I thought the bit about "gadgets != progress" was dead on. I'm in the process of creating a culture where villages were the usual unit of population collection for a lot longer--say, five thousand years longer--than they were here, and people are just coming up with the idea of cities. It's very interesting to consider what gadgets might have been invented in those five thousand years, and how technological development happens even when there isn't that particular sort of cultural development. Another question is how that culture might look if no one really sees much use in fire (the sentient bipeds are amphibian, so they're comfortable with low levels of light, well-adapted to eating raw foods, and very fond of water, which right there minimizes most of the initial appeal). I think those questions are actually very skiffish, but because it's pre-Iron Age and there's a lot of mysticism, it looks like fantasy.

In 'On Science', B. K. Ridley, a physicist, says that magic occupies the space between science and religion. Science, he says, for example, can't explain unique events since scientific method relies on repeatability.

I find that take is pretty interesting, though I haven't figured out quite what I want to do with it yet.

"Science fiction is what we mean when we point to it." Damon Knight.

Note: Any classification system should really take account of: magic realism, paranormal romance, utopian fiction, dystopian fiction, techno-thrillers set in the near future, cat-detective mysteries, mysteries with vampires and/or werewolves, supernatural horror, fiction written by and for people who believe in at least one kind of magic (as distinguished from fantasy written by and for people who see it as a vacation from the real world), pseudo-nonfiction which pretends to be written in the future and look back on a past which hasn't happened yet (for example, the book which explained how George McGovern had won), mind control pornography....

If you are to discuss any form of literature in detail then some definitions are essential. If all you want is to chat about books and find more of what you like then vague descriptive categorisations are enough.

I think science fiction has about as much to do with science as butterflies do with butter.

Which is to say: There's some science fiction which deals with science, and some butterflies which will land in the crock of butter on your picnic blanket. But just because I read *particular works of science fiction* for what they do with or suggest about science doesn't mean I read *science fiction in general* for what it does with or suggests about science.

It is a problem, although I don't think that's actually what's going on with Sarah, Ted Chiang, or Jeff Vandermeer.

*faints with fannish glee*

*revives long enough to say: "Mely, please."*

Thank you for the link to JeffV's essay. On the strength of it, I have invited Evil Monkey over for scotch by the fire, and said he could bring Jeff, too.

I've used "fantasy" elements in two of my books and am looking at going further... In both of those books, the fantasy elements were pretty much plot devices and I paid very little attention to how it all worked. However, my hubby says that even when I write fantasy, I focus on the characters and the plot -- and um, isn't that what you're supposed to do? I'm sure he doesn't mean info dumps, or Old wizard talking to Novice stuff ... but my attitude is that writing fantasy is like writing a historical -- only you get to make things up (or not, as I seem to be tending toward historical fantasy, if that's a catagory). And that if you don't have good characters and a ripsnorting plot, what's the point of the fantasy setting? (you know, aside from making life difficult for said characters.) Anyway, wondering if you had any thoughts on that.

I still say there isn't one

Me too --

1) Genre is overrated (this used to be "There's no such thing as genre really" but that got people upset and then they would yell at me). I guess when you get the liberal arts education and start off with Plato -- are they dialogues? are they philosophy? are they religious? are they funny? -- and continue on thru stuff like Don Quixote....debates about genre and mashups and "crossover"/"slipstream"/whatever have been going on about as long as someone started telling stories, and a lot of it strikes me as bibble because

2) it's ALL fantasy. Because it's all MADE UP. This was why I had a problem with one of yuki_onna's recent columns where she came out as a fantasy writer, because, hell, everyone's a fantasy writer. Esther Summerson is no more real than Genly Ai. I love Homer, but I think Plato has a real point when he criticizes mimetic art in the Republic. Thomas Wolfe, who got accused of transcribing real life, once wrote this wonderful diatribe where he said if you put him down in front of a brick wall and he faithfully described every single aspect of the brick, it still would be SELECTIVE, because of the nature of the human brain (enter Kant). There's no synoptic mimetic viewpoint -- there's no novel that captures real life absolutely. When people insist on these divisions of "more realistic" or "less mainstream" it really blunts and smudges the power of what art can do. Even yr dullest stupidest flattest Raymond Carveresque short story is made up, fantastical, imagined. Which leads me back to genre because

3) People's definitions of what's "realistic" and what isn't change. (Hell, people's cultural definitions of classic and trash, high and low lit, change with nearly every generation, but I'm not getting into that rant here, because this is already frothing enough.) It's interesting to go back and look at very early science fiction, because Judith Merrill and other writers in I think the mid-50s did see their work as v related to science -- as sort of scientific experiments, only carried out in fiction; a lot of it was extrapolation. (Hell, Frankenstein was based on a lot of scientific debate going on in Mary Shelley's day.) Let us not forget John W. Campbell's infamous dictum that he wanted an "sf" story to read like an adventure story set in the future -- something that someone 25 years from now or whenever could read as a straight-up story. Let us also not forget Campbell had (IIRC) some fairly whack ideas about telepathy which gave Philip K. Dick, of all people, pause. And then there's Clarke's Third Law (which bears an awful lot of resemblance, to my mind, to Spinoza's thinking on miracles and natural law).

....which isn't to say there aren't recognized tropes within certain kinds of fiction (test tubes, computers, spaceships, intergalactic battles; dragons, wizards, queens, talking animals, quests) that authors can have fun and play around with. But I think a lot of genre writers, and people who enjoy reading genre books, get really hung up on this-is-like-that and this-isn't-like-that-over-there when what we should be asking is: how does it work as a story? Does it move us? Does it leave us cold? Does it work? Is it fun? Is it something you would want to read again?

By the same token, I like reading a lot of genre stuff because it busts through those barriers -- where else could you have writers like Mielville (sp?) and Zelazny and Le Guin and Tolkien and Beagle and Bova and Heinlein and Butler all together in the same part of the bookstore? (Yeah, I like "speculative fiction" as a label, if we must have one.) So altho it's fun to read about and a lot of people better-educated and more coherent and smarter than me have fun debating about it, and I have fun reading those debates, it also gets frustrating, because of precisely the limiting nature of such debates Jeff Vandermeer points out:

....when you try to label something you simplify it to such a extent that it can only be one thing or another thing. When most good fiction is more complex than that—fantasy included—and contains a cross-pollination of the rational and the irrational, the magical and the scientific.

Amen.

I personally think genre exists to be transcended, or at least that the attempt needs to be made

Absolutement!

Is that nihilistic_kid? ((goes off to look))

'Mainstream' fiction is mimetic in its attempt to represent an environment equivalent to ours, and to represent it in some acceptably faithful approach to reality.

You mean like Dickens and Orwell and Hardy and Austen?

There are many things that characters in "realistic" novels even a hundred years ago would take for granted that we wouldn't consider "normal and part of reality" -- and just imagine trying to explain the internet, or a modern car, or a laptop, to someone from 100 years ago.

I guess that's why I have fantasy bleeding into my SF and SF seeping into my fantasy -- I don't have well defined ideas about the walls between them.

It also confuses me that I tend to write stories about things other than magic or science... although if you squint at Middlemost really hard I guess there's a story there about ethics and the misuse of a scientific discovery. My SF or fantasy is not generally about the science, or about the magic, those are just means by which I can manipulate the story so it works the way I want it to, or can remove it from a contentious setting to one where I can maybe sneak up on the issues without people taking sides (or their usual sides) before the debate gets rolling. And sometimes it's just because I get a kick out of shiny ideas and worlds that don't work the way mine does (I still love that one sentence from a short story where the ants walk backwards up the walls... for absolutely no reason but that it's neat).

And there again, defining SF or fantasy by whether there's magic or science gets weirder once you include telepathy, FTL, and pretty much anything to do with quantum theory thought experiments. ::grins::

to this...

2) it's ALL fantasy. Because it's all MADE UP.

It doesn't matter if the writer is trying to be realistic or not (and, honestly, on some level we're all trying to be *realistic enough* for the reader to suspend disbelief on *some* level in order to get into the story)--it's still all fantasy. The attempt to re-create a mimetic reality is false from the get-go, because there is no such thing, when it comes to how people perceive the world, which is what fiction is, in part, about.

I mean, I think about this quite a bit. I think about it when I'm working at my desk. The effort it would take to just truly replicate the reality of my working area in a way that would replicate what a camera sees (keeping mind that an ordinary camera doesn't take a photo of anything other than what is revealed by ordinary light--no heat signature, no infrared, no measurement of anything else other than what sight can provide). That would be a 300-page novel, if you got right down to it. (It would be pretty boring, of course.)

So it's impossible to replicate reality (especially since you then have to ask yourself: whose reality).

On that basis, I believe that "mimetic" writers are basically doing the same thing "non-realists" are doing: they're building a world for their setting. The main difference is the fantasist has the same challenge as a historical novelist in terms of setting/description, etc. (Character viewpoint is world building of a kind, of course.)

Now I'm just babbling, though. LOL!

JeffV

PS That single malt scotch offer was very compelling. If we're ever at the same con, we must all share some scotch...