What is SF/F?

And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.^[1]

—William Shakespeare

Go to your local bookstore and you’re sure to find a section labeled “Science Fiction and Fantasy.” In some ways, the pairing doesn’t make sense. Science and fantasy are at odds; one maintains a foot in observable reality, while the other breaks the gravitational pull of reality to only be limited by the author’s imagination. In other ways, the pairing makes a lot of sense. Fans of one are often fans of the other, though the old feudal border—some crumbling ancient wall set between the two—persists. Despite old borders, any science fiction writer will tell you that what they do with the imagination isn’t all that different from what fantasy writers do with the imagination. Both genres require a degree of creativity and a sophistication of world-building rarely matched by the more realistic genres. The biggest similarity between the two? They are marketed in the same ways and to the same demographics.

In fact, the terms science fiction and fantasy might rightly be considered market distinctions more than proper descriptors for discrete genres. Both are popular genres, often found in grocery stores alongside Harlequin romances and spy thrillers. Marketed in this way, the terms science fiction and fantasy become catch-alls for any fiction that breaks with empirical reality. Often, science fiction and fantasy merge and become one, as is the case with weird fiction or science fantasy. In such cases, generic distinctions fall apart, the writers themselves refusing to be pigeon-holed. It is for this reason that many writers and critics prefer the term speculative fiction. It should be noted, however, that many SF and fantasy writers refuse the label speculative fiction. This was especially true during the 20th century, when the labels speculative fiction and science fiction were sometimes synonymous with literary, “high” fantasies and popular, “low” fantasies, respectively. Speculative fiction is sometimes now used as a catch-all for all tales of marvel and wonder, to the detriment of the more properly extrapolative elements of SF. While this discussion might seem overly taxonomic (it is), genre distinctions allow communities of readers and writers a shorthand to navigate the vast informational landscape and find the fiction they enjoy.

Fantasy is even more complicated when we approach it from the point of view of genre. Part of this complexity results from the tensions between the interpretation of fantasy as a genre versus the fantastic as a mode. In theory, the two are not mutually compatible. A genre is any classification of a body of texts with a shared set of conventions, themes, or ideas. A mode is a broader literary category that can describe conventions or techniques found across many different genres and forms. So, while we speak about fantasy literature—a genre with a specific history, one often tied to the person of J.R.R. Tolkien—we also speak about the fantastic, a literary mode that can be found in diverse genres, including fantasy, horror, and science fiction. Many critics see modes as diametrically opposed to genres because modes create ahistorical, ideal forms while genres are historically located and specific. In fact, as you’ll learn throughout this OER textbook, the interpretive conventions of the fantastic mode are often incompatible with the interpretive conventions of the high fantasy genre.

The fantastic mode relies on an element of surprise, a moment of hesitation and doubt. To create this moment, a baseline reality must first be established, one in accordance with known rules of physics, biology, etc. After this baseline is established, something occurs to disrupt it, something impossible according to the known rules of reality. One genre within the fantastic mode is the Gothic, a quintessential example being the tale of a haunted house that turns out not to be so haunted (think every episode of Scooby-Doo). This genre emerged in the late 18th century, and as such, could hardly be said to be the same genre as cosmic horror, one that emerged in the early 20th century with the work of H.P. Lovecraft and concerns itself with the incomprehensible as a source of horror. What historical conditions shaped the emergence of these respective genres, both equally in the fantastic mode? The Gothic emerges when society is transitioning from the feudal mode to the industrial, capitalist one—ancient castles and cathedrals became synonymous with old ways and old superstitions. Cosmic horror emerges, conversely, as humanity is turning its attention to the stars and the unfathomable vastness of space.

Modes are not Platonic ideals—ideals toward which every text ought to strive—because modes are also historical and subject to change. Such changes to modes are usually accompanied by changes to how people see the world and their relationship to it. In fact, the fantastic mode is impossible without the scientific revolution, a subject we will address in more detail below. We’ll also go into a little more detail about genres and modes.

Throughout this text, we will continue to refer to science fiction and fantasy as SF/F because this abbreviation allows us to express the multi-faceted nature of our object of study while maintaining the market distinctions with which readers are familiar. Considering how complex the relationship between mode, genre, and history is, when we say SF/F, we mean several things at once. “SF” refers not just to the genre of science fiction, but also alludes to speculative fiction; “F” refers to both the genre of fantasy and the fantastic mode. In this way, we hope to produce an OER that captures the complexity of non-realistic modes and genres in all their marvel and wonder.

