I have been reading SF and Fantasy for years, always thinking there are differences, though with some borderline crossovers, and never knowing people fuss so much over it.

However, for me, you hit the nail with this:
“And do we actually give a shit, given that it’s a fucking immense story?”

But he marvels at the abrupt and seeming miraculous shift in perception a simple change in the way he’s seeing brings about.

Lawrence Norfolk, the author, plays with this throughout the novel to great effect, making it quite clear that, regardless of the rigor one brings to anything, conclusions are utterly dependent on how one sees something.

I always took this as a sly working of the whole tension between fantasy and reality. It’s a play on the way the Enlightenment altered the way we all see.

And that’s what happens in both good fantasy and good SF.

John Crowley did this in his Aegypt cycle marvelously, working the conceit that the world changes because we learn to see differently. Was magic always a myth? Maybe, but what if we simply experienced a paradigm shift in the way we perceive…?

You don’t need to accept magic as an empirically valid theory of the universe to enjoy the psychological play suggested by the form.

I will posit that some writers (and many, many readers) very much wish to see magic as exactly that—reality—and subsequently support readings of certain texts that one could label fraudulent (or at least dishonest in its underlying assertions) and I actually have little patience for such work because it plays to gullibility rather than any “search for truth” that might be engaged in lieu of cheap effect. But so what? 99% of popular romance is bollocks in its construction (and a lot of it is barely disguised rape fantasy, which is worse) but the aesthetic value is clearly important to those who indulge it. (I loathe and despise country & western music, but I can’t arbitrarily dismiss it as fraudulent or corrupt, because on some level I just can’t “hear” the value.)

This, of course, takes us dangerously close to a kind of relativism which, if stretched, allows for no room to judge a bad work as, in fact, bad. But that’s not what I’m saying. While I sometimes would love to simply consign a great deal of fantasy to the draw labeled “Trash” I do not because I would then have to be fair and do the same with work I like. You can judge however you choose, but in the end people read what they do because it does something for them, and it may not even be what we think it is. I argue that there is a substantive, qualitative DIFFERENCE between SF and Fantasy. I certainly prefer SF, and for some reasons that lie outside the texts themselves. But I won’t arbitrarily categorize Fantasy as fraudulent because ultimately it’s not about hewing as closely as possible to the material reality around us—it’s about hewing closely to our understanding of people, which is the metric by which all literature is finally judged. A work rises or falls in value depending on what it tells us about ourselves (and, yes, I include in that how we as people perceive the universe around us and how we react to that universe, fictional or real). The hard SF crowd have always had just as hard a time with that notion as the Epic Fantasy crowd—both would rather play with icons and symbols rather than gushy, fallible human beings, and to the extent that they do their work is good or bad, (I have a problem with the Destiny trope in fantasy exactly because it removes the human quality from the character.)

So while all this back and forth about sustainability and fraud is interesting, some of it misses the point because it’s teasing at something the writer probably didn’t care about and certainly his or her fans don’t, either. Whether they should is another topic, and one with much wider implications than for just genre fiction.

Are you actually reading what I write? I compared sf to the sonnet form, which I respect highly. Then I turned your analogy round and compared sf to modernist poetry, which I also respect highly. I compared *traditional Romantic fantasy* to doggerel. And I see no threat of “the real poetry” being destroyed by “science fiction notions.” I only point to the folly of misrepresenting it as part of a discourse of abjection. As I said to Mark upthread, this harms sf by alienating the very sort of writers who made it great — the next Delany, the next Zelazny, the next Silverberg — when books like DHALGREN, ROADMARKS and THE BOOK OF SKULLS are highly likely to be published as fantasy these days.

Given that there is more fantasy than ever, and science fiction is rapidly declining…

… because the default label has shifted to fantasy…

… there is no need to argue the case for serious fantasy, fantasy as high art, against science fiction.

