The UMass Amherst Science Fiction Society Library is the second largest on the East Coast, and contains roughly 8,000 books of widely varying literary quality, fame, and level of wear on the binding. Some are by very famous science-fiction authors, some by renowned scientists, and a depressingly large percentage are written by untalented pulp-novelists who were intimately familiar with the desires of their well-trained audience. With such breadth on almost every count, one common thread that unites the collection is sure to shock the casual browser. I don't think the statistics have never been accurately tallied, though some poor grad student surely thought he had found a dissertation when he noticed that roughly one out of every ten books is averred to be the product of a “Forerunner” or “Magnate” or “Grand Master” of the Science Fiction genre.
Most of these appellations are misnomers granted to any schlub who published a story in 1930's pulp, but one man, Isaac Asimov, truly deserves that title. He wrote on everything, from black holes to the bible, but his biggest mark was on science fiction, to which he gave the much-stolen“Three Laws of Robotics”. He is best known for his robot stories, but his most daring achievement was the Foundation series, which revolves around the Foundation, a planet of the Galaxy's best and brightest created by mathematician Hari Seldon to advance his meticulously calculated plan for the future of the galaxy. The seven novels in the series, and either other works that are set in the same universe, meditate on the progress of history, criticize modern academia, and rebel against predestination. Using his oracular science of psychohistory, Seldon had seen the course history would take for thousands of years. His basis thesis is the extremely plausible belief that historical trends can be predicted by simulating the reactions of vast groups of people, much like the average behavior of large volumes of gases can be predicted, though single molecules move at random. The stories in the series are brief snapshots of different stages in the course of the thousand year long plan, and the ebb and flow of history is ultimately more important than any individual plot.
The series is astounding, and is an excellent example of great science-fiction that is also very good literature. When I recently reread it, the psychohistorical approach fascinated me most. Only a year before, the seed of the same idea had sprung up in my head, and I had feebly attempted to build something out of it as well. I began to construct a fantasy world by a similar historically process: by starting with certain initial groups and allowing them to grow and interact as organically and free from artificial stimulation as possible. Asimov's description of Seldon's Plan used almost identical ideas, but for science-fiction, not fantasy. Outsides often view these two genres as cousins, because they both deal with worlds that differ vitally from our own, but a fan of either or both almost always has an instinctive urge to separate them. The UMass Science Fiction Society owns both, but I shudder to think of the punishment that would befall the fool who sought to group Tad Williams's Otherland series with his Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. I do not think I am qualified to give a good opinion on why such a division is necessary, but I hope by examining two of the main dividing lines between the genres, I can peer into the inner workings of each and relate the issue to the larger question of why we feel compelled to sort our books so carefully, as though a Linnaean taxonomy of literature were somehow possible.
The most obvious distinction is atmospheric. SF hides its unreality under the guise of technology, while fantasy buries itself in the cloak of magic. From this perspective, a Vulcan is just an elf from space. It's a very popular idea, because it makes sense ("It is called Science-Fiction, ain't it?") and lends itself to easy classification ("Oh, look a wizard. This must be fantasy.") The trouble is that it is superficial and does not give any information on the inner workings of the genres. A very popular problem case is Star Wars. Under this system, it is clearly science-fiction; after all, it has robots, and lasers, and galaxies and stuff. The case is closed, until you realize that there is practically no science anywhere to be found in the original trilogy. The parsec is a unit of distance, not time, for instance, so before many embarassed readers dove in with some creative retconning, legendary starship pilot Han Solo didn't even understand the rudiments of interstellar measurement. Similarly, you don't need a midichlorian count higher than master Yoda's to realize that the Force is a magic system with no scientific justification. Why don't we say that Star Wars, at least the worthwhile movies, is clearly a fantasy set in a society with futuristic technology?
We often adopt such obvious and appearance-based ways off defining genres, because they do have legitimate uses. Generalizing that Science Fiction uses lasers where fantasy would employ fireballs is true, because authors tend to use the same creative devices as their inspirations, gradually establishing a list of tropes appropriate to their trade. If we sort books based on the tropes they contain, we have stumbled upon a fairly reliable way of tracing literary influences and intertextuality, and of subtly comparing authors by the different ways they uses the same narrative tricks. Since our tastes develop based on what we learn at a young age, we will tend to gravitate towards settings and plots we loved in our youth, and dividing the genres so roughly can provide a good guideline for guessing what will and will not appeal to us. Despite this usefulness, such a simplistic litmus test is of little use for the critic or scholar of literature. Its decision relies on surface characteristics of the narrative, and once it has decided where to shelve a work, it can offer nothing more. It would behoove us to find a categorical scheme that helps us understand the themes and philosophical working of a book.
