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.

Reflection: What is Science Fiction?

Science fiction is a broad genre that pervades through most of modern media and culture. Born in the late 19th century and booming within a large portion of the 20th century, this relatively new form of artistic expression lacks the immediate recognition as art that other older genres posses. Simultaneously defined as a realm of great literary fiction and the current residence of bad TV B-movies, the genre struggles to find a definitive voice among the conflicting quality of works. While other genres posses the same quandary of works polar opposite in quality, they retain a certain immunity in the scholar's eye. The romantic genre is often stuck between the poorly written love novel and William Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet", but rarely is the genre written off completely in terms of an academic or literary study. However, academic banishment seems to be the pervasive case with science fiction, often lumped together with fantasy as drivel for unrealistic young men. Yet the fantastical imagery that influences scholars to dismiss the genre is the aspect of science fiction which makes it worth academic analysis. Science fiction has an inextricable link to humanity and the current human condition; it is a bridge between the fantastic and the real.

"My definition of fantasy is something which we would like to happen but it can't in the real world, and science fiction is something which we would like to happen and it probably will." - Arthur C. Clarke

In one of his final interviews before his death in 2008, Arthur C. Clarke explained to futurist Jose Cordeiro his conception of science fiction as a genre. In many ways, Clarke's definition strikes at the heart of what it means to write true science fiction. Clarke's statement also addresses directly the emerging meta-genre of "sci-fi/fantasy" that publishers have seen fit to promote. In the case of both science fiction and fantasy, Clarke underpins both genres with a desire to be something, or to witness some fantastical event. Yet his words "can't" and "can" cut the genres along a very distinct line. While the formation of the Fellowship in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings may represent a human desire (the joining of nations and wills against a greater evil), it is not something humanity can realistically grasp within its hands. Nine individuals cannot realistically battle against a purely evil army in hope of destroying a magical ring. Within this distinction lies the gap between the genres. Tolkien himself wrote that his Middle Earth was not to be an analogous work; it was to be a world in itself, internally consistent, meant to entertain the reader. In essence, fantasy represents an element of escapism; a retreat to a world unbound from natural laws.

Science fiction shares elements of removal from the realistic with fantasy, but it is hardly complete, and serves a vastly different purpose. The genre plucks at the fabric of reality, removing elements in some areas, adding elements to other areas. This modification may be gentle, or it can be extreme. While science fiction avoids pure escapism through the retention of large portions of the human universe, the genre consists of a wide gray-scale of modifications to the real universe. Science fiction closest to the real world is often considered "hard" science fiction, while stories far away from reality are sometimes referred to as "space opera" or "space fantasy". However, the maintenance of this link to human experience is the most pertinent element to academic study of the genre. The modification of the universe, and the removal from the realistic, serves to modify and add upon that link to humanity. Therefore, while no one reader can truly 100% identify with a character from science fiction, the presence of the modified universe, and its elements used to drive the story, enrich the readers experience beyond what any typical setting could express. In essence, science fiction better expresses its elements and themes better because of its modification of reality, and in some cases, is only able to express these elements and themes in a modified universe. Science fiction is present because it cannot be told in any other manner.