Science fantasy

For the magazine, see Science Fantasy (magazine).

Cover of the magazine Imagination, October 1950

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Science fantasy is a mixed genre within speculative fiction drawing elements from both science fiction and fantasy. Although in some terms of its portrayal in recent media products it can be defined as instead of being a mixed genre of science fiction and fantasy it is instead a mixing of the genres science fiction and supernatural.

Science fantasy vs. science fiction

A definition, offered by Rod Serling, is that "science fiction makes the implausible possible, while science fantasy makes the impossible plausible."^{[citation needed][dubious – discuss]} The meaning is that science fiction describes unlikely things that could possibly take place in the real world under certain conditions, while science fantasy gives a veneer of realism to things that simply could not happen in the real world under any circumstances. Another interpretation is that science fiction does not permit the existence of fantasy or supernatural elements; science fantasy does. Even the usage of this definition is difficult, however, as some science fiction makes use of apparently supernatural elements such as telepathy although science fiction can use telepathy or telekinesis because they deal with the mind and such abilities can be accessed or created through scientific means.

For many users of the term, however, "science fantasy" is either a science fiction story that has drifted far enough from reality to "feel" like a fantasy, or a fantasy story that is attempting to be science fiction. While these are in theory classifiable as different approaches, and thus different genres (fantastic science fiction vs. scientific fantasy), the end products are sometimes indistinguishable.

Arthur C. Clarke's dictum the "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" indicates why this is so: a writer can write a fantasy using magic of various sorts, and yet turn the story into science fiction by positing some highly advanced technology, or as-yet-unknown but ultimately thoroughly provable science, as an explanation for how the magic can occur. Another writer can describe a future world where technologies are so advanced to be invisible, and the effects produced would be classified as magical if they were only described as such. A world might include magic which only some people (or only the reader) know to be in fact technological effects.

There is therefore nothing intrinsic about the effects described in a given story that will tell the reader whether it is science fiction or fantasy^{[citation needed]}. The classification of an effect as "fantastic" or "science fictional" is a matter of convention. Hyperspace, time machines and scientists are conventions of science fiction; flying carpets, magical amulets and wizards are tropes of fantasy. This is an accident of the historical development of the genre^{[citation needed]}. In some cases they have overlapped: teleportation by matter-transmitter-beam is science fiction, teleportation by incantation is fantasy. A hand-held cloaking device that confers invisibility is science fiction; a hand-held Ring of Power that confers invisibility is fantasy. Mind-to-mind communication can be "psionics", or it can be an ancient elvish art. What matters is not the effect itself (generally scientifically impossible, though not always believed to be so by the authors) but the wider universe it is intended to evoke. If it is one of space travel and proton-pistols, it gets classified as "science fiction", and the appropriate terms (cloaking device, matter-transmitter) are used; if it is one of castles, sailing ships and swords, it gets classified as "fantasy", and we instead speak of magic rings and travel by enchantment. In short, science fiction uses technology to explain impossible phenomena while fantasy employs magic. For the most part, science fiction will attempt to explain its effects using known physical laws or reasonable extensions of them. Science fantasy will generally ignore physical laws (i.e., magic) or invent its own structure of laws which have no necessary connection to known laws. Science fiction is also more likely to take the time to delineate the laws or extensions involved, while fantasy will provide a more meager structure of its invented rules^{[citation needed]}.

Drawing the line between science fiction and fantasy is not made any clearer by the fact that both of them can use invented worlds, non-human intelligent creatures (sometimes, in science fiction as well as fantasy, based on myth: consider C. L. Moore's Shambleau and Yvala), and amazing monsters. It is, to a large extent, authorial fiat that tells us that C. S. Lewis' Narnia books are set in a fantasy world rather than on another planet^{[citation needed]}. An example of this is Star Wars, a borderline case in which a mystical power known as the Force lends a strong fantasy element to the science fiction veneer. The main difference between the two is that science fiction is largely based on established scientific theories, while science fantasy is largely implausible.

Even archaism, one of the strongest conventional marks of fantasy, is not an infallible distinguishing characteristic: an archaic world of edged weapons and battlemented fortresses could simply be another planet that has entered a stage of barbarism, or has never emerged from it. Some of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover books represent just such a world, complete with technology-indistinguishable-from-magic. (It is this, as much as the "dragons", that leads some readers to perceive McCaffrey's Pern series as fantasy, in spite of the science-fictional setting established in the first paragraphs of the first book.)

Historical view

The label first came into wide use after many science fantasy stories were published in the pulp magazines, such as Robert A. Heinlein's Magic, Inc. and L. Ron Hubbard's Slaves of Sleep. Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp produced the Harold Shea series. All were relatively rationalistic stories published in John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Unknown Magazine. These were a deliberate attempt to apply the techniques and attitudes of science fiction to traditional fantasy and legendary subjects. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction published, among other things, all but the last of the Operation series, by Poul Anderson.

Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore published novels in Startling Stories, alone and together, which were far more romantic. These were closely related to the work that they and others were doing for outlets like Weird Tales, such as Moore's Northwest Smith stories cited above.

Early science fiction book publisher Gnome Press published Robert E. Howard's Conan the Conqueror in hardback in 1950 with the book clearly labeled "science fantasy" on the dustjacket.

Ace Books published a number of books as science fantasy during the 1950s and '60s. Many of them, such as Leigh Brackett's Mars stories, are still regarded as such. Conan the Conqueror was published as an Ace Double with Brackett's Sword of Rhiannon. Others, such as Andre Norton's Witch World books, are now considered outright fantasy. Mercedes Lackey has discussed this period in her recent introduction to an omnibus edition of the first three Witch World books. In the U.S. at that time, these were almost the only stories which used that label.

Subgenres of science fantasy

Dying Earth

Main article: Dying Earth (subgenre)

Jack Vance's Dying Earth stories are sometimes classed as science fantasy because the cosmology used is not compatible with that conventionally accepted by science fiction. Other stories in the Dying Earth subgenre such as M. John Harrison's Viriconium novels or Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun are usually classed as science fantasy.

Planetary romance

Main article: Planetary romance

The planetary romance, a story set primarily or wholly on a single planet and illustrating its scenery, native peoples (if any) and cultures, offers considerable scope for science fantasy, in the sense of fantasy rationalized by reference to science-fictional conventions.

The works of Edgar Rice Burroughs and E R Eddison are probably the earliest examples of this genre, especially the John Carter of Mars series. David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, published in 1920 is one of the earliest examples of the type, although it differs from most of them in not assuming a science-fictional background of interplanetary or interstellar travel; it is rather a philosophical romance, which uses an alien planet as a background for exploring philosophical themes. C. S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet (1938) is an example of the same type of story, though in its case the preoccupations are theological. In both cases the magical elements are barely rationalized, and in Lewis' case stand in stark contrast to the pseudo-scientific machinery that frames the story.

Some examples of this type of science fantasy deliberately blur the already vague distinction between science fictional paranormal powers and magic; for instance, Poul Anderson's The Queen of Air and Darkness, in which aliens use psionic powers of illusion to imitate earthly myths of fairies—who are themselves traditionally regarded as magical illusionists.

SF otherworlds

Some science fantasies use fantasy worlds with the thinnest veneer of science fictional trappings, only distinguishable with difficulty from standard fantasy. An early example of this type is Eric Rücker Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros, nominally set on the planet Mercury, but a Mercury that is indistinguishable in any way from a fantasy Earth. This work may be considered a borderline case.

In Andre Norton's Witch World series, the fantasy world is excused as a parallel universe. There are a few science fictional elements in the earlier stories of this series, which are absent from the later novels.

Terry Brooks' Shannara books represent a fantasy world as the far future of Earth after supernatural events cause the downfall of civilization.^{[dubious - discuss]}

Sword and planet

Main article: Sword and planet

Many works by Edgar Rice Burroughs fall into this category, as well as those of his imitators such as Otis Adelbert Kline, Kenneth Bulmer, Lin Carter, and John Norman. They are largely classed as "science fantasy" because of the presence of swords and, usually, an archaic aristocratic social system; Burroughs' own novels are, however, skeptical in spirit and almost free of any non-rationalized "fantastic" element (other than the never-explained mechanism by which John Carter gets to Mars). The graphic novel Camelot 3000 is another good example of this. The movie Krull also falls in this category, since that the movie depicts a story where a near omnipotent alien creature invades a fantasy world and the protagonists must find a way to fight back against the alien.

Other subgenres

Science fantasy is sometimes used to refer to a fantasy story in which the fantastic elements are presented as compatible with real-world science, in contrast to fantasies in which the fantastic only needs to have its own internal logic. Classic examples are Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions, in which petrification means danger because turning carbon to silicon results in a radioactive isotope, and his Operation Chaos, where werewolves and other lycanthropes are the same size in human and animal form, owing to conservation of mass.

Science fantasy is also a popular subject for role-playing games, of both pen-and-paper and computer varieties, the latter most popularly emphasized by games such as Final Fantasy VII and VIII, which incorporate fantasy elements such as magic in dystopian, futuristic world settings. One of the earliest pen-and-paper games to reference the term was Gamma World published by TSR in 1980 (the same company that originated Dungeons and Dragons).^{[citation needed]}, while its predecessor Metamorphosis Alpha, published in 1976 is classified as science fiction, highlighting some of the confusion between the two genres. The manga Dragon Ball can be considerated a kind of science fantasy, seeing that science fiction elements like aliens, robots and high technology coexist with supernatural concepts like gods, demons, afterlife and powers based on the manipulation of ki.

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