cannot evolve. It is not irrational to them. (Check any of the very science fiction dragons of Anne McCaffrey’s Pern novels.)

Many stories of “magic” call it psionic talents and are then categorized as SF.

Basically FY has come to mean more romanticized stories that do not try to invoke techno-jargon, that are more fully invented by the authors rather than based on a scientific (or sociological or political) speculation, or that purposely work folktale motifs like werewolves, elves, etc. (There is a lot of “etc” in this topic!)

There i an old saying: “Science fiction is what I point to when I say ‘that’s science fiction.'” The same goes for fantasy. The real overlap zones are science fantasy and so-called “hard fantasy” where the speculation is entirely the creation of a new world but with no irrational elements. To me, that is just science fiction with the spec in sociology or polisci, not in physics or chemistry. It does not have to have ray-guns or big machines that blink to be SF.

On the other hand, talking about nanobots and travelling through black holes does not make it science fiction. Many a great story has been science fantasy, where the author does what they want for a rattling good tale, that if dressed in turbans would use magic rings and djinni. Instead, they have blasters and teleporters and psionics, but an honest physicist would have a hard time calling it science. We call it science fantasy, and the classic examples are Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars series and the Star Wars franchise.

If you want to know more about the various sub-genres of specfi, I suggest a trip to Other Worlds and clicking on the Genres link. It is there to help people figure if this is the right workshop for them (no horror, no erotica, no f/f/p romance).

Now, some of you have asked, is steampunk science fiction or fantasy?

Both and neither.

Steampunk is a setting and an attitude, what might be called retro-futurism. That is, you are either stepping back to the Steam Age and inserting other tech, or imagining the future as the people of the past might have. There is steampunk fantasy and steampunk SF, but the science is often so slight and replaced by known pseudo-science that the division is a line of smoke. It has been called “Victorian, twisted” or “the future the Victorians imagined would happen”.

Steampunk books (from before the term was invented) include Michael Moorcock’s Nomad of the Time Stream, Eismann’s Sherlock Holmes vs.
Dracula, and Philip Jose Farmer’s The Other Log of Phileas Fogg. Movies that are: the newest version of Around the World in 80 Days (Jackie Chan), any post-WW1 version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, either Time Machine movie, Sleepy Hollow with Johnny Depp, and, of course, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The key is Victorianism, or enough knowledge of early SF to be able to extrapolate like them. (I spent all 2008 reading almost nothing but pre-Great War specfi.)

As fashion, steampunk is replacing goth as goth gets commercialized and mass-marketed. It also lets you wear brown and green and garnet instead of black. An awful lot of fashion steampunkers are refugees from the narrowing of goth (so that you could not be “goth” without tattoos and piercings and bondage wear: get out of here if you are not — hey, fetish shows were where the money was for bars and clubs; these folks used to be the subset called fetish goths, as opposed to histogoths, cowgoths, glamgoths, and the rest).

One of the problems for some people to realize is that the term has nothing to do with punk music or its fans. First there was cyberpunk in the 1980s, and then some authors kidding around referred to Victorian-set scifi as “steampunk” (Derek Jeter’s fault, really).

There is also dieselpunk or radiopunk, that follows the steampunk era. Think of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow or the Captain America movie. There is medievalesque and Renaissance-ish clockpunk, ancient-set stonepunk, and the whole realm of mannerpunk, which is like Austen or The Three Musketeers on other planets or with elves or magic thrown in.

Definitely no “punk” in that! No, in specfi, “-punk” has simply come to mean “a kind of setting”. So you can have mannerpunk science fiction, and mannerpunk fantasy.