The opposition is yours, not mine. I’m arguing for fantasy as high art as well as science fiction. The only thing I’m against in science fiction is the loyalists who seek to impose a closed definition on fantasy as part of a discourse of abjection. Well, no, actually I’m also against the trad Romantic fantasy loyalists who seek to impose a closed definition on fantasy because that’s all they want. But there’s none of them here arguing that right now.

Why is necessary to try to deligitimize the entire concept of SF? Don’t protest that it’s not an attack. If understanding makes the wonder go away, then SF in its occasional incarnations as serious fiction, is at root wrong.


I’m not at all sure what you’re projecting on to me here. I don’t subscribe to the view that rationalisation (which I presume you mean by “understanding”) makes the “wonder” go away. Nor do I believe that in doing so it would be essentially wrong. I hold that sometimes sf is not truly rationalised, simply using various other strategies to maintain suspension-of-disbelief in the face of the incredibilities which generate wonder. I hold that sometimes it is entirely rational and may be bereft of wonder, but that this is entirely valid, as is any self-imposed stricture. In my comparison with the notion of “Serious Fiction” when I express how I appreciate the impetus behind expunging comedy, you should be able to read this extended metaphor as expressing comparable sentiments about uber-rational sf.

If not understanding, if being *Magic* is cooler… then fantasy addresses something genuinely true tha realism doesn’t.

The first and second conditions have nothing to do with your conclusion. The first doesn’t even make sense as a predicate.

… if the world (internal psychology, social being or physical landscape) is at bottom irrational, then fantasy addresses something genuinely true tha realism doesn’t.

This at least makes sense. And yes, I’d say, that follows. It’s not what I’m arguing though. I’m arguing that fantasy is largely as rational on a figurative level as any metaphor that would be irrational nonsense if taken literally — e.g. “time is money”. Sometimes it uses the irrationality of these conceits to address our interaction with aspects of reality so complex and abstract, not to mention rife with anomaly and inconsistency, that they appear irrational. Here and there in some of that experimentalist arthouse stuff, it may actually posit that the world *is* irrational, but generally it is simply trying to render the complex and abstract comprehensible — to rationalise it — via extended metaphor, just as “time is money” gives us a conceptual hook that helps us get our heads round time. This is a capacity of all non-realist fiction. Realism lacks that capacity but can address the same problems with its own toolkit, and does.

The fantasy story set in an impossible world or portraying an absurd universe of uncaused effects or blatantly using magic all require a willing suspension of disbelief that demands ignoring what we know factually to be false.

So does every metaphor. And the level of suspension-of-disbelief is quite different if you’re reading a narrative as figurative, reading for something more conceptual than an immersive adventure. I know CATCH-22 is too absurd to be literally true. I do not have to suspend my disbelief to the point of utter credulity, ignoring the fact that it’s absurd, in order to appreciate it. I get that its a joke, with a very serious point.

The problem with fantasy (at least the kind that pretends to be serious) is that the willing suspension of disbelief also suspends its seriousness.

For you perhaps. I find it as easy to parse a fantastic conceit to its meaning and appreciate the import as I do to parse a sentence like “He’s a gutless, spineless, soulless bastard” and appreciate how serious an accusation this is. As easy as it is to read CATCH-22 without feeling that it’s “suspended its seriousness.”

Where’s the insult if neither of us believe in the soul? Unless you can parse it to its secular meaning. Can you? Can’t you? If you can, fair enough. You do actually have some poetry in your soul. If you can’t…

When the story starts working magic, instead of getting thrilled, I’m reminded of fraud and superstition. I don’t think the case for regarding this as an esthetic/moral deficiency has been made.

When I use the metaphor “don’t got no soul,” instead of parsing it to its meaning, are you reminded of fraud and superstition? So much so that you think those metaphors are pernicious? If so, that’s an incapacity to parse metaphor. If you can’t scale that up to a fantastic conceit, that’s an incapacity to parse a fantastic conceit. Nothing moral about it, but it’s kind of like not getting the humour in comedy.

