Today we take a crack at an old chestnut:

Is it worth maintaining the thin red line between Science Fiction and Fantasy?

My two cents is that for adults this question is largely irrelevant. Experienced Science Fiction and/or Fantasy readers know what they want and where to find it. There are a few books that exist in the murky territory between the two (not enough for some, too many for others).

My beef is with what’s being presented to young readers. I worry (perhaps undeservedly so) that they’re being presented the two genres as two alien opposites (ie horror/romance) as opposed to two sides of the same coin. I got into Science Fiction and Fantasy from a background in comic books (which I started reading at the age of three) and fantasy. One of the great things about comics was that there wasn’t much of an attempt made to delineate between the two genres. Your average comic book universe runs that gamut from Science Fiction (granted not very Hard SF mind you) to Fantasy to Mystery to War to Horror. This gave me as a young reader a wonderful feel for how the genres were and weren’t related. And as a result it was a pretty smooth and natural transition from going through the Wardrobe into Narnia and then shortly after riding the Hot Needle of Inquiry to the Ringworld. I wonder if young readers nowadays aren’t herded into increasingly fenced-in definitions of genre at the expense of the genre-blending experience I had growing up. We hear a lot of talk about there not being enough young adult science fiction nowadays but perhaps what we really need is to make it easier to port young readers over from children’s Fantasy to Science Fiction.

That’s more than enough of a whinge from me, now onto our commentators:

Michael A. Burstein:
People have been trying to define this line for years, and I’m not about to try to figure out where to place it. But fantasy and science fiction have always served different literary purposes, and I would be reluctant to eliminate the line between them entirely.

Marissa Lingen:
“Maintaining” makes it sound like it’s ever been there, and I don’t think it has–not with any solidity. Some things get stuck into science fiction by trope association, not by any definition based on what the story is actually doing. Same with fantasy. If something has giant lizard-like creatures, is it SF or fantasy? Is alternate history SF or fantasy, or does it depend on what’s being altered? The existence of black and white does not negate the existence of grey. Or blue, purple, green, yellow.

I studied nuclear physics before I quit to write, so that’s where I come from–and I think it affects the fantasy I write a lot more than it does the science fiction. I don’t want to have to strip out that part of my brain before I sit down to write, and I don’t think it’s possible even if I did want to. Most of the people who want to insist on the separation seem a lot more interested in keeping SF free of fantasy, but for me it goes both ways. Whenever I see characters dealing with awesome, world-changing power, I think of the Manhattan Project. I can’t keep wave-particle duality out of *anything* any more. And I think the best writing, at any length and in any genre, is influenced broadly–by myth, science, history, personal experience, other genres, other stuff within the same genre, all of it.

So I think it’s valuable that some stories are firmly science fiction and some are distinctly fantasy, but the muddy middle is where my own brain works most of the time. I like it here.

Deanna Hoak:

I’m not even going to try to define the difference between fantasy and science fiction, as there have been numerous fantastic discussions on that very topic all over the blogosphere.

Needless to say, though, there are books that are clearly fantasy or clearly science fiction, and there are people who prefer reading one or the other. From that perspective, of course it’s worth maintaining the labels. The problem arises when you try to force novels into only one category when they don’t clearly belong to either, because as is evidenced by all those earlier discussions, plenty of people don’t agree on the distinctions.

When China Miéville’s Iron Council (which I copyedited) won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, some people complained that it shouldn’t have because it wasn’t science fiction. The “thin red line” for all those books in the interstices is fading out, though, and many readers prefer books that fall into that gray (or pink, I suppose, then ; - )) area.

Publishers will undoubtedly continue to maintain the line, because it’s worth it for the books farthest from the middle. Readers who enjoy the interstitial novels will find them anyway—we never paid much attention to which side of the line we were walking on in the first place.

Ian Watson:
In the long run it’s impossible, because when space exploration ceases and big tech fails and resources run out, et cetera, and after what’s left of human civilisation undergoes a paradigm shift, all science fiction will become fantasy. After a few hundred years, SF will be more fantastic than fantasy. This will be the posthumous victory of SF, although only hypothetical alien archeologists of the further future will realise.

Ian Watson’s homepage

Susan Palwick:
My preferred definitions, adapted from Joanna Russ and Samuel R. Delany, are that SF deals with things that are possible but haven’t happened yet, while fantasy deals with things that are impossible. And since the line between the possible and the impossible is vitally important, however thin and red it may be, I do think the distinction is worth maintaining. The possible reminds us what we could do, but haven’t yet done. The impossible reminds us what we wish we could do, of the dreams and yearnings we can make real nowhere except in art. The possible reminds us that we have a responsibility to the concrete world around us; the impossible reminds us that we are more than our physical and social limitations, that we are creatures with endless imaginations who delight in play as much as in work.

The thin red line, while important, is also always moving, as things once considered impossible become commonplace. This means that science fiction and fantasy will never be static genres, because they will always have new territory to consider and explore.

Susan Palwick’s homepage

Andrew Wheeler:
For me, “thin red line” isn’t really the right metaphor — it’s more of a big fat demilitarized zone in between SF and fantasy. Oh, sure, plenty of traders go through it all the time, and a few squatters even try to live there permanently — like any semi-fortified border anywhere — but the bulk of the people of both sides are wary of it, and try to avoid it. It has to be a fat zone, because every reader draws the border in a slightly different place. They’re all in the same neighborhood, but there’s quite a bit of leeway depending on who’s talking.

I spend much of my professional life thinking about whether particular books are SF or fantasy, and that really boils down to the question “Who is most likely to read and enjoy this book?” Yes, writers always want to believe that everyone in the world will love their little darlings, if they’d only read it, but that’s not the case. Different people like different things to begin with, and the expectations a reader has going into a book will color her reading of it. Most books don’t cause much trouble; they’re clearly one thing or the other — or, at least, most of the books I deal with regularly, that are going to be of interest to that wide audience, are clearly one or the other. (There are plenty of books digging deep into that no-man’s-land, but they’re very rarely the books that are taken up and enjoyed by large numbers of readers.)

So, to me, what’s important is communicating clearly what a book really is, and not trying to disguise it as something it’s not. That’s more difficult if it’s something complicated like Sean McMullen’s “MoonWorlds” series (which are alien-planet fantasy, with one vampire ex-human character in a new body, probably set in the medium future, and the magic might even have a deeply hidden technical explanation) than it is with Hal Clement or Terry Brooks, but that doesn’t make it less important. As Lawrence Block once said in a slightly different context, beer tastes good, but if you’re expecting ale, good beer tastes like really bad ale.

There’s no purpose to patrolling the border and keeping authors, books and readers out of it. But there *is* great value in carefully signposting the border, so that we all can see where we’re standing as we look at it.
Andrew Wheeler is senior editor at Science Fiction Book Club

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