I find "science fiction is just a kind of fantasy" to be an interesting statement in and of itself, because of what it reveals about the understanding the speaker has of the meaning of "fantasy".

More generally, anyone who can say "x is a subset of y" in a conversation about what the difference between x and y is just isn't using x and y to mean the same things as the other people in the conversation. That's interesting because the space covered by the difference in meaning is where the true agreement, or disagreement, lies.

Here's some fuel for the fodder: genre benders! In deference to David's outrage, I'll concede there's a difference between fantasy and science fiction, but it's an interesting question where you draw the line.

Take for instance Gene Wolfe. His Book of the Long Sun is clearly SF, and his Wizard Knight is clearly fantasy. But what do we do with Claw of the Conciliator (I mention this book specifically, as opposed to the Book of the New Sun altogether...).

Or Phil Dick: Clans of the Alphane Moon or Man in the High Castle are pretty much SF, but what do we do with books like Ubik or The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch?

Not that Ubik or 3SoPE are necessarily fantasy. I might argue that they're magical realism, which I would place in a subgenre of fantasy, much as I would place alternate history in a subgenre of SF. But that may just be me...

Another question would be what do we do with Rabelais or Homer? Or Shakespeare for that matter? Is Midsummer Night's Dream fantasy? Why not? Cause it was written before such a distinction was invented? Or because it's by The Bard?

Personally, I would call The Odyssey fantasy. Homer might have called it an alternate history. He might just have called it a history, or he might have been a little more disingenuous and called it simply "fiction..."

And don't get me started on the Bible.

peace

The Odyssey is the true word of history, handed to Homer by the Gods Themselves.

Okay, I'll concede the Odyssey and the Bible, since I don't want to get into a theological argument in David's space. Come on over to holychao.blogspot.com and post a comment if you want to argue that stuff.

OOH! And what about Jonathan Swift? Is Gulliver fantasy or allegory? Ok, it's allegory, but is allegory a subgenre of fantasy?

Also someone mentioned Mark Twain. What about Connecticut Yankee? Fantasy?

peace

PS I think the phrase "fuel for the fodder" is one of the worst things I've ever said. Please substitute "fire for the cannon."

“science fiction is just a kind of fantasy.”

Depends on what's meant by the "just." It may be a "so shut up." (And, honestly, who hasn't had that reaction to science fiction writers who insist they're writing something unique and superior?)

It may also be "in my opinion; ask me if you wish to know more."

It may also be "I see it in this place, but that doesn't mean it's not interesting there. The USA may be "just" a democracy, but that doesn't mean its differences from other democracies and from a theoretical "pure" democracy aren't worth discussing.

The claim that SF is a subset of fantasy doesn't imply that there is no distinction. It shifts the distinction to a different place, from genus to species.

Yeah, Will, I agree, “just” has a lot to do with it.

It’s not the way I react to arrogant science fiction writers, though. (At least not to the ones that are talking about what I would consider actual science fiction, and not just adventure fiction with science fiction props and costumes.) Because I do think they’re doing something different, just not something by its nature superior. It’s the premise of superiority that I’m likely to take issue with.

I feel the same way — maybe not as strongly because I don’t feel as personally involved — when somebody says “magic realism is just fantasy by Latin American authors.” Because, again, I think what, say, Marquez does is different from the vast majority of Anglophone genre fantasy, whereas what Angelica Gorodischer does is much more similar to what Le Guin does than to what Marquez does.

Lois — and many Greeks would argue that saying Macedonia is just a part of Greece just shifts the distinction from internal to external. Macedonians tend not to be as comfortable with the idea. :)

eppur se muove

Okay, but can you show your work? :)

It is this: that you seem to be refusing to look at the issue through the lens of this concept, lest you not like what you find there. Or because some time in the past you have seen something you did not like through this lens. So instead, you attack the motives and manners of those who have used it, and engage in other diversionary tactics. Yet if a concept is true or useful or interesting or any of those other good things, it does not cease to become so just because some persons may have misused it.

And specifically, again, that there is no logical sense in supposing that the claim [SF is* a subset of fantasy] means that there is no difference or distinction between the two, as if the one genre had devoured the other and shit it out in an undifferentiated mass. It clearly implies the question: what distinguishes SF from other types of fantasy?