I mean, does a man turning into a giant beetle remind you of fraud and superstition, fairy stories of princes turned into frogs? If that’s the only way you can read Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” I’d say that’s… idiosyncratic.

It is a rare fantasist with powers of invention strong enough to make nonsense fresh enough to take seriously.

Do I have to keep repeating Sturgeon’s Law over and over again?

Again, it is the rare fantasist who actually has the equipment to inspire admiration instead of laughter.

Apparently I do. Nah, just take it as read.

Universes with a Plan or their opposite, universes where nothing makes sense and the notion of causation is fraud and superstition, are hard to take seriously because the fundamental falsity is too obvious to overlook.

And if just one ickle thing doesn’t make sense? I’ve only rarely read fantasy that goes the full-on oneiric route and abandons causation entirely. Usually it’s the most high-brow of the lot — the equivalent of experimentalist arthouse cinema. Mostly there’s a handful of conceits that are extrapolated into a story otherwise bound by the limits of known nature, history and science. Still, the main reason fantasy doesn’t all crumble apart to non sequiturs and nonsense in my hands is because I get that it’s figurative.

I suppose this is where we’re supposed to succumb to the delusion that the strange stuff in science fiction and fantasy is all fundamentally the same.

Well, it all shifts the alethic modality of the text to “could not have happened.” There are differences in terms of levels of (im)possibility — logical, metaphysical, temporal and technical — but sf plays with all four, as does fantasy. There are also differences in how these are treated, but different styles of sf take different approaches, sometimes multiple strategies. The same is true in fantasy, to the extent that where you draw the boundary between the two idioms is unlikely to be the same as where others do. It’s not actually that difficult to see why this is when you ignore the whole turf war.

Science fiction helps the reader achieve the willing suspension of disbelief.

Mostly yes, sometimes no. If you apply this as a rule, you exclude DHALGREN. Oh, and fantasy does this too — generally in a different way, but sometimes with similar strategies.

The tacit insistence that exploration of the psyche is the only worthy goal of Literature pursues an ideological agenda.

Straw Man. I’ve only ever said that this is a worthy goal.

But, people live in societies, which exist in a material universe.

And fantasy addresses our interaction with each other and with that world. It just uses extended metaphor.

Declaring so much of reality out of bounds really is closing off the discourse.

Where have I declared anything of reality out of bounds?

Fantasy in the form of secondary universes don’t carry that baggage. They merely suffer from the usual tendency to be senseless hodgepodges, therefore boring. It is a rare fantasist with powers of invention strong enough to make nonsense fresh enough to take seriously. Universes with a Plan or their opposite, universes where nothing makes sense and the notion of causation is fraud and superstition, are hard to take seriously because the fundamental falsity is too obvious to overlook.

I suppose this is where we’re supposed to succumb to the delusion that the strange stuff in science fiction and fantasy is all fundamentally the same. The thing is, even in crappy science fiction, the fig leaf of “science” covers up that embarrassingly dinky appendage of nonsense which when analyzed is every bit as silly as magic. Science fiction helps the reader achieve the willing suspension of disbelief. Whereas fantasy insists on flashing the reader. Again, it is the rare fantasist who actually has the equipment to inspire admiration instead of laughter.

The science fiction writer who can actually produce worthy speculation about the real world is equally (more?) but no fantasist, no matter how skilled, can possibly do the same. The real world is not just the individual psyche. Metaphors of magic can explore that just as well any other, I suppose. The tacit insistence that exploration of the psyche is the only worthy goal of Literature pursues an ideological agenda. But, people live in societies, which exist in a material universe.

Declaring so much of reality out of bounds really is closing off the discourse. Insisting that science fiction notions about rigor in extrapolation, plausibility in speculation and all that is cliche, doggerel, that destroys the real poetry implies: Magic is poetic; Understanding is not; A universe of limitless possibilities means I can do anything (aka fantsy of infantile omnipotence); A universe of laws enslaves me; Things just happen and anybody who says they understand it is a fool or a fraud.

