A Matter of Semantics

My mother reads hard SF and has never been interested in fantasy (except Lord of the Rings). She has the same problem understanding the genre as you appear to. Think of it this way: I don't listen to very much country music at all. When someone says "country music," I think instantly of the cliches--"I was drunk the day my mama got out of prison," for instance. But I know that's not all there is to the genre, that country music spans a lot of ground and has a lot of really sophisticated, talented people at its core.

You're right when you say that all fiction is fantasy. Fantasy the genre just got tagged with the word fantasy (just like the word romance was brought from a general term for fantastic fiction to a specific term for one type of fiction).

I recommend Diana Wynne Jones as a marvelously readable and accessible fantasy writer. She literally wrote the book to fantasy cliches, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, and then she took those cliches and wrote Dark Lord of Dirkholm with them, showing that a good writer can do anything she wants and get away with it. I also recommend Terry Pratchett, particularly his Discworld series--the great thing about the series is that you don't have to read it from the beginning, just pick one up and begin. They all stand alone to a large degree.

Fan fiction has nothing to do with dragons, elves, and celtic names. There is lots of fiction without any of these elements - it doesn't even have to be science fiction or fantasy, it could be mainstream, like the fanfiction of _The Lord of the Flies_ and _The Phantom of the Opera_ I have seen.

Fanfiction is, by definition, stories by one writer using another writer's characters and/or setting. By one way of thinking about it, all the myths and folktales from various cultures are fanfiction, because they had no conception of copyright, and each storyteller who told a tale modified it to suit their own tastes and purposes, and some made up new tales about the same characters.

Fantasy, OTOH, could be defined simply as stories set in worlds where some form of magic exists. Personally I think that the idea of magic is related to the way people's subconscious minds work, as explored by Carl Jung in his writing about dreams. People have a natural tendency to believe in sympathetic magic, luck, curses, because we try to find a cause for everthing that happens, and if no cause is obvious we invent invisible ones.

Like gravity - if we weren't used to thinking of gravity in a scientific context because that is the way it was presented to us in school, this mysterious invisible force could very easily be considered magical. Science fiction is for people who want everything explained in pragmatic terms of cause and effect - who want the universe to be mechanical and react in a predictable, logical manner when we poke it. Fantasy is for people who want the world to have an underlying spiritual order - to be human and respond to us in an empathetic, socially responsive way.

A novel that *could* happen isn't a fantasy. Take a mystery for instance. The people are of this planet, probably the 'western' world, they deal with crime, mental illness, legal systems, etc. that we are all familiar with to some degree in our daily lives. The events in those novels *could* happen.

Generally speaking, fantasy takes place in a made-up world and involves events, creatures, etc. that most people believe can't happen or or don't exist. There are exceptions, but the fantasy genre is called 'speculative' for a reason. We speculate on elements not of this reality.

That's my take anyway.

BTW, I don't think all fantasy necessarily has magic in it.

Ace said:

Well, I think things that could happen are most definitely fantasy. I fantasize about never having to worry about money. That could happen.

PS: I thought scifi was called speculative fiction.

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Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah, the word has more general uses than just for the genre. SF is speculative also. And horror is often referred to as speculative as well.

Ace said:

PS: I thought scifi was called speculative fiction.

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Sci-fi is generally used by people within the genre as a term for media tie-ins and stuff like Flash Gordon and Star Trek (no real basis in science, totally unbelievable, etc) and by people outside the genre - particularly mainstream press - to denote anything inside the genre. Sometimes they use it because they know it annoys the hell out of serious science fiction authors, and other times it's just ignorance.

Speculative fiction covers science fiction and fantasy. Unfortunately the abbreviation (sf) also stands for science fiction, so the abbreviation for science fiction is often capitalised (SF). Or the other way round, depending on which day of the week it is.

If you want to be clear, you just use the abbreviation specfic when talking about science fiction and fantasy. Or you can use the abbreviation SF/F

Unfortunately this abbreviation annoys horror writers, who occasionally appear in these mags. Horror isn't Spec Fic, unless it has fantasy elements, so you tend to abbreviate the whole genre as SF/F/H to appease everyone.

Except people outside the genre, who take one look at all of this and go W/T/F?