* note absence of "just"

Even without the implied slur of "just", although I do tend to hold with the idea that Science Fiction is a subset of fantastic fiction, I think the genre labels make that statement too woolly. It takes two sets and places one inside the other, but there's a by-it's-bootstraps quality to the statement; it contains an implicit (re)definition of Fantasy to "all fantastic fiction" which is at odds, I'd say, with the term's common use as a genre label. Sure, if Borges and Marquez and so on can be called fantasists, you can label their work, and any work using the technique of fantasy, as capital-F Fantasy. You can then say there's a subset of similar fantasists who apply rationalism in that technique, and are therefore writing Rationalist Fantasy (or Plausible Fabulism, indeed). By definition, that statement becomes true because it is, essentially, an act of definition.

Isn't it the point, to engage in an act of definition?

Well, as a proponent of the idea that science fiction is a form of fantasy (and, in fact, that all fiction is so), I'm not realy happy with that word "just" either.

As a data point.

One is marketing categories and self-defined readerships. Fantasy is what women write and buy when they're not writing YA. SF is what men write and buy when they're not writing YA war-stuff (would have used another word, but it got flagged).

The other is that s.f.|fantasy is too coarse grained to be useful. There's fantasy of imagining we're important against the indifference of the cosmos, there's the fantasy that's an analogy or stand-in for the culture of "who are your people" vs. "what do you know." There's the SF of unobtainium which otherwise follows the rule as we know them. There's the SF of "who are your people" as in genes matter and slans can evolve out of normal people. There's fantasy that's parallel to that, only the genes or something like genes create a being so charismatic he can bend the universe to his will. There's fantasy that assumes that fantasy rule bending would be malignant (this does not sell well but gets the author a letter from the agency that manages the Kafka estate).

And more. I was a reader of the s.f. that who knew Frank O'Hara was and found that I didn't really have anything to say to a readership that didn't know. Since most of those people stopped reading s.f., I think my job is to do what I find worth doing and see if I can attract those readers' attention. It can't be done with either the Fantasy or SF label attached.

Furthermore, I think that outside the genres, most successful writers, best sellers or not, create their own word space and people read them to be in that particular word space which has connections with other word spaces, but which isn't defined by being in this or that clump of word spaces (except perhaps the experimental fiction writers, but then the difference of this word space from other word spaces is what the draw is).

As a way to navigate the aisles of bookstores, there's a reason religion is near the New Age stuff and why science is near history and why s.f. and fantasy and mystery are near each other.

But most readers buy authors, even in genre. Stephen King and Peter Straub are more King and Straud than horror writers and mistaking Star Trek readers for s.f. readers makes this old lady run screaming from any editor so foolish. Readers may buy connected discussions, theme and variation, but not s.f. or fantasy uber alles unless they've self-defined as fans and that's a small and aging chunk of the human population.

If you're a writer worth reading for more than a way to waste some time, people are buying you, not s.f., not fantasy, not mainstream. Does anyone imagine that a John Grisham reader thinks "Oh, I'm buying mainstream fiction" when he goes into the store to pick up another John Grisham novel? Or that anyone who reads Guy Davenport thinks, "Oh, wow, a ....." I can't think what Guy Davenport is, but I know what he writes.

Thinking about the underlying logic of one's work doesn't require thinking about fantasy vs. s.f. Both are too coarse grained to be useful. If a category is meaningful at all, it's because it's roughly an extended conversation between people who are roughly peers. SF now is not the SF I was interested in during the late 60s and early 70s when Ballard was being published as an SF writer, and Disch's Camp Concentration was in the 8th Street Bookstore racks.

Yet if a concept is true or useful or interesting or any of those other good things, it does not cease to become so just because some persons may have misused it.

Lois, this is sort of my point, actually. The people I take issue with aren’t the ones that say “science fiction can usefully be regarded as a subset of fantasy, said uses including . . .”; they’re the ones who say distinguishing science fiction isn’t a worthwhile exercise.

Here’s the problem, though: the people who, with good intentions, place science fiction and fantasy as leaves at the same level on the tree of categorization, and the people who, with equally good intentions, place science fiction as a daughter branch of fantasy, aren’t really using the words (particularly fantasy) to mean the same things.

Because of that, when you shake the jar, they fight.

