I
love being a writer. I love the feeling
of my fingers dancing across the keys, love to watch the words running across
the screen, love to let my mind trace the events and ideas I describe on the
page. I am proud of the three novels I
have completed, and though they are not yet published, I am confident that
someday they will be. But there is one
thing I do not like, and that is when people ask what my books are about.
Yes,
I know that this is a natural question to follow the announcement that am
writing a book. I recognize that this
question is a necessary evil. But if I could
tell the story in the time allotted to a casual conversation, I wouldn’t have
written an entire book (series) about it.
More than that, though, I feel awkward talking about my work to people,
because I have this idea that they will lose interest the moment I answer their
question. You see, I write science
fiction and fantasy, and there is something about those genres that reduces the
respect people give to the writing. I
have expressed my feelings on this stigma at length in a previous post (“Niche”),
so I won’t get into them here.
I
think the reason for this uncertainty is the fact that these genres—collectively
with horror called “speculative fiction”—have long been outliers of literature,
enjoyed by only a few and not considered by academics to be worthy of
analysis. Even now, when fantasy and
science fiction are becoming more firmly established in popular culture—think Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, not to mention Star Wars and Star Trek—still I had trouble finding a professor who had any
knowledge about (or indeed, interest in) my chosen genre. These genres are escapism, a way to get out
of the world, and I think most scholars tend to find realistic fiction more
relevant.
I
disagree (of course). I think that these
genres have a great deal of relevance in today’s culture, that they can teach
us much about ourselves and the world we live in. Maybe people do come to these genres to
escape, to stop thinking about the troubles of this world, but I think they
find in these stories that even in fantastic and outlandish and impossible
worlds and situations, people are still people, still relatable. Readers of science fiction and fantasy see
the best and worst of humanity displayed in ways that we don’t see in our
world, and that has real value.
Fantasy
is defined by the use of imagination to construct a world unlike our own. Of course all fiction involves imagination,
characters and places that do not actually exist, but to qualify as fantasy, a
drastic change has to be made. Either
the story must take place in a different world entirely, or elements of our
world are consciously altered. Magic is
a common tool and a clear sign of fantasy, but there are others—divergent histories,
for example, in which one finds the world just slightly different than it
actually is, because the author imagines what might happen if a certain
historical event had not happened or had been changed.
Early
fantasy came out of stories for children, fairy tales in which the rules of the
world are not questioned. Indeed,
fantasy relies on suspension of disbelief, a willingness on the part of the
reader to accept things as they are presented.
John Ruskin’s The King of the
Golden River and George MacDonald’s The
Princess and the Goblin are often cited as the earliest examples of fantasy
stories, published in 1851 and 1872, respectively. After them came other works by authors such
as William Morris and Lord Dunsany, establishing the genre. In the early 20th century, the
most popular form of fantasy described various “lost worlds”, feeding off of
archaeological discoveries in South America, Egypt, and the Middle East. More and more fantastical stories appeared
throughout the 1920s and 30s, though juvenile fantasy was much more successful
than fantasy for adults. In the 1950s, “sword
and sorcery” fantasy, with its fast-paced action, romance, and focus on
personal matters was most prevalent.
It
was high fantasy, best characterized by Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, that brought fantasy into the mainstream. These stories focus around a single hero or
heroine, usually with a special heritage or a mysterious nature. The story follows the hero as s/he matures,
and it often features a mentor figure and a powerful enemy. The conflict of good vs. evil is central to
such stories. Harry Potter and The
Chronicles of Narnia both fall into this subgenre, and so it is this that
most people think of when they think of fantasy—sweeping epics in other worlds
or in societies set apart from our own world.
There is, however, a subgenre of “low” fantasy, in which the story is
set in our own world with the inclusion of magical elements like personified
animals or toys (The Indian in the
Cupboard), altered physics (The Borrowers),
magical powers, or time slips. These
stories are less black and white than their high fantasy equivalents; their
heroes and heroines tend to be more cynical and have their own agendas.
