On a few ways to parse the differences between two imaginative genres.
As I see it, a class like Introduction to Science Fiction and Fantasy,
which I I taught for the third time this spring, has a couple interconnected
but distinct goals. (Toward its content, I mean; I discussed goals
for the students’ skills and voices in my preview post.) For one thing, it’s
an opportunity to introduce a wide range of authors and works, of examples of
what these genres (and related ones like the
weird tale) can include and entail. I do that by using two anthologies of
short stories alongside our five longer works, so we’re able to read a couple
dozen different authors by the end of the semester. But there’s also another
layer to the class title, and it’s the way in which a class like this can
introduce the genres themselves, and thus help us discuss how we describe and
define literary and cultural categories like them.
There are of course no set answers for those definitions, and indeed I
stress throughout the class how much the opposite is true: that my interest is
in what the students would emphasize, how they can make their own developing
definitions part of their final paper work (among other spaces for such ideas).
Moreover, I think that such definitions develop at least in part through
comparison and contrast, through a sense of what differentiates (in this case)
fantasy from science fiction. This semester the students came up a number of
interesting ideas about those differences: a sense that science fiction deals
more with making the familiar look new to us, while fantasy creates an
unfamiliar world and draws us into it; a perspective on the role of black and
white/good vs. evil narratives in fantasy compared to gray area/ambiguous
narratives in science fiction; and a take on non-chronological/episodic literary
structures in science fiction contrasted with more straightforward journey
structures in fantasy, to name three examples.
As we came to the conclusions of our class discussions, and specifically to
the final conversation about our last novel, Dan
Simmons’ Hyperion (1989), I found myself articulating a
definition of my own that I hadn’t ever quite developed before. It seemed to
me, re-reading Simmons’ novel this time around, that he utilizes mysteries in a
way that feels common to science fiction: foregrounding the mysteries, making
them a primary element to his worldbuilding, and then moving his audience
through the novel by gradually revealing more and more information to explain
those mysteries. Whereas fantasy, I would argue, often foregrounds heavy
expositional worldbuilding, explaining a good deal of its world, and then creates
an increasingly mysterious or uncertain journey for its characters (and
audiences) within that world. And it’s worth noting that each of these concepts
would fulfill distinct human needs: an intellectual desire to grapple with the
universe’s mysteries, on the one hand; and an emotional urge to imagine our own
unfolding journeys as part of a larger world of meanings, on the other. No
wonder these genres are so primal and popular!
Next recap tomorrow,
Ben
PS. How was your spring semester?
PPS. After I scheduled this post, my talented student Harrison Chute shared the following salient Orson Scott Card quote: "Science fiction is about what could be but isn't; fantasy is about what couldn't be."
PPS. After I scheduled this post, my talented student Harrison Chute shared the following salient Orson Scott Card quote: "Science fiction is about what could be but isn't; fantasy is about what couldn't be."
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