I don’t, myself, think that discrete hierarchical categories are a particularly accurate way to model fiction, but other people seem to find the exercise entertaining. (And the economics of shelf space mean things have to be categorized in order for readers to find books, but not with any great degree of precision, and anyway that’s another story.)

So, mostly I find these discussions of genre categories either amusing or dull, depending on how cleverly the people doing the discussing write.

*loves moles extra much*

Isn't it the point, to engage in an act of definition?

Problem is, if we're trying to define different fantastic forms in relation to one another -- i.e. what is a subset of what -- as soon as we use those marketing categories SF and Fantasy I think we're talking in terms too vague in some senses (Does SF include Alternate Histories like The Man In The High Castle? Does Fantasy include Kafka?) and too specific and arguable in other senses (Does SF require science? Does Fantasy require magic?) to actually get anywhere.

With such fuzzy labels as SF and Fantasy we could equally well argue that Fantasy is a subset of SF. If we accept The Man In The High Castle as SF -- or Zelazny's Roadmarks, or a number of other weird and wacky works which are generally considered SF -- then we're redefining SF as the wider field. Hence the use of "Speculative Fiction" as an umbrella term which encompasses the marketing categories of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror for many people.

I don't think it's terribly hard to define and describe fantastic fiction. In fact it's pretty much a no-brainer: you look up the word "fantastic" and then you look up the word "fiction". I don't think it's terribly hard to define and describe "structural fabulation" as the characteristic literary approach used by fantastic fiction -- taking a fanciful metaphoric conceit and making it concrete, extending that out through the body of the story or novel and maybe even unmooring that metaphor from a single, obvious, symbolic representation of X, such that the result is fantastical rather than allegorical. I think Gormenghast is a good example of that sort of process, Peake taking the Edwardian "big house", turning it into a fanciful conceit by upping the scale, and developing the whole thing as a sort of extended metaphor for English class relations -- but exploring the potentials of the metaphor itself rather than rigidly, allegorically mapping it to reality in the way that Orwell's Animal Farm maps. Kafka does the same thing with The Trial, I'd say.

If you label all the results of that approach Fantasy, then I think it's fair to say a subset of those results would be what we generally call SF, the key distinction being that in SF the process involves basing that fanciful metaphoric conceit on plausible scientific speculation. Alternatively you could segregate the results of the restrained technique and the results of the more freeform version and say that both SF and Fantasy are subsets of some wider Whatever.

Either way I think this leads to a confusion of process and product, and this confusion is made worse by the arbitrary nature of those marketing categories. These categories include the Nth generation copies which simply snatch the tropes generated by SF and Fantasy and clunk-click-fit them into generic formula plots. Qualitatively different in terms of the approach used to create them, these -- it seems to me -- often aren't fabulation at all, simply adventure stories, thrillers, romances, whatever, dressed up in the symbols of fabulation. Any distinction between SF and Fantasy here is meaningless; going by that "[scientifically speculative] structural fabulation" definition, they're neither.

Unfortunately, that "symbolic formulation" sells, and "structural fabulation" long ago bit the bullet, made its deal with the devil and got into bed alongside it. Indeed, it's not just a matter of works of one type being sold alongside works of another type; I'd say those two techniques go hand-in-hand in many individual works, with writers combining the two all the time -- stealing old plots and tropes, shamelessly cobbling them together, but at the same time finding a new angle to explore that reinvigorates the trope and brings back that metaphoric resonance.

Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is I'd rather talk about small-f fantastic fiction in general than use capital-F Fantasy as a blanket term, since for me that just carries too much baggage. If you want an accurate descriptor/definition for what I think we're reading and writing in this field, generally I'd say it's a mix of "structural fabulation" and "symbolic formulation". For the sake of expedience, though, I'm happy to work with SF/F or Speculative Fiction as a marketing category for the whole kit and kaboodle; while I don't think they're particularly accurate and do think they can be downright misleading, they serve the pragmatic purpose of getting my hybridised ravings in front of the right audience. Until such time as the term "Indie Fiction" catches on, of course.

