Science Fiction is Fantasy

I've mentioned before that one of my favorite What's New with Phil & Dixie strips appeared in issue #65 of Dragon (September 1982). In it, Phil Foglio muses on the surprising similarities between fantasy and science fiction. It's a great comic and one I can still, more than forty years later, quote almost verbatim. While Foglio probably wasn't being entirely serious, one of the reasons the strip's humor lands is that there is more than a little truth to his flippant comparisons of these two supposedly distinct genres. 

As a lifelong science fiction fan – take a drink! – I've observed how often many of my fellow fans have advanced the notion that science fiction is somehow more “serious” or at least more plausible than fantasy. There seems to be this unspoken assumption that science fiction possesses some kind of intellectual legitimacy that fantasy lacks, perhaps based on the idea that spaceships and robots are, in some meaningful way, closer to reality than dragons and sorcery. I understand the logic behind this perspective, but I simply don't find it convincing.

I obviously say this without any dislike of, let alone malice for, science fiction – quite the contrary. I'm a big fan of the genre, probably a bigger fan, in fact, than I am of fantasy. That's why I increasingly feel that the distinction between the two genres as they're commonly understood rests on a foundation that is far shakier than we'd like to admit. Science fiction, despite its name, is not really about science. It's simply another mode of storytelling and one that's rarely more plausible than fantasy. The difference between the two genres lies not in what is possible, but in what we are willing to believe.

To understand better what I mean here, it helps to take a look at the history of imaginative literature over the centuries. Human beings have always told stories about things that do not exist, whether they're spirits, enchanted forests, utopian societies, lost worlds, or journeys beyond the horizon of the known. These stories served many purposes, often religious, philosophical, and moral, but they all had one thing in common: they evoked the marvelous. 

In the past, the marvelous was typically framed in explicitly supernatural terms, such as miracles or magic. These were the explanatory frameworks available to premodern people. A flying chariot was thus the purview of the sun god and immortality the product of drinking from a magic spring. To people living in earlier eras, that was explanation enough. However, as the intellectual climate started to change in the 16th and 17th centuries, the language of the marvelous changed with it. The old supernatural explanations lost their cultural authority, at least among the educated. In their place arose the new explanatory tools of reason, science, and technology.

Science fiction is, in the realm of imaginative literature, the heir to this cultural transformation. It takes the same fundamental human desire to imagine worlds beyond our own and to transcend our mortal limitations and clothes it in the language of Science. Instead of magic carpets, we have grav belts; instead of philosopher’s stones, we have nanotechnology; and so on. Yet, in most cases, these speculative future technologies are not meaningfully more plausible than their fantastical counterparts.

Faster-than-light travel, for example, is a staple of science fiction because it allows characters to visit other star systems on a human timescale. However, unless our understanding of physics is very wrong, FTL is almost certainly impossible. The same is true, in different ways, of many other common elements of sci-fi, such as artificial gravity, sentient robots, or force fields, never mind the routine colonization of distant planets.

I feel that we readily accept all these sci-fi concepts not because they are in any sense likely, but because they are framed in the language of science. That language carries cultural authority and that authority lends them the illusion of plausibility, even when the underlying ideas are, in fact, no more plausible than a wizard’s spell. The key difference between science fiction and fantasy, then, is not that one is "realistic" and the other is not. It is that they draw upon different sets of cultural assumptions.

In a society where belief in magic or the supernatural is widespread, stories of sorcery don't feel implausible. In a society shaped by centuries of scientific advances, stories framed in technological terms feel more credible, even when they stretch (or outright ignore) the limits of current knowledge. Most people today no longer believe in fairies, but we do believe, often without much reflection, that Science will one day solve nearly any problem. Consequently, we assume that, for example, interstellar travel or artificial intelligence are not merely imaginable, but inevitable.

This assumption is rarely examined, being simply an article of faith in the religion of Progress. Science fiction, at least it's popularly understood, taps into this faith. It reassures us that the future will be wondrous, because the universe will yield its secrets and our ingenuity will use those secrets to overcome all obstacles. Even when SF presents darker visions of the future, it still does so within the same overall framework that depicts technology as powerful, transformative, and, perhaps most important of all, central to human destiny.

Fantasy, by contrast, draws on different symbols, those derived from mythology and folklore. Its marvels are overtly impossible and, therefore, easier for contemporary audiences to dismiss as “mere” imagination. Nevertheless, the imaginative function of the two genres is remarkably similar. That's why I hope this post won't be read as a critique of science fiction, but rather as a celebration of the kinship between science fiction and fantasy.

Science fiction is not, in my opinion, diminished by being understood as a form of fantasy. On the contrary, it's elevated by placing it within a long and venerable tradition of imaginative storytelling that stretches back to mankind's earliest myths. It is one of the ways people today continue to grapple with the unknown, express our hopes and fears about the future, and explore questions that lie beyond the reach of empirical inquiry. Likewise, fantasy need not be defended as if it were secretly “realistic.” Its value lies precisely in its freedom from any such constraints.

Both genres, in their different ways, encourage us to imagine the world differently. They create spaces in which we can ask “what if?” without being bound too tightly to what actually is. If I can be a little mawkish, I'd day that fantasy, broadly defined, gives form to our dreams, our anxieties, and our aspirations. Whether the stories exploring these subjects is expressed through the language of magic or technology is, in the end, a secondary matter.

None of this is to say that science fiction cannot engage with real science or that it has not, at times, anticipated genuine technological developments. Anyone who's read science fiction, especially in its formative years, know that it has indeed done both and often done so brilliantly. However, I think it's worth remembering that, as a genre, it is no more bound by reality than fantasy. Its most enduringly popular images, like FTL starships and intelligent robots, are not predictions. They are myths for a technological age. To insist otherwise is to mistake the trappings of science fiction for its substance.