My
first fantasy book was probably The Last
of the Really Great Whangdoodles, and I would often rent the movie
adaptation of The Princess and the
Goblin. I went on from there to Tamora
Pierce’s Alanna and John Peel’s The Secret of Dragonhome. I don’t know when it was precisely that I was
hooked, but it got to the point that my father would tease me I wouldn’t read
anything unless it had wizards and unicorns in it. High fantasy, low fantasy, I gobbled it all
up, and to this day it remains my favorite genre.
Four
of my five major writing projects are fantasy, and they feature elements from
both high and low fantasy. While my Snapdragon
series has no magic at all and a world following almost all the same rules ours
does, I have another series where the culture of the world is defined by a
decades-long war with demons. Both
subgenres present different challenges to the development of character and
plot, and both offer fascinating explorations of human nature.
“Fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science fiction is the improbable made possible.”
Rod Serling
Science
fiction is equally difficult to define—anything that is considered “speculative”
will naturally push any boundaries one tries to set around it. What one normally finds in science fiction,
though, is a story which looks to the future, finds a world that is technically
possible, and explores how it might come about and what it might be like if it
did.
Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein is often cited
as one of the first science fiction novels.
After her came writers such as Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, inspired by
the wave of new technologies made available in the early twentieth
century. American pulp magazines sprang
up to feature science fiction works, and in the late 1930s, Isaac Asimov, Arthur
C. Clarke, and Ray Bradbury brought us some of the most common elements found
in science fiction, namely robots, space travel, and new political systems (see
I, Robot, The Sentinel, and Fahrenheit 451). Over time, two different subgenres developed:
“hard” science fiction, featuring a focus on the natural sciences and accurate
details, and “soft” science fiction, which is less concerned with accuracy and
more with speculative culture and society.
Other subgenres include cyperpunk, steampunk, time-travel, dystopian,
and apocalyptic.
I’m
somewhat of a newcomer to the science fiction genre, having come to it late and
somewhat by accident. When I first
started to read Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders
of Pern series, I thought that it was fantasy—an agrarian society in a
made-up world, a culture led by musicians…fire-breathing dragons? Of course it was fantasy. But as I continued to read, all of these
elements were explained in a way that would technically be possible, and Pern
was revealed to be a distant planet.
From there I went on to McCaffrey’s collaborative works Acorna and Freedom’s Landing, and then to Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness. As a teenager and young adult, I started to
pick up some of the dystopian works trending at the time, like Uglies by Scott Westerfield and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.
In my reading I definitely lean towards soft science fiction; I’m more
interested in the way possible worlds might affect people’s lives rather than
the technologies in their lives.
My
Youngest series I would definitely classify as soft science fiction. My interest is in the interactions between
people—and yes, I do consider Youngest as a person, despite the fact she is an
artificial intelligence. That debate
itself is part of the reason I started writing her story. This kind of question is something that can
only be asked in science fiction, and it leads to many fascinating themes—the relative
worth of sentient lives, the interaction of human and not-human, the value and
the danger of technology, the comparative horror of death and pain—which are
deeply relevant to today’s world.
So
mainstream or no, science fiction and fantasy have great value. The trends in these genres outline the
direction of human imagination, bringing life to our hopes and fears for the
world. They give a shape and a voice to
things we don’t often think about, to issues that we don’t usually talk
about. I think that’s worthy of some
thought, don’t you?
If
I’ve convinced you, and you would like some recommendations to start your own
exploration into these genres, here are a few in addition to the ones I’ve
mentioned above.
Fantasy:
Abarat by
Clive Barker
Green Rider
by Kristen Britain
Which Witch?
by Eve Ibbotson
A Wizard of
Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
Science Fiction:
Ender’s Game
by Orson Scott Card
The Handmaid’s
Tale by Margaret Atwood
A Wrinkle in
Time by Madeleine L’Engle
Flowers for
Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Science Fantasy (yes, there is such a thing! Science fantasy stories feature elements of
both science fiction and fantasy)
So You Want
to Be a Wizard by Diane Duane
Artemis Fowl
by Eoin Colfer
Heir
Apparent by Vivian Vande Velde
The Giver
by Lois Lowry
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