I view genre taxonomy as a purely intellectual exercise, and such it should remain, in the airy realms of theory, for those who are interested in that sort of game. "Science fiction" and "fantasy" aren't natural kinds, they are only labels we print up and stick on the circles we draw in the dust, enclosing and excluding certain examples [which image I prefer to the vertical hierarchy of trees forex]. They are labels of convenience, because these are the categories we most commonly use, but it's true that their use can cause confusion because of the corrupting influence of marketing labels, which exist solely to distort the gravitational field of money. Otherwise, we would just call everything a "book" and shelve them all together by the color or size of the binding.

The point of the exercise should be to cast the marketing labels aside and reshuffle the definitions just so the parties to the discussion can agree, at least provisionally, to share the same set of cards for the duration of the game.

As a matter of curiosity ... Mr. Moles, do you think that a bookstore that used some sort of folksonomy for shelving would be nice? That is, if some sort of uber-Powell's had six or seven copies of each book, and could shelve each in a different section according to customers' preferences, so a children's book about baseball on the moon could be in sports, children's and sf, would that be Good or Evil? And would it make discussions of genre more or less annoying?

Thanks,
-V.

Hal, that’s certainly a valid approach (though the word fantastic isn’t pinned down all that well by any of the on-line dictionaries that come immediately to hand). I think any rigid definition along those lines still runs the risk of defining fiction = fantasy and making fantastic fiction redundant, though. Really I think it all comes down to what Susan pointed out about literary movements — that it’s not about what you write, it’s about who you hang out with.

Lois, I agree completely.

Vardibidian, to do a folksonomic bookstore right, you’d have to let people create their own sections and shelve any book in as many sections as they like. And to really do it right, you’d need extra dimensions, so that you could get directly from any one copy of a given book to any other section it might be shelved in.

Yes, the hypershelves would be the way to go. I was imagining a more plausible scenario, with jacked-in customers think-filing their tags as they browse and superfast shelvers creating and tearing down sections (and of course ordering books) according to their instructions from the Big Database.

Seriously, though, or at least somewhat seriously, isn't the point of the frustration that a book can only be shelved in one section of the bookstore, and thus can be either a mystery or literature, but not both? I mean, yes, there is the reader expectations element, but that can only be helped by allowing a book to be both, rather than neither. [excised lengthy query comparing sub-genre arguments to those around jazz music, which although interesting to myself, turned out to be irrelevant to what y'all were actually discussing] What I'm really wondering is how arguments such as “science fiction is just a kind of fantasy” are working within a context that relies (as Ms. Tilton says) on the assumptions of a marketplace that is totally deuterochiliastic.

Thanks,
-V.

I'm not sure what deuterochiliastic means, but I'll comment anyway...

I think the ideal venue for your folksonomic arrangement of books is an online store. Indeed, amazon has something similar with their "folks who bought this also bought that and the other," which often points in-genre, but sometimes points at something completely different and illuminating. Also, the reader reviews often let you look at other things the reviewer liked, etc.

Curiously, amazon does away with genre classifications altogether. As an aside, I've been having an interesting argument with Ben Rosenbaum about genre, and one of the things I said (that Ben took umbrage with...) is that genre is basically useful for people who are browsing a bookstore to find something they might like.

You know, I like China Mtn Zhang, and that's science fiction. Maybe I'll like this Joe Haldeman character.

But I think genre is quickly becoming a brick-and-mortar distinction, and in the age of the Internet, people are going to find better ways (or possibly just more link-friendly ways) of grouping things.

peace
Matt

PS I'd like to read your digression on Jazz, V. Did you blog it?

I don't see the statement "SF is fantasy" a negative or nasty statement at all. Many writers who write both fantasy and SF use it as a way of calibrating their approach. In a way, if you say that, you're basically just saying you don't approach writing SF any differently than fantasy. And a lot of writers don't. And shouldn't.

Besides, it's *all* fantasy--everything. Every damn bit of fiction written. :)

JeffV

Hey, people can categorize their own work any way they like. (Hell, they can categorize my work any way they like.) It’s denying other people’s categorizations of their own work that gets up my nose.

Anyway, it’s all in how you say it. :)

Deuterochiliastic = “of the second millenium?” So in the tritochiliastic era we will not be bound by the limitations of mere shelf space?

How fin-de-millenaire, to posit technological “progress” as an atemporal universal . . .

"(as Ms. Tilton says) on the assumptions of a marketplace that is totally deuterochiliastic."

She does??? How polysyllabic of her!