Cheers
Simon

The difficulty in defining the difference between science-fiction and fantasy is that humans do not think in boolean logic; we think is fuzzy logic. there are number of different axes on which we look to determine whether something is sci-fi or fantasy. worse yet, some of them contradict each other. furthermore, everyone has a different idea of which is the most important one. yet, somehow, we come to a consensus. that's the wonderful thing about human adaptability.

the way I look at it, the following are several of the criteria people use to separate the two. i don't personally agree with all of them, but here you go:

Sci-Fi explains how things work; fantasy asks you to take it on faith

sci-fi has spaceships and guns; fantasy has dragons and magic swords

sci-fi is mechanical, objective ,and intellectual; fantasy alows emotional and spirituall truths to affect the world directly.

Sci-fi could really happen; fantasy couldn't

Sci-Fi belives that the world works the same for everyone, that is science is equally true for anyone; fantasy holds that magic is a special talent of a select few.

no one of these is the final arbiter; i have read and wirrten stories which broke every one of these rules, but they help explain how a book will be perceived. to create your own definiton, you need only decide which rules are actually important to you, and which are conventions.

I tacitly agree with the gist of your definitions, but here are a few codicles.

fallenangelwriter said:

Sci-Fi explains how things work; fantasy asks you to take it on faith.

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Er...not exactly. Science-fiction generally proposes a theory that asks the reader to accept as possible. Rarely are the explanations of how things work much removed from techno-babble.

fallenangelwriter said:

sci-fi is mechanical, objective ,and intellectual; fantasy alows emotional and spirituall truths to affect the world directly..

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I don't know what you're using as an example there...I venture to say that the majority of R.E. Howard's original Conan stories (one of the two primary templates for fantasy writers) had far, far less spiritual truths contained in them than say, Dune, The Demolished Man, The Martian Chronicles, Childhood's End or even a a truckload of episodes of Star Trek (the original and Next Generation), The X-Files and even Stargate SG-1.

I personally have read an awful lot of fantasy that was as emotionally and intellectually sterile as a set of "how to" instructions.

fallenangelwriter said:

Sci-fi could really happen; fantasy couldn't.

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Once again, science-fiction proposes a possibility, a theory or extrapolation of a scientific discipline, i.e, faster-than-light drive, controlled wormholes or time travel. But that's a long way from claiming it "could really happen".

As for "fantasy couldn't" happen...

My own rule of thumb is if you're writing about an 85 foot humanoid giant menacing the heroes and don't care to be restricted by the cubed square law of biomechanics, then you're probably writing fantasy.

Axler, you *do* realize that these are generalities which i was careful to point out are not hard and fat rules, right?

Axler said:

I tacitly agree with the gist of your definitions, but here are a few codicles.


Er...not exactly. Science-fiction generally proposes a theory that asks the reader to accept as possible. Rarely are the explanations of how things work much removed from techno-babble.

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there is science fiction which does explain thigns in terms of real science (some heinlein stories). at any rate, even the techno-babble is an explanation. regardless of how much sense it makes, the implication is that the bolognium operates under principles understood by the character sof the story. fantasy sometimes has the equivalent of technobabble (mages talking about "energy fields' "power sinks" and the like) but it's not required. in short, real scince= sci-fi. no explanation at all= fantasy. technobabble= the mroe technobabble, the more sci-fi. in fact, I personally, don't care if something is really possible or at all related to our own physical laws, and so anything which contains self-consistent laws thatd efine the workings of the world is "sci-fi" to me, even if others call it fantasy.

I don't know what you're using as an example there...I venture to say that the majority of R.E. Howard's original Conan stories (one of the two primary templates for fantasy writers) had far, far less spiritual truths contained in them than say, Dune, The Demolished Man, The Martian Chronicles, Childhood's End or even a a truckload of episodes of Star Trek (the original and Next Generation), The X-Files and even Stargate SG-1.

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there are, of cours,e spiritually significant stories in every genre, but fantasy, as a genre concerned with magic, quests, gods and the like is more likely to be spiritual. any story in which emoitons or beliefs can directly effect the universe is probably fantasy, for instance.

Once again, science-fiction proposes a possibility, a theory or extrapolation of a scientific discipline, i.e, faster-than-light drive, controlled wormholes or time travel. But that's a long way from claiming it "could really happen".

As for "fantasy couldn't" happen...

My own rule of thumb is if you're writing about an 85 foot humanoid giant menacing the heroes and don't care to be restricted by the cubed square law of biomechanics, then you're probably writing fantasy.

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let me say only that is something could really happen, it is virtually always sci-fi, never fantasy. fantasy can, by its nature, get away with more implausibility.

again, none of these are hard and fast rules, but they ARE the guidelines which inform the general percpetion of the genres.