Reflection: What is science fiction?

In Orson Scott Card’s book How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, he spends quite a bit of time on this subject. He does, however, describe it chiefly as a publishing issue—defining science fiction versus fantasy. “A rustic setting,” he says, “always suggests fantasy; to suggest science fiction, you need sheet metal and plastic. You need rivets” (Card, 4). So it is better, perhaps, to start out with defining what is “speculative fiction” as terminology and narrow it down from there.


To me, speculative fiction is about trying to explain the world through a different lens. In a sense, it is about taking something contemporary and running with it. For example: Frank Herbert’s Dune takes the notion of a struggle for resources and exaggerates it to develop an entire galactic empire locked in a battle over spice. The native peoples of the planet Arrakis must sacrifice their desire for a moisturized world in order to keep the sandworms, the source of the spice, alive, and therefore maintain the galactic economy. In doing so Herbert is able to depict the contemporary environmental issues facing our world today, particularly regarding oil consumption and the destruction of natural habitats.


Dune does not have that many rivets. It is as much caught up in the myth and legend of the story as it is in the spaceships and biological science. Even though Herbert has come out with saying that “the scarce water of Dune is an exact analog of oil scarcity” (Genesis of Dune) the story also addresses the making of a myth and a legend. So what precisely separates Dune from, for instance, Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast?


There is something about fantasy, I feel that, in contrast, to science fiction, is fundamentally organic. This is probably what Card means when he talks about rivets. Fantasy does not have, as science fiction does, a desire to explain itself in the same way. I do not, from a first reading of Titus Groan, have any idea why, where, or how the castle of Gormenghast exists. I do not have any idea how the One Ring of Tolkein fame was made, or how Sauron derives power from it. I do, however, know that the Bene Gesserit in Dune derive their witch-like power from intense training, combined later with effects from the spice melange. I can talk, with relative ease, about the concept of psychohistory in Foundation as a mathematical and sociological phenomenon as opposed to a force of prophecy.


We have a tendency to get caught up in the categorizing of things. It is a human trait, and hardly surprising. In this case, the most important thing you can say about science fiction, as a category, is not the presence of rivets or sheet metal or plastic, but the presence of speculative thought made concrete in fiction. Science fiction as a genre enables us to look and think critically at our world but placing its problems in another.