Genre

Genre studies focus on the taxonomization of works of art. In this sense, much of genre theory is structuralist in orientation; yet the rigid conceptualization of systems that is structuralism is incapable of describing, in reality, the complex and shifting aesthetic terrains of science fiction and fantasy (or any other genre). This OER textbook takes a soft Lukáscian approach to genre, an approach explained below.

By Lukáscian we mean in accord with the work of György Lukács, a Hungarian and marxist theorist of the novel. In his works The Theory of the Novel (1916) and The Historical Novel (1955), he argues for a historical materialist understanding of genre. Historical materialism designates a school of thought that sees human society, culture, art, etc., as determined by the material, economic conditions of a given society. Following this method, specific literary forms are born from specific conditions. One genre upon which Lukács expends a great deal of energy is realism, especially the realism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For him, realism, as a literary genre, balances the subjective and objective aspects of life within the text.^[2] Lukács downgrades naturalism because it focuses too much on the objective, casting humanity through its characters as helpless victims of natural or social forces; he also downgrades the avant-garde or experimental, arguing that the overfocus on the subjective portrays the objective world as a non-factor. You can see how the generic categories (realism, naturalism, avant-garde) begin to form into rigid structures.

Famously, Lukács debated the German playwright Bertolt Brecht on genre. Brecht was an avant-garde dramatist, a playwright who sought to push the boundaries of theater. He argued that the so-called overly subjective prose that Lukács maligned was actually more realistic to the modern reader than the balanced subject-object realism Lukács so adored. Reality, Brecht reasoned, had changed (modernity had, after all, brought about urbanization and mechanization), thus the experience of reality must change. If writers of the early 20th century wrote in a way that seemed overly subjective, it was because they were alienated from the material world and each other by the rapid pace and exploitation of modern life. Whether we side with Brecht or Lukács is immaterial. Brecht’s critique points to the limitations of the historical approach to genre; while Lukács was convinced a certain manifestation of realism—19th century bourgeois realism—represented the height of the novel, he could not see how changing historical circumstances demanded new generic formulations. You can see how rigid generic structures soon fall apart.

This Lukáscian approach had a profound impact on the study of science fiction and fantasy thanks to the work of Yugoslavian and Marxist literary critic Darko Suvin. For more on Darko Suvin, see Chapter 2, “Science Fiction.” For now, it is enough to note that Suvin’s early definition of SF served as one of the first theoretical defenses of SF as a genre. This was a necessary defense because science fiction was viewed as a “low” or popular genre, written only as cheap entertainment for a mass audience. Such popular texts usually prioritize plot development over character development, and for this reason they are often considered less literary than “high” genres such as bourgeois realism. This distinction plagued the early studies of science fiction, and a bit of that old prejudice toward the popular persists even today. But scholars continue to argue for science fiction’s capacity to induce critical thinking.

Suvin made the same error as Lukács. That is, he failed to see how his own analysis was historically situated. When he wrote his treatise, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979), Suvin described a specific type of science fiction that reached its peak in that era, much as the realistic novel had reached its peak in the late Victorian period for Lukács. In that text, Suvin downgraded fantasy literature, just as Lukács had done with naturalism and the avant-garde. While Suvin might have made many of the same errors as Lukács, he did not repeat them all. Lukács hardened his position when questioned by Brecht, whereas Suvin, under the pressure of criticism and a changing literary landscape, later softened his position on fantasy literature, conceding that it was not merely the “old obscurantist foe.”^[3]