Given that there is more fantasy than ever, and science fiction is rapidly declining, there is no need to argue the case for serious fantasy, fantasy as high art, against science fiction. If science fiction is the enemy, it is a defeated enemy. Why is necessary to try to deligitimize the entire concept of SF? Don’t protest that it’s not an attack. If understanding makes the wonder go away, then SF in its occasional incarnations as serious fiction, is at root wrong. If not understanding, if being *Magic* is cooler, if the world (internal psychology, social being or physical landscape) is at bottom irrational, then fantasy addresses something genuinely true tha realism doesn’t.

“…saying that “the story believes,” what you’re saying seems to be that 1) fantasy articulates a certain belief, 2) that the true science fiction writer never uses such conceits, or 3) when they do this is a profound Wrongness. This seems fair, no?” No. The fantasy story set in an impossible world or portraying an absurd universe of uncaused effects or blatantly using magic all require a willing suspension of disbelief that demands ignoring what we know factually to be false. The problem with fantasy (at least the kind that pretends to be serious) is that the willing suspension of disbelief also suspends its seriousness. Fantasy in a humorous vein isn’t affected the same way, which I think is why some fantasists hate it with a passion.

Logically, they are, but we’re talking about perception, which means psychology, and it happens all the time.

For instance, take Sir Lancelot at one end and Johnny Rico at the other. Both armored warriors, serving their kingdoms (states) and yet one is firmly fantasy and the other just as firmly SF, and most readers will likely not see them as essentially two ends of the same continuum because of that background classification. They will apply compartments—because that’s what people do—and read them as distinct.

“Deep epistemological skepticism denies the possibility of knowledge”

That’s a mischaracterization more to do with pseudoskepticism, which, in your formulation, is pathological and, yes, solipsistic. Genuine, honest skepticism requires proof and concedes its validity in order to escape tautology. So while your assertion is strictly true, it’s a marker of exactly the opposite—a fundamental embrace of unbelief through a refusal to believe, regardless of evidence. In short, a rhetorical stance except in cases where it is not simply dismissive of any and all authority.

“As to comic book superhero movies being the most popular form of SF, yes, indeed, readers don’t look primarily to them. But readers are the minority. Therefore what they read is the minority taste. Even of what is read, television tie ins constitute a large proportion of the work published, even if Locus doesn’t cite them. I meant popularity as measured by the whole population.”

Yes, well…personally I could care less about any medium other than the written in this debate, because television and film do different things than text and in any case derive their ultimate philosophical authority, whether aknowledged or not, from the work found on the page. From my experience, there is a divide in actuality between people whose primary fictive indulgence is visual and those who go to the trouble to read the stuff, the latter having been continually in the “minority” for a good part of the last century and consequently a largely ignored element in any such discourse on the part of the so-called majority. No one in film/tv engages this particular debate because they see the elements from purely visual positions and in that instance find no distinction. They treat them as mix-n-match and are genuinely baffled when they’re called on the carpet for misuse of certain tropes. The assumption seems to be “if we can film it then it’s all the same.”

This comes across to me in a peculiar way—I can barely tolerate most epic fantasy on the page (Robert Jordan either bores me or makes me gag) but I can *watch* this stuff quite happily. This is because film makers are partaking of a third category of primary metaphoric building blocks by fully deploying their creations as Dreams (which explains many if not most of the plot and logic problems in all manner of film).

So while I won’t deny you have a point about comic book superheroes in relation to what you claim is the majority popularity, that is simply not how I “read” it because I’m comparing it all to text fictions—minority or not, text supports this kind of deeply examined subtextual discourse far more than film and television.

Personal prejudices on my part.

