Week 3 - In What Ways Do Science Fiction and Fantasy Differ?

To my mind, science fiction has always been a genre favoured by thinkers, those writers who stood apart from greater society and who viewed it objectively, painstakingly dissecting its fallacies and inadequacies whilst drawing out their underlying nuances for elucidation in print form. Fantasy, by contrast, is the province of dreamers, those writers who bear little or no interest in societal vagaries, but who are instead concerned with bringing romance and adventure to human archetypes within make-believe realms and histories, places where 'nuances' are swept under the carpet and where grandiose themes of life and death take precedence.

Science fiction has never been afraid to get its hands dirty, asking itself the hard questions that most other genres dare not speak of, themes that straddle the fine line between what is possible and what is impossible, often dealing with dark subject matter and psychological themes. Fantasy, however, often projects antiquated Old World themes of virtue and tradition upon its characters and worlds, the courage and rectitude of its protagonists emboldened while its villains are often exaggeratedly diabolical, with the hero's triumph over the seemingly impossible odds always at the forefront of the heartening good-versus-evil quest.

If science fiction is about what it means to be human, then fantasy is about the human spirit and its limitless capacity to endure and overcome any situation. Realism and idealism, you might say.

According to Plausibility Revisited by Ursula K. Le Guin, authoress of the epic Earthsea Saga, one of the key aspects of fiction in its most generalized form is plausibility (Le Guin, 2005), but fiction's off-shoots - fantasy/science fiction - take different approaches with plausibility as a literary mechanism. Le Guin gives an example of how writers make use of plausibility as a plot device in order to provide a solid foundation or framework for a science fiction story, in this case being a work by noted author Philip K. Dick, Man in the High Castle, in which World War II was won by Germany and Japan (Le Guin, 2005).

Fantasy fiction prefers to play with the idea of plausibility, remaining largely independent of real world limitations, but inclined to borrow from what is expected of people and their actions and planets as places susceptible to the whims and laws of Mother Nature, if only to give readers of fantasy some respite amid the vibrant vistas and fire-breathing dragons (Le Guin, 2005). As Le Guin also notes, fantasy fiction is not overly concerned with probability as it relates to the real world, but rather remaining consistent with the invented rules of constructed worlds as established by its writer, the "coherence of the story" as Le Guin puts it (Le Guin, 2005).

In summary, science fiction and fantasy fiction differ because of the means by which they choose to construct and deconstruct real world plausibilities, not merely due to the context of the stories told in these respective genres, and how through the careful manipulation of the rules of our world literary worlds can achieve wholly new dimensions and depths that further add to the story-telling craft.