Robert J. Sawyer, the sf writer, has a rather tiresome post insisting that science fiction is rational, whereas fantasy is not. He actually argues that the only reason for any market overlap is due to Ace Books pirating publishing Lord of the Rings in their sf line. That sf and fantasy were mingling in fiction magazines (and elsewhere) for a generation or more before this epochal event is a fact that passes under Sawyer’s radar: not a powerful instrument, it seems.
Preferring sf to f is a point of view (though not mine: I like both) and there are certain distinctive features to each genre: robots in sf, golems in fantasy, etc. But rationality is not exclusively or particularly a feature of sf; it is essential to fantasy, as Tolkien pointed out a decade or so before he set out on his mission to destroy Americo-Canadian science fiction.
Sawyer’s point rests on his assertion that fantasy deals in things which cannot happen, whereas sf deals with things which can happen; that’s why sf is rational and fantasy is not. Putting aside all the impossible things that sf routinely proffers us with a straight face (like the dimension-hopping highly intelligent Neanderthals RJS writes about), let’s consider the premise that it is rational to consider only those things which one knows to be possible.
This might be a reasonable proposition if we knew absolutely everything which is possible and everything which is impossible. But we don’t. Arguably, we can’t, but in practical terms we never will. To be rational in the real world is to acknowledge the limits of one’s knowledge, to entertain the possibility that everything you know is wrong, or at least some of what you know is wrong. The inability to confront this existential reality is not a sign of rationality; it is a symptom of dogmatism.
“Counterfactual thinking” is another way of describing the feature of fantasy which RJS erroneously calls irrational. Counterfactuals are essential to human psychology. They have an important place in philosophy and science and history. Someone who could not engage in them would be utterly shut off from the unknown possibilities that life offers.
[Edit: fixed a bad link. Bad Link! No ocarina for you!]
[I copped the link to RJS’s blog from Paul Jessup.]
[Another theft from Paul Jessup: There’s a fell-off-my-chair-funny web-comic about the Sawyer kerflufflet at Steve Wilson’s My Elves Are Different. I mention this somewhere in the comments, but after sagely considering the question for roughly 5 milliseconds I decided that My Elves Are Different needs to be exalted to the skies. And lifting the link up from the comments was as close as I could get.]
Of course, there are also plenty of people I’ve met who say that SF is irrational. But these are usually elitist litsnobs who don’t often know their Hemingway from a hole in the ground.
You’ve got a broken link in this one that is turning several paragraphs into a link.
Lately, I don’t think there is much real difference between SF and F. Both are speculative. One requires superstitious handwaving on the part of the author, and one requires science-based handwaving, but both require handwaving to achieve your goal. If it was really rational and possible, in the truest sense, then it would just be fiction, neither science fiction or fantasy.
Thanks; I think I’ve fixed it. Sorry if it was unsightly: I had to post and run, as I was late for something.
I know what you mean about sf/f–I tend to feel sf is just a sub-genre of fantasy, broadly defined.
In addition to your other points: Rob’s argument supposes that rationality is necessarily a “truer” approach to reality. But as writers our job isn’t, e.g, to make more efficient car engines, where methodical, rational, problem-solving modes of thought, extrapolating from what is known already, are at least as useful as purely intuitive ones. Writers are working toward the description of human experience, where rationality and realism aren’t necessarily the most adequate tools.
I hadn’t unpeeled the argument this far, but I think you’re right. Even in science, I suspect the creative edge is imagination, extended and supported by reason (e.g. Kekule’s famous dream of the benzene ring).
I just commented with a long rant undercutting his definitions — hope your bandwagon isn’t rickety.
Tag-team this nerrrrd?
Martin
It’ll be interesting to see what he says. It looks like he’s the sort of guy who’s never ever wrong: everybody’s lost but him. It can be hard to carry on a conversation, or even have an argument, with a guy like that.
Steve Wilson posted a pretty nifty comic about the kerflufflet at My Elves Are Different.
Oh, man, he’s the sort of guy who foists you off to a labyrinthine, byzantine, and aquamarine website collecting every good review he’s ever got, and tells you to discern his opinion by reading the whole thing. My plea was for specificity.
Hoping, anyway, this gets good.
Although you seem a whole lot more congenial to all this special talking of remarkable words. I wrote this –>
http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:uasjpmXdbE4J:everything2.com/index.pl%3Fnode_id%3D1846289%26lastnode_id%3D0+site:everything2.com+poisoning+imaginative+literature&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=ca&client=firefox-a
(google cache because everything2’s moving their server right now) over a couple afternoons last December – I’d be interested to hear your thoughts, and in particular, where you think it would benefit from expansion.
It’s an interesting argument. I think its weakness is in treating genre as a purely negative quality. Storytelling doesn’t only involve a storyteller, but an audience, and genre is one of a multitude of social cues that help a storyteller connect with an audience.
Umberto Eco has a relevant piece on the artistic virtues of “more of the same”– it’s “Understanding Serials,” I think, in his Limits of Interpretation.