Yeah, I do think there’s a dynamism born of the discourse. And I do try to acknowledge that polarity of aesthetics with the whole open/closed definition thing, saying, OK, you’ve got (Hard) Science Fiction and (Epic) Fantasy. And they’re like Neo-Classical and Romantic painters, their defitional perspectives irreconcilable like those of your anatomists.

But rather than being at opposite extremes of a 1D spectrum, I see them as at the extremes of distinct axes. Like, if each axis is on a scale of 1 to 10 according to how important that quality is as a constituent (say X is clarity of line and Y is boldness of colour,) you have these two clusters centred at (9,3) and (3,9). Each cluster sees one feature as essential and when they look at the other cluster they see X *utterly forsaken* in favour of Y, and vice versa. So they see Y as negative-X and X as negative-Y, imagine these qualities as the inverse of each other, essentially incompatible. Some Xists start to argue that the absence of Y is what makes their work what it is (and again vice versa). They seek to minimise the unwanted quality, and the centres of the clusters shift to (9,1) and (1,9). They turn a blind eye to that negligible Y-value of 1; that’s not *really* Y, they say.

They construct a spectrum, a line that models anything that doesn’t conform to the Xist or Yist aesthetic as a trade-off, a mixture. There’s a mid-point at (5,5), soft-X at (7,3) and so on. Looking at everything in that phase-space, they try and fit it somewhere along that continuum. There are outliers in that X cluster, at (9,2) and (8,1), but they’re OK. But now when it gets to (8,3) or (9,4), that higher Y-value becomes an issue. They weren’t even thought of as outliers back at the start, when the X cluster was at (9,3) — the cluster was big enough that they were considered core — but now? Now one Xist denies that Y-value and insists that (9,4) work is (9,1), another reckons the rough ratio of X to Y and puts it on the spectrum at (7,3), a third sees the Y-value as *clearly* 4 and has to therefore place the work at (6,4).

That’s where the debate becomes really unproductive, I think. There’s no big deal with Xist #2, but Xist #1 and Xist #3 are now radically misrepresenting that work and in doing so the very roots of the genre. One will refuse to recognise its real Y-value while the other will refuse to recognise its real X-value, and it all becomes about who can shout, “La la la la, I’m not listening,” loudest and longest. This is where I see a lot of the political/territorial hierarchising coming in, and my attempt to sweep away the polarity is about tearing apart the discursive mechanisms that perpetuate those turf wars more than anything. Ultimately, my favoured cluster *couldn’t* be given any sort of primacy in the sort of model I’m aiming at, cause it’s recogniseably marginal, aesthetically and historically. I have multiple favoured clusters scattered across that X-Y plane (Flash Gordon! New Wave! The Borribles!) but a lot of my aesthetic is way off on some Y-axis, I think, going, “Oooh, pataphysical quirks!”

All I saw was an approach that took the same universe traditional nuts-n-bolts SF worked in and then inserted ordinary people who couldn’t figure out what was going on. The underlying aesthetic hadn’t change re the universe and how it functions, only the kind of people we thought we were in dealing with it.

I think what it is for me is that a lot of New Wave fiction has its worldscape radically disrupted in a way that makes it logically unrationalisable. Like the cyclic structure of DHALGREN, the transformation at the start, the spliced-in journal entries. The catastrophe extends to ruptures in logic & the text itself, in a way that resonates with… I dunno… the end of Lindsay Anderson’s IF…, Bertrand Blier’s BUFFET FROID, Pinter’s THE BIRTHDAY PARTY, most anything by William Burroughs. And I see a connection there to a strain of fantasists riffing off Kafka. Like there are generally middling X and Y values, but notably high Z values, and in an idiom where Z is generally minimised. I mean, I’m sorting of playing with the idea of high Z representing an existential aesthetic. Writers/readers clustering around, say, (5,5,9) might be materialists themselves, but if the materialism in the (Hard) Science Fiction cluster carries that techhead sense of The Way Things Work being hardwired in, then that cluster has the same zero Z-value as the (Epic) Fantasy cluster with all its Destiny and Fate. It’s essentialist. Which is to say, maybe is some of that anti-sf and anti-fantasy (and maybe even some of the quasi-sf and quasi-fantasy) looks like it’s in the middle of a continuum to others but to those who’re doing it, well, they’re thinking, “I’m not even in that plane.”

It may be that there is a different label for what you and Mieville and Crowley (in the Aegypt cycle) do, but good grief that last thing we need is another category!

Ah, category is just about getting it to the right reader, far as I’m concerned. When it comes to decribing a work I’m interested in that “position” in a framework of qualities as dimensions, not in slapping a nominal label on it according to territories and loyalties.

On a panel many years ago, the question came up about Destiny and I was asked “Does the starship captain have a destiny?”

I can’t help thinking, “No, silly. He has an enterprise!”

Anyway, this has been fun. It’s nice to talk about this thing with someone who prefers to open out the discourse rather than circle wagons.

Indeed. I do think the Great Debate can actually be fun and interesting when the territorialism is laid to one side. I appreciate your being a sport about it.

The new idiom is based on innovation then, and the way it focuses in on science is comparable to the cerebral craft with which the modernists focus in on image. It’s that tight control, the precision of placement, the need for it to be new, of the now, that the poetic and fictive forms share. It’s a far more intellectual endeavour than simply shaping some bloated waffle about knights into a doorstop of iambic pentameter. And of course to our free verse poet sf writers that vast bulk of traditional poetry fantasy that *is* just hideously clichéd iambic pentameter stands as an emblem of everything they’re against. It’s easy to dismiss it as doggerel. And a poet with a hard-line free verse aesthetic might do just that. Metrical poetry? Bleh! Trite nonsense harking back to the past, pandering to an infantile craving for the easy, familiar, comforting banality of limericks and nursery rhymes. It may be a nice diversion, but it’s unchallenging, safe. Isn’t this actually a better mapping for your oppositional discourse of sf and fantasy?

Of course, fantasy is not actually all iambic pentameter, but rather metred in a multiplicity of ways. Much of it is rhyming couplet doggerel though, because that shite is easily accessible and therefore popular, and easily written and therefore churned out in tome after tome after tome of unreconstructed Romantic drivel, full of “true king” mumb-jumbo and wankery. Oh, but the sonnet is a whole nother story. As is the rondeau and the sestina. The modern sonneteers have learned from those free verse modernists. They may dispense with rhyme and metre entirely, and write a free verse sonnet (and get slammed for it by reactionary doggerel fans.) Or they may keep metre and write a blank verse sonnet that one free verse afficionado likes because it has the precision of imagery without the silly rhyming couplet stuff, even if it is tightly regular; while another may vehemently reject it, that metricality sending off “doggerel” alarm bells, rubbing them up the wrong way.

That, it seems to me, is how sf readers react to disputable works, some insisting that this is tainted with fantasy, others that its quite acceptable as sf. Where one reader calls DUNE “science fantasy” because it’s in iambic pentameter, so to speak, you might say, no, it has the precision of imagery that’s key to sf, and it *doesn’t* have all the nonsensical rhyming; it may breach the formal constraints with that regularity of rhythm but this is one misstep of “bad syntax” and it’s not enough to make it “not sf.” You read STAR WARS as SF. Mark reads it as Fantasy. While I say “it’s all strange fiction,” this is not because I deny the difference of approach, but because I see it as… in iambic pentameter but blank verse rather than rhyming couplets, so to speak. And imagery-wise? Well, it does use clichéd wizards and knights basically, but it makes them new and of the now (relatively speaking, where Rocket Age pulp is new in 70s cinema in comparison to Robin Hood, etc..) I see no need to pigeonhole it by terms that it will not fit for one or other of you. It fits the criteria of Epic Fantasy for me, but it also fits the criteria of the most traditional Science Fiction.

Anyway, I’d have thought this way round would suit your position more. Wouldn’t science fiction’s pseudorealism fit better with the pseudonaturalism of free verse? It seems to me that this is more in line with your rejection of magic as an artificial (and dangerously so) conceptual framework. And you could construct a more compelling case for a distinctive sfnal syntax on that basis. Where metrical & rhyming poetry has ultimately arbitrary sets of conventions which we could map to how fantasy exploits the pre-existing frameworks of myth & legend, one might well root the sfnal syntax in a stripping away of those frameworks, leaving only the natural rhythms and unrhyming of speech. This would be why for many sf must be absent of “that fantasy thing” in order to be sf. But in order to function as poetry, sf-as-free-verse must still be creating those musical phrases. It must therefore develop its own dynamics of word & image. And such a free-verse poetics could of course be brought into a blank verse metrical work. This would be the key ingredient that for some makes a fantasy work “read as SF” (while the same works read as a miscegenation to others.) Meanwhile, the level of diversity in metrical forms, and the extent to which they’re simply invented by poets like Yeats, and invented and breached by poets like Stevens — this would be what I’m trying to get across about fantasy not being, well, all sodding Tennyson, how it is in many ways bedfellows with sf.

I know *my* aversion to certain types of fantasy is quite comparable to my aversion to doggerel.

See, now this is a perfectly reasonable tack. I dispute that there’s “nothing of interest” to be gleaned by looking at what makes non-realist fiction non-realist, just as I’d dispute an assertion that there’s no value in a work on poetics addressing the figurative image, speech cadences, phonetic patterning and all the myriad features that distinguish poetry from prose (or that render prose “poetic”). That’s just silly. But talking about techniques for “incorporating impossibilites into fiction,” asserting that sfnal technique is, in this regard, about formal limitations comparable to those of metre in poetry, that fantasy is without those restrictions… OK. As far as it goes.

First, I think you have to narrow the field a little when it comes to “the various metrical forms of poetry.” A sestina and a sonnet have quite different rules. A rondea can but be reviled if you judge it as a ballade, and a ballade is bad, bad, bad if you’re measuring how it fits the rondeau form. Even if we want to judge a sonnet for its formal integrity, we need to ask if it’s Spenserian or Shakespearian, or maybe something else. And what else could it be? What rhyme schemes might we see? ABAB? AABB? ABBA? ABBA CACA CDDC EE? In fact there’s sonnets in blank verse, quite metrical, but with no rhyme at all. There’s sonnets in free verse, as well, yes, sonnets wrought in verse that’s free. (And prose that writes-in poetry.) Where sonneteers through the ages have revamped the conventions of the sonnet — as they have — breaching the formal conventions has resulted in good sonnets, better sonnets. Going for a more complex rhyme scheme than the conventional, they can still be judged for bad rhyme. Writing in blank verse they can still be judged for bad scansion. Even in free verse they can still be judged for bad scansion. Pure prose can be judged for bad scansion; irregularity doesn’t mean gracelessness.

The point is all the various metrical forms of poetry are not, as a unity, hidebound in conventionality. Yeats made up his own metrical structures and broke them; as long as it’s patterned it’s metrical even if one line is iambic pentameter and the next trocheeic hexameter. But still, your analogy is apt, I think, because of that. The sonnet is a good comparison precisely because you can have a closed definition held to by one poet/reader, in which only sonnets in one of the utterly traditional rhyming & metrical forms is considered a “proper” sonnet; while you could have someone else who requires the classic metre but accepts innovative rhyme schemes, or even the non-rhyming blank verse; and you could have a third viewpoint with someone who accepts even free verse sonnets as an entirely valid development of the form. The hard-line traditionalist is quite entitled to reject the “bad syntax” of the blank verse sonnet and say, “No, this has gone beyond the tradition. It is no longer a sonnet.” Hell, they could do that even with a new rhyme scheme. The way you’re positing it is a different position: if it’s simply metricality that matters, only the free verse “sonnet” would be rejected as “bad syntax.” And you’re just as entitled to place the boundary there. You and the hard-line traditionalist can duke it out to your heart’s content, in a pointless squabble about whether or not the blank verse sonnet is a sonnet at all. And if that discourse is constructed around an idea that it’s all about how much or how little the “bad syntax” makes it really “free verse,” free verse poets might well just point and laugh.

See, just to be awkward, some free verse uses metre — iambic free verse. That which does not may be cadenced. Even where you get into the Modernist poetry most deliberately composed “in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome,” works by Yeats and Stevens, for example, are in part at least, tightly metrical (Stevens: “They said, you have a blue guitar / You do not play things as they are / The man replied things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.”) Free verse does not abjure formality, only entrenched traditons which would require fitting specific patterns like the rondeau or the Spenserian sonnet. Form is deeply important. The point is to break free of clichéd moulds and create new structures. Stevens’s “The Man With the Blue Guitar” begins metred and rhyming, loosens up as it goes on, but maintains a couplet structure throughout, sometimes metrical, sometimes not. If you think Stevens should have sat himself down and decided on whether to write in pure free verse or make it all properly metrical, that his mixing it up could only be “bad syntax,” I may start taunting you with a spork to see if your head explodes.

But the real point here is that free verse is not absent all limitations; it creates its own — or in part seeks to find the natural limitations of speech. You can still point to bad rhyme and bad scansion in free verse. Not that you say you can’t, but in so far as free verse *does* dispense with the traditional schematics of, say, fourteen lines in iambic pentameter on an ABABCDCDEFEF GG rhyme-scheme with a volta somewhere along the way, this doesn’t make it a lazy poet’s cop-out. You want to compare fantasy to free verse? Sure, but that doesn’t mean the technique it employs for integrating the impossible is just to chuck it in according to whim. As Eliot said: “”No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job.” As poetry goes, rhyming couplet doggerel is easier by far.

But that doesn’t necessitate an abjection of comedy as the Enemy. It would say more about the Serious Fiction purist than aything else if they demonised comedy as essentially manifesting a criminally “un-serious” or “anti-serious” worldview. Though comedy *can* be crass and pandering, it can also be… thematically weighty, profound, highbrow, incisive and sincere. Tthis is what the Science Fiction loyalist is all too often doing in their discourse as regards fantasy. All we need to get past that is for the Science Fiction loyalist to step back a second, pause the pillorying long enough to look at what actually goes on in fantasy, beyond the immediately obvious pabulum, and listen to what those who are actually versed in it say about its aims and methods. If they simply quit the demonising — and that includes the “yes, but” cop-outs, the strategies of excuses and exemptions which reintroduce the same condemnation by the back door — there’d be no need for those of us who *simply aren’t doing* what Joe Genrehead considers Science Fiction to expend so much energy extricating ourselves from our position as their ideological piñata.

Sorry, this cur won’t be kicked just because you’ve decided that fantasists can only ever be doing either a) the wicked Fantasy, or b) a miscegenation of Fantasy and Science Fiction that is “bad syntax” as either. This is like a Serious Fiction purist for whom all else is either a) damnable Comedy or b) a miscegenation of Comedy and Serious Fiction that is “bad syntax” as either. So your Serious Fiction must abjure comedy? Whatever. This does not mean that comedy must abjure the serious. And comedy does not do so, not essentially. Writing or appreciating comedy does not mean one is in thrall to some puerile Farrelly Bros mentality. It does not mean that one is promulgating infantilism and schadenfreude. Any Serious Fiction loyalist clinging to a dogma in which CATCH-22 is either a) pandering pabulum because all Comedy is, or b) a halfcast hybrid of Comedy and Serious Fiction that is rendered Wrong, an aesthetic *failure* by its breaches of “syntax” in terms of both aesthetics, is simply making a fool and a knave