If we accept the logic behind shelving Star Wars next to The Hobbit and A Song of Ice and Fire because it doesn't rely on science we arrive at a somewhat clearer distinction between the two genres. Our last definition only looked at the skins of the genres; we need to dig deeper. A couple of robots is not enough to justify a claim to Science Fiction; there are enough Golems, Colossi, and Warforged floating around the fantasy multiverse to debunk that claim. When you give one of those robots a positronic brain, however, you clearly separate him from his divinely- or magically-animated counterparts. The most interesting difference between fantasy and SF lies not in the props the authors use, but in the reasoning behind those props and set pieces. Science-Fiction writers tend to build their worlds with empirical reasoning and scientific processes, while fantasy authors prefer more subtle, imaginative logic.
We should be very clear that the sort of reasoning involved can often be very subtle, and need not be restricted to anything we are already familiar with. This caveat is most important to Sci-Fi, which needs enough imaginative room for its Fictional aspect to escape being tied down by the Scientific. An imaginative Steam-punk author does not have to abide by the laws of nature and any writer who tries to break the cosmic speed limit, whether with a Gravitic Hyperspace Engine, an advanced Warp Drive, or a Flux Capacitor is not a good-for-nothing who deserves to have his Science license revoked. As any worthwhile scientist would admit, the laws of physics as we have formulated them are simply apparently trustworthy models of reality, and any day another Einstein could turn up to totally subvert our understanding of the world. Another Sci-Fi Great, Arthur C. Clarke, sick of second-rate hacks who thought that every teleporter and ray gun had to be explained in pseudo-physics, put forth as a countermeasure his famous Third Law: Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology is Indistinguishable from Magic. Basically, we don't understand the universe, so we are probably wrong about just about everything. Since trying to explain impossible things with our limited vocabulary is like trying to take a hike in the fourth dimension, just let it go. This allows writers to explore the social and scientific limits of their imagination without checking Scientific American every month to justify their dreams. It gives them the freedom to work with every facet of the genre, which is fundamentally not about shiny spaceships or Newton's Third Law, but about man's interactions with his creations and the vast universe that he finds himself in.
With an idea of Science-Fiction that revolves around scientific logic, we might conclude that Fantasy is simply nonsense and pixie dust, a branch of imaginative fiction without the intellectual rigor to play by the rules. That's certainly not the case. Fantasy is the rebel, the genre that breaks out of the rules others set for it, attempting to arrive by creative means at truths as evident as the ones the rules account for. It is about mythopoesis, inventing and telling stories for the sheer sake of creation. The history of Middle-Earth isn't written with comprehensive sociological factors in mind, but it makes as much as sense as Heinlein's Future History, and has as much emotional resonance as anything since the ancient myths. Of course, not every rebellion succeeds, and the creative freedom inherent to fantasy can be its downfall. The unconstrained liberty to create anything the author wants is a powerful invitation towards Mary-Sueism, and a lack of creativity can lead to disaster, as anyone who has ever seriously thought about Eragon or Twilight can certainly attest. Of course, this occurs in any form of creation (after all, 90% of everything is crap), but the voluminous shelves of identical pulp novels that dominate the Science Fiction Society library bear witness to how much more common crap seems to be in science-fiction and fantasy. This is why we need a more mature definitions for the genres. We need to form our ideas about them based on their utmost potentials of imagination and creativity, not based on the wealth of constantly repeated plot structures and character archetypes that make the uninitiated fear that all imaginative fiction truly is the same.
In closing, I just need to say that even these definitions are not the final step in the categorization of fantasy and science-fiction. For one thing, they need to be fleshed out significantly more to be truly useful. For another, and more importantly, no single way of thinking about an entire genre will ever always be useful. As we saw, a naïve classification based on appearances can come in handy, and there almost certainly are or will be books that violate my system. This is because a genre is actually nothing more than a name people give to a bunch of artworks that seem to go together. By putting together everything we thing belongs and abstracting the similarities, we obtain a description of a genre, but something will always arise that definitely fits in but does not have quite the right features. In these cases, it is always the genre definition that is wrong or flawed, never the book. Art makes genres; genres should never make art.
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