Though in the 20th century the barriers between fantasy and science fiction were rigid, the 21st centuries have ushered in a profound rearrangement of the old borders between science fiction and fantasy, a rearrangement made possible by the rise of the virtual mode as one of the dominant literary modes. You can still find classic science fiction without magic or gods, just as you can find magical tales that reject all semblances of modern technologies, sure, but it is now much easier to find works that blend the two. In the 20th century, the subgenre of science fantasy seemed almost too ridiculous, and involved ludicrous concepts such as vikings^[4] or English knights^[5] in space. By the 21st century, the subgenre of weird fiction had become a phenomenon, blending science fiction and fantasy in unique ways, such as is the case with China Miéville’s Bas-Lag Trilogy, a virtual fantasy world where magic is real but knowable as a physical phenomenon in the same way as chemistry, biology, etc. Works by authors from non-European backgrounds also do not demonstrate the strict demarcation between science and magic. N.K. Jemison’s Broken Earth Trilogy is an excellent example of this, and those texts are mentioned in both Chapter 2 on SF and Chapter 3 on Fantasy. What is it about the conditions of the 21st century that make the blending of science and magic more prevalent? What two competing impulses clash and harmonize in the production of such texts? Why are non-Western, non-white authors more likely to blend magic and science?

If it’s not clear, the strictly generic approach isn’t sufficient. There’s something about these genres that extends beyond rigid structural boundaries, something that allows them to intermingle and connect, even if they sometimes clash. Figure 1.1 below is meant to help readers visualize the complex relationship between genres and mode. To better understand the forces that might work across history and across genres, let’s turn to a discussion of mode.

Mode

When thinking about modes, many critics succumb to the temptation to paint with a wide brush. For example, it might be tempting to classify every genre that deals with marvels and wonders as an example of the fantastic mode; following this, the fantastic exists as some sort of ahistorical ideal embodied in specific ways by specific cultures. But this is too deterministic a formulation. Rather than thinking of modes as an ideal that produces specific manifestations, this OER emphasizes that modes are also historical in nature. Therefore, they are subject to historical change. To understand this OER, it is important to understand the fantastic, mimetic,^[6] and virtual modes. We’ll cover each below, but let’s build a little context first.

These literary modes have a close relationship to the epistemological conditions from which they emerge, especially regarding superstition versus empirical thinking. Each relies on certain shared assumptions about the nature of reality, assumptions shared so deeply that we do not often think about them. For example, how do you know what’s real? What if it were all just a dream within a dream? What if it all were a simulation within a simulation? How would you even know the difference? Stub your toe on a rock and all these existential questions go right out the door, sure, but later, when you reflect on your pain, you’ll have to admit it was all a production put on by chemicals in your brain. If the role of the subject is so pronounced, was it really the rock, the object, that caused the pain? To take it even further, what’s to say this world isn’t some vast simulation run on some universal-divine server?

Every now and then, things happen, big things, and these things shake our assumptions about the nature of reality, shake them so hard that we undergo what are called epistemological shifts, changes to the assumptive matrix we’ve used to navigate reality. This isn’t to say that the old ways of seeing the world just magically go away; no, quite the contrary. The old ways tend to live on, coexisting more or less peacefully with the new ways of seeing as circumstances demand. A couple of key epistemological shifts are critical to understanding the history of science fiction and fantasy. The first, and perhaps the most influential, is the epistemological shift of the Enlightenment, a period in European history during which scientific reason was extolled and old superstitions eradicated. The second major shift is the shift to the digital and the virtual, where reality is mediated by advanced computing technologies. Let’s take each in turn.

All of the mythic, religious, and allegorical modes were downgraded during the Enlightenment. ^[7] As such, these ancient modes are insufficient to describe the modern genres of SF/F.^[8] Efforts were made to eradicate the old superstitions of the common folk. These superstitions were often conveyed via folklore, about which you can learn more in Chapter 6. But it was not only folklore to which superstitious content matter was attached. There are allegorical modes that seek not to represent reality but to convey the deeper truths behind reality. The allegorical mode often overlapped with the mythic; myth-making, or the creation of cohesive narratives that provide national or social identity, is central to much SF/F. Even the most technologically oriented science fiction can attune itself to the metaphysical, even if that might seem contradictory.

While downgrading some modes, the Enlightenment elevated the mimetic mode and made possible the fantastic mode. The mimetic mode purports to represent reality as it is. Thus, for the peasants living before the Enlightenment, for whom fairies were part of their reality, their tales might be said to be mimetic. That is, their collective assumptions about the nature of reality would lend the tales a sense of verisimilitude, or believability. As what counted as real changed, a change affected by the Enlightenment, the mimetic mode ushered in high realism.^[9] Reality was not the world of fairies but the world of country towns, cities, loves, losses, everything verifiable and human and real. To this day, literary realism remains the norm, a split that continues to drive the high/low distinction discussed above (realistic texts are often considered more serious and worthy of study than fantasy texts).

The fantastic mode relies fundamentally upon the epistemological shift of the Enlightenment; without the Enlightenment assault on superstition, this mode simply would not exist. This is the case because the fantastic mode assumes a scientific and rational worldview. We discuss the fantastic mode in great detail in Chapter 5, but for now it is enough to say that this mode relies on a baseline sense of reality that is then disrupted by something inexplicable or impossible; if these things turn out to be, say, a dream or hallucination, the story will be a realistic genre, but if the impossible thing turns out to be a ghost or fairies or something else, the story will resolve into a fantastic genre.

That moment of experiencing “that which breaks the rules of reality” is key to the fantastic mode. Knowing it could not be real, we are then led down various paths toward horror, SF, etc. An oft cited text here would be Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Looking at Figure 1.2 below, you will see that this date falls with the Romantic period, a period known for advocating passion and madness in reaction to the sterile rationality of the Enlightenment period. The fantastic mode, perhaps better than any other mode, captures that Romantic impulse to rebel against the prison walls of empirical reality.

All this talk of the Enlightenment and the Romantic period is extremely Eurocentric—overly focused on and valuing episodes of European history that may not apply to every culture everywhere. Magic realism, a genre that treats the impossible as real, tends to come from cultures where belief in the supernatural is a commonplace part of everyday life; that is, these cultures never experienced anything quite so totally dismissive of their beliefs as the Enlightenment period was of folk beliefs in Europe. Science translates better across cultures than mythologies, and as Chapter 2 reveals, science fiction is a world literature, revealing that science can spread without the ideological assumptions of the Enlightenment.

The case is not so clear cut with fantasy. Built by Tolkien from the stuff of European myth and Wagnerian opera, fantasy has become a repository for all sorts of wee and fae folk (general terms for fairies of all sorts) of European extract. This Eurocentric situation is beginning to change, especially in America, where many people of different cultural backgrounds draw upon their respective cultural mythologies to create new and daring fantasies that break with the Eurocentric model set forth by Tolkien, Lewis Carrol, George R.R. Martin, and others. In general, though, societies that have not gone through something such as the Enlightenment would find a fantasy writer’s use of sacred stories to be profane and sacrilegious. In this sense, fantasy is uniquely modern.

The Enlightenment initiated a period of warfare between reality and fantasy that persists to this very day. During the Victorian period, efforts were made to prevent children (and adults) from consuming too much fantasy, especially fairy tales. Science fiction tended to fare a little better because it could always bill itself as educational^[10], but fairy tales without clear instructional purpose were considered detrimental to children. During the Victorian Age, it seemed like reality had outflanked fantasy yet again. But this was not the case. There was a growing body of literature that focused on fantasies for children and adults. Even if these works were often sanitized to serve a social purpose, readers were still consuming them, daring to dream. Fantasy fared better during the Modern Period, a period that focused on the subjective experience of the world over the objective. Modernism also developed new and experimental literary techniques, such as surrealism, that blurred the distinction between reality and dream in a way that disrupted modal expectations. It was in the postmodern age, though, that fantasy fared best.

Postmodernism challenged old binaries such as reality/fantasy but also produced the conditions for the virtual mode to gain in prestige. Even putatively realistic fictions such as Jorge Luis Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940) are written in this virtual, worldbuilding way. If fantasy texts create secondary virtual realities, then what use as a conceptual tool is the fantastic mode, which relies on a shared sense of reality to generate its primary affect?

An understanding of the virtual mode is vital to understanding the 21st century evolutions of SF/F. The virtual mode is in some ways new, but its pedigree is long. In fairy tales, a type of secondary belief was practiced and perfected that is necessary to full immersion in the virtual; in the utopian genre (Chapter 4), new worlds were rendered with complex political and social systems that influence the virtual world-building of all SF/F; in children’s literature the virtual was more and more sequestered until, spilling out into games, it encountered the digital age and could no longer be contained. Empowered by the internet, all sorts of virtual environments were born, from video games, to chat rooms and social media. Science fiction and virtual worlds are synonymous with the digital age, but also central to understanding fantasy. Tolkien might have cast the virtual worlds of fantasy as an escape from modernity, but when considered as part of the virtual mode, fantasy is a quintessentially modern genre.