I have certainly seen the claim that "all fiction is fantasy" pronounced with a sneer and usually with an "anyway" tacked on, as a dismissal of the entire genre taxonomic enterprise. But I don't care how people say it, sneer or sincere. I only care if it's so or unso.

And I would argue that it is not, that it's essential to understanding what fantasy is to determine just how it different from other fiction. In fact, until this is determined, it's really not much use carving up the SF/fantasy set.

To me, the difficulty with "science fiction = fantasy", or "science fiction is a subset of fantasy" is that it seems to prioritise fantasy. Whereas I think the difference between most science fiction and most fantasy is pretty obvious, whether because of the way the "different" "genres" have been marketed to us or just because, hey, there's a difference...

But as Hal Duncan says, it's neither inaccurate nor particularly useful to say that it's all "fantastic fiction" (and Niall Harrison likes to refer to that other stuff as "mimetic fiction") - the problem is that "fantasy" pretty straightforwardly refers to a certain flavour of stuff: to most people, I would say, it evokes a numinous but not too badly defined sort of thing, and it's fairly different from the numinous but not too badly defined sort of thing that science fiction evokes.

To put it another way, science fiction is different enough from fantasy that it's conceivable that, individual interstitial pieces of work notwithstanding, a person may like science fiction and not really like fantasy.
To such a person, who may not wish to express a superiority of their preferred genre over any other, it may nevertheless seem a little bit... something... to lump it all into one big ball, differentiated or undifferentiated, and call that ball fantasy. [That "something" may range from "unfair" through to "colonialist", or just plain "wrong".]

It's basically the difference between “theory” and “Theory.”

"To me, the difficulty with "science fiction = fantasy", or "science fiction is a subset of fantasy" is that it seems to prioritise fantasy."

That's really what people are getting all exercised about, isn't it? "Mommy, he has more chocolate chips in his genre than me!"

Well, that and “Ha, ha, my genre has more chocolate chips than yours!”

Er, no. It's just "my genre's not the same as yours, and it's misleading to suggest that it's all actually your genre".

Or, now that I think of it, what you're saying is that what I'm saying is, "Hey! It's unfair because 'fantasy' gets its finger in so many more pies because it's the overarching genre, whereas poor ol' 'science fiction' can only apply to a subset."

But that's not really it either. It's purely and simply an objection to the use of a word for two different things. "Fantasy" is meant to refer on the one hand to a certain type of book, probably containing magic, or a particular kind of world-view -- and then it's also meant to refer to all kinds of "fantastic" fiction, an all-encompassing term which (perhaps, perhaps, perhaps) differentiates these fictions from "mimetic" or "mainstream" fiction.

If we are going to be arguing about definitions (descriptive or prescriptive) of sf and f, I think it's both misleading and unilluminating to say it's all fantasy. It's at best a cute etymological game, and only possible because of that etymology of fantasy.

What if we were to take Nick Mamatas' suggestion and run with it:
Hey, Coke, Pepsi, Chinotto - they're all just different kinds of Coke really.

Running with Nick’s suggestions is often kind of like running with scissors.

In some dialects of American English — Jon Hansen, check me here? — isn’t “coke” used as a catch-all term for any sweetened carbonated beverage?

"Running with Nick"... eek.
I'm sure there are some dialects of American English where "fantasy" is used to mean... oh bugger it, enough, enough! ;)

Your "remember personal info" thing doesn't seem to be working. I'm like "Yeah, no need to introduce yourself, we've met before", but it just keeps saying "Name:... Email Address:..." I feel jilted.

"Running with Nick"... eek.
I'm sure there are some dialects of American English where "fantasy" is used to mean... oh bugger it, enough, enough! ;)

Your "remember personal info" thing doesn't seem to be working. I'm like "Yeah, no need to introduce yourself, we've met before", but it just keeps saying "Name:... Email Address:..." I feel jilted.

"If you kids are going to fight over the cookies, then nobody gets one."

isn’t “coke” used as a catch-all term for any sweetened carbonated beverage?

In the southeast it is. Not soda, not pop. "You want a Coke?" "Sure, whatcha got?" "Diet Coke, Sprite, and a Mountain Dew my brother left behind."

Here, some documentation and a map for doubters.

I grew up in the 'coke==soft drink' part of the country. I've trained myself to say 'soda', but 'pop' still just sounds *wrong* to me.