Introduction to the Fantastic

And you will face the sea of darkness, and all therein that may be explored.

–Narrator, The Beyond (1981)

What is the fantastic? If we turn to Tzvetan Todorov, world-renowned Bulgarian-French philosopher and critic, he informs us, “The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event”.^[1] In other words, the fantastic exists in limbo or stasis, the grey area of making a decision about a hesitation to confirm something as real or fantasy. Once the fictional character who experiences the crisis of hesitation makes a decision to believe or reject the supernatural, the concept of the fantastic dissipates. It is a passing moment, a pause, much like John Donne’s metaphysical contemplation of death in “Sonnet X” in which “And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die” once a person experiences the life stage of dying. In the way that Donne’s poem about death confronts the concept as a slippage between life, death itself, and the afterlife, so goes the fantastic to be the intermediary and vanishing point between reality, fantasy, and what lies beyond making a decision out of those two choices. Specific to the fantastic, however, once a character accepts the fantasy or reality and the hesitation dissipates, they simultaneously become immersed within it.

Science fiction, fantasy, and the fantastic–a mode of literature represented by the unknown and the supernatural–successfully combine in written texts and visual media (graphic literature, film, television, and video games) as evidenced by a longstanding tradition of narratives published and produced in their creative spaces, and examining this genre-mode fusion allows us to better understand how to read, research, and write about it. The speculative nature of science fiction and the ambivalence of fantasy allows the fantastic to naturally blend with the two genres to provide audiences with fictitious spaces that examine elements beyond our known realities. In this chapter, we focus on the fantastic in science fiction and fantasy as an amalgamation of genre (horror as one of its leaders alongside weird fiction), other modes and styles (the carnivalesque, magical realism, and surrealism), and aesthetics (Gothic and macabre) that examines human curiosity, fear, anxiety, enlightenment, and dread in relation to discoveries and threats beyond our control.