Sci-fi versus Fantasy

Confession: I have to be very careful not to read special significance into coincidences. I think I'm just predisposed to find meaning in randomness.

Reading:

• The Van, by Roddy Doyle

Writing:

• "Ferian Fetlock Cures a Horse"

Revising

• "Dolly Hobbles"

I've never been a big fan of utter realism in fiction. What's the point of reading about reality? There's enough of that in real life to go around. But my tastes have shifted from a love for science fiction to a love for fantasy.

I wouldn't say there was ever a point that I disliked fantasy. The Hobbit was one of my early favorites, although I started The Lord of the Rings too early to really get into it properly until much later. But there wasn't a great deal of good fantasy stories for my age range available in the 80s and early 90s. The age of Harry Potter had not yet begun.

No, this was the age of Star Trek. Thanks to Reading Rainbow, I found out that LeVar Burton was in another show too, and that looked pretty cool. So from 1987 until my sophomore year in college, I was a dedicated Trekkie. At one point, I had over 200 of the Star Trek novels, as well as every single episode on tape, recorded off of television. My greatest literary achievement of high school, the fifteen part epic entitled The Happy Wars Saga was heavily based on the Starfleet system outline in Star Trek. Essentially, it was a universe in which I and a few of my friends were happy to play.

By the time I got to college, that fervor started to wane. I can still remember when I stopped reading Star Trek fiction. It was in Wal-Mart when I saw a certain paperback--a Star Trek/X-Men crossover. My illusions were shattered.

Ten years later, I read that book. It sucked, but not as bad as I was afraid of. It still read like Mary Jane fan fiction.

I had an immediate outlet, though. This was 1998, and Star Wars fervor had begun, first with the release of the Special Editions, and soon with the advent of the first prequel. I'm going to go on record right now to say that The Phantom Menace is my favorite Star Wars movie. (That's right, fuckers. That's not even a confession, because I don't feel guilty about it.)

But Star Wars is often held up as somewhere between sci-fi and fantasy, and I always related more to the Jedi than to droids or bounty hunters or X-wing pilots. And there was more.

Without the monthly influx of two or three Star Trek novels, my reading output went elsewhere. It found Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, Martin's Song of Ice and Fire, and revisited old favorites like Anne McCaffrey's Pern series and the venerable Lord of the Rings. Then I discovered Terry Pratchett, and he displaced Douglas Adams in my mind as the king of humorous speculative fiction.

Wherefore this change? I think it's because science fiction is all about dehumanization, and fantasy is all about being human. And between the two, I know which I'd rather fantasize about. I never really read much sci-fi outside of the Star Trek universe, and when you think about it, that show was never really about the technology either, only where it could take you.

I love stories about honor, and by the time you get to the post-apocalyptic worlds of science fiction, honor no longer exists... or if it does, it's in a story like Dune that is as much fantasy as Star Wars.

The Fallacy of Fantasy

Confession: I love old Kung Fu movies, especially early Jackie Chan, back when he did all his own stunts, but none of the lines... at least, not in English.

Reading:

• Master of the Cauldron by David Drake

Writing:

• "Ferian Fetlock Cures a Horse"

I just finished my last few revisions on "Illuminated" today over my lunch hour at work. I've formatted it according to the guidelines posted on the Realms of Fantasy website, and tomorrow I submit it for publication, along with a long overdue car insurance bill.

That's got me thinking a lot about fantasy (the story, not the bill). In particular, this innate contradiction inherent in most fantasy settings.

Any world should be one that draws us in. Fantasy, in particular, succeeds because it presents a world of which we'd like to be a part. More than most other genres, fantasy invites us to live in a new and different place, one in which our values have meaning and the realities of normal existence can be countermanded with the wave of a wand. It's a world in which people can be Special (note the capital), and those people are us.

Yet in order to be believable, the story must ring true, in characterization and description and motivation and all the other pieces that make up a story. In order to compensate for the fantastical elements, everything else must be grounded in relentless realism.

Do you see the inherent contradiction? Most fantasy settings are medieval or even earlier. Master of the Cauldron, for example, is based around classical era technology (in the seafaring especially) and Sumerian culture. And yet the characters have the same point of view and standard of living as we do. If I were suddenly transported to this world, I might not have much more to complain about than itchy clothes and a long walk in the morning for a cold bath.

But is that really surprising? To make a world one that people would want to live in, it is necessary to gloss over some of the more unpalatable elements. Yet in doing so risks sacrificing the believability of the setting, which is so important in a fantasy story. So the author is left to walk a thin line between gritty realism and escapism.

Some stories choose to fall off the tightrope entirely and follow one path or the other. George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire goes 100% gritty. It is not a world in which I would ever choose to live, but I enjoy visiting it very much. Of course, very much the same story could be written in an historical novel, if a few of the fantasy elements were replaced with real world equivalents. I would submit that A Song of Ice and Fire is not a fantasy per se, but rather a story with fantastical elements.

On the other side of the spectrum, David Eddings' multi-volume saga consisting of The Belgariad and The Malloreon spring readily to mind. The world in which they are set is a pageant, not a real world. I'm not claiming it wasn't an enjoyable read, but it was by no means deep literature.

I'm not trying to impose a value judgment on one technique over the other, although my tastes tend more toward Martin than Eddings. And it would be a mistake to believe that all fantasy can be measured along that same spectrum, or that none can succeed in balancing the two. I believe that Charles de Lint's Newford books are stories are a great contender for the prize, blending vivid characters and troubling realism with a fantasy world I'd love to explore.

For my own writing, I think I'll want to decide from the very beginning whether I want to walk the line, or take the story in one direction or another. My worry is that I will try the balancing act, and I will fail, and the result will be more of the usual insipid fantasy prose.