First off, let me do you the favor/injury of pointing out TVTropes.org, which is a fantastic resource for looking at fiction in all its myriad forms. If you're afraid to follow the link (someone has warned you of it, perhaps,) TV Tropes basically catalogues in Wiki form every trope that people can think of. This can be anything from "Did we just have tea with Cthulhu?" where characters find themselves interacting with a villain (usually a horrifically powerful one) in an unexpectedly pleasant manner, to "Drop the hammer," describing situations where a character is known for using a large hammer as a weapon, to "Freudian excuse," where a character's traits or actions are justified in the story by some past trauma.
You can find yourself spending hours there, linking from Trope pages that have lists of works where the tropes appear, to Work pages where they have a list of the tropes you'll find in that story.
It's fascinating, and I think it's a great tool to use to analyze your own stories. I'll make references to stuff on that site a lot in this blog, so I recommend checking it out.
Anyway, what I thought I'd write about here is the difference between Science Fiction and Fantasy. The two genres are closely related, and there is an argument to be made that they are, in fact, the same genre.
If one is to merge the two (and perhaps include Horror as well,) something that people have taken to calling "Speculative Fiction," you can basically describe the supergenre as stories in which things we have not seen in the real world appear. This is a somewhat clumsy definition, of course, because we've never seen Jean Valjean in the real world, but what we are talking about are creatures, technologies, or phenomena that do not, as far as we know, exist.
Yet Fantasy and Science Fiction have very different feels to them, and we can usually tell the difference with ease. Often, the difference is the setting: Science Fiction often takes place in the future, and often takes place at a time when people are able to travel through the cosmos with relative ease (most either ignore or create some plot device to get around the issue of the speed of light and the vast distances between things in space.) That is not to say that all science fiction is like this. For example, Steampunk, a subgenre of Sci-Fi, is typically set in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, and usually on Earth. Typically, Sci-Fi explores the way that scientific and technological breakthroughs will impact individuals or society on whole. For example, the existence of time travel could create logical paradoxes, or the development of space travel could lead to the discovery of other forms of life.
Fantasy, on the other hand, tends to be less rational. The typical setting for a fantasy story is often a different world with a different history that nonetheless appears similar to Medieval Europe (or other periods of Earth's past.) Fantasy will often have non-Human, yet human-like races (such as Elves, Dwarves, and Orcs) though many authors decline to do this. If there is one real focal-point to what defines Fantasy as a genre, it is the existence of magic. Different authors use magic in different ways, but it is quite rare indeed to find a story that creates a different world-setting that does not include some kind of magic.
The problem in drawing a clear line between the genres, then, is defining magic. Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, said "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." One could simply read this to mean that until we understand something, we will see it as magic, but I think there's a more profound question inherent to this, which is "what do we really mean when we talk about magic?"
Science Fiction, after all, often deals with discovering some phenomenon that seems to act magically - it does things that were previously thought impossible. Frequently, the hero of a Science Fiction story must solve the mystery of exactly what is going on, and then apply that knowledge to resolve the conflict of the story.
If someone had a gun to my head, I might say that the difference between the genres at its core, is that Sci-Fi ultimately believes there is an explanation for what is going on - that through scientific reasoning, one can eventually just figure it all out. Fantasy embraces the mystery - Gandalf can come back from the dead because it is the will of Eru Illuvatar. Harry Potter is a wizard because, well, he's a wizard. He might have inherited it from his folks, but it's not exactly a clear dominant/recessive gene, because there's a chance for those who have Muggle parents to be born wizards/witches, and vice versa. And even if the ability to be a wizard is genetic, the way all that magic actually works is, well, just magic.
Until the Star Wars prequels came out (and let's just pretend they never did,) there was no explanation for why someone would be "strong in the Force" as opposed to being just a normal schmo. Again, it looked like there was an inheritance to it - Anakin's kids are both Jedi-capable (it just occurred to me that if the Jedi-capability is based on "midichlorians," and we assume these are organelles like mitochondria, Anakin couldn't have passed them on because as the father, he provided the sperm, which does not have mitochondria.) But the nature of the Force had a more of a spiritual explanation than a scientific one.
So I'd actually classify Star Wars as a Fantasy story, even though there are spaceships and aliens. It's more of a story based on emotion than reason. Tellingly, the way Luke saves the day in Return of the Jedi is to reach his father emotionally, to make Vader feel love for his son once more.
Of course, this itself may be an overly simplistic distinction. Sci-Fi (at least the better-written stories) is not devoid of emotion, and often the implications of new technology or natural phenomena lead to an emotional story. In Next Gen, there's a great episode where Picard goes home to France a few months after being temporarily assimilated by the Borg, and the entire episode is focused on the emotional toll that this experience has exacted on him - the guilt over the responsibility he had for the deaths of thousands and the doubt over his life's work, as well as the sheer horror of knowing what it was like to be transformed and used like that.
Ultimately, the two genres are linked in their willingness to stretch the willing suspension of disbelief, to invent new rules by which the world will operate, and examining the implications of that new world - both on a larger, sociological scale, and the smaller, personal scale.
Yet, to paraphrase Potter Stewart, we know the difference when we see it. Most works conform to a standard setting (swords and wizards: fantasy, ray guns and spaceships: sci-fi,) and even when they play with those settings a bit, we can often identify which is which.
I like to think of the two genres as being like the oceans. The Pacific and the Atlantic are different oceans, yet what do you call the waters south of South America? The two blend together, and there's a lot of overlap. One can also argue that the viewer's opinion can change the genre of a piece.
The real point in all of this really boils down to one thing: I like both. Hooray!
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