The Science Fiction Hall of Fame; or, No, Seriously, What Exactly Is Fantasy?

So, first of all, I highly recommend The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, an anthology of short stories voted on by the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America and edited by Robert Silverberg. The book was originally published in the 1970s, but new hardcover and paperback versions came out only a couple years ago. It contains great, thoughtful stories like Lewis Padgett’s “Mimsy Were the Borogroves” and Daniel Keyes’s “Flowers for Algernon”. There are a number of deliciously creepy stories, too; I find that being told a story is creepy makes me less likely to perceive it as such and more likely to guess the ending, so I won’t give those titles here. If you’re the sort of person who asks the people beside you at the movies to tell you when you can open your eyes again, email me and I’ll send you a list.

However, reading some of the stories in the anthology made me wonder: where exactly is the boundary between science fiction and other genres? Fantasy in particular, but also mystery, romance, horror. Ray Bradbury’s Mars stories are seen as indisputably science fiction, by virtue of the Scientific Fact that Mars exists and the mundane fact that colonizing it seems like it could be a reasonable goal for scientists. But Bradbury’s Martians have powers similar to magic; imagine, for example, that he’d set the whole thing in a secondary world, with humans from Glangifuskar crossing the Wild Oceans of Terror to settle in the faraway land of Hoopdilala. Search and replace “Martians” with “Hoopdilalese”. Suddenly the whole sequence looks like fantasy, yet nothing substantial – major plot, characters – has been changed.

Jerome Bixby’s “It’s a Good Life” could be classified as fantasy or horror without a single change: a small boy has omnipotent powers. Magic? Maybe. Demonic forces? Again – why not? So why is this story science fiction? Because that’s the genre under which it was initially published? Anthony Fremont’s powers seem more like the sort of thing one could expect to be born with in Xanth*.

There are several arguments one might make here. The first and most obvious is that genres are merely helpful labels to help people find stories they like. In the strictest sense, this is true: there is no Platonic ideal of “fantasy” or “science fiction” to which all stories in those genres must conform. There’s nothing stopping the editors of Asimov’s, for instance, from publishing a short by Ellery Queen or Agatha Christie except for the fact that they have promised to fulfill certain expectations of their readers, and publishing a real-world mystery in a magazine nominally dedicated to speculative fiction would violate that promise.

However, there is nevertheless something we mean when we use the terms like “science fiction”. When a magazine claims to be dedicated to that genre, one knows one can expect certain things from it without ever reading an issue. Outer space and other planets and aliens means science fiction; magic and secondary worlds and monsters means fantasy. But is that all? When I think science fiction, I also think “logic”; I expect a science fiction story not only to accurately depict the accepted scientific views of the time during which it was written but also to logically extrapolate the consequences of whatever novel idea it introduces. But, see, I also expect logic from fantasy: if a spell works to, say, open locked doors, I want to know why the heck anyone who lives in a world where this is possible doesn’t take additional precautions to prevent intruders. In other words, I expect a magic spell that duplicates items in a fantasy world to be thought-out to the same extent as a machine that does the same in a science-fiction story; yet, somehow, the fact that it’s a spell in one and a machine in the other makes the stories differ?

I suppose I could go on and point out that, really, the more you generalize it, the more any story can transcend its nominative genre. Give Harry Potter ultra-uber-techno machines instead of wands and spells and set his life on another planet, and you could make a pretty similar science-fiction version. Make Moriarty an evil demon from H-E-double-hockey-stick, turn Reichenbach Falls into Mount Doom and you can have a credible fantasy version of “The Final Problem”.

You might counter that there’s something missing from a Sherlock Holmes who couldn’t find his way to Nelson’s Column or a Harry Potter who doesn’t believe in magic. Even if they were exactly the same in every other aspect, those wouldn’t be the stories we know. And, to a certain extent, I think you’d be right: Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Cinderella isn’t the same as Disney’s Cinderella, who isn’t the same as Charles Perrault’s Cinderella, despite the fact that the three stories share the same plot and characters, mostly. Besides, even ideas that seems the same can mean different things in different genres: a murder in a murder mystery is a puzzle; a murder in a horror story is a manifestation of the terror.

Maybe it all comes down to expectation again. We expect certain tropes from certain genres: Westerns end with a gun duel between the baddie and the goodie. Mysteries end with the detective revealing the criminal. Fantasies come in trilogies more often than romances do; literary fiction often focuses on character over plot; sitcoms have a laugh track but dramatic shows don’t pretend there’s a studio audience. In fact, parodies often use these attributes to mock particular kinds of stories. For instance, Scary Movie is funny (well… dubiously so) only if you’re familiar with the typical plot elements of teen slasher films**.

Or maybe “fantasy” is just one of those words like “theatre” or “science”: we know what we mean when we use it, but, if we try to give an explanation in words, we end up either leaving out particular instances we want to include or including things that don’t belong. What do you think?

… besides the fact, that, like me, now you really want to write a story about the magical land of Hoopdilala.

* Except for the lack of puns, of course.

** Well, or if the gratuitous mention of genitalia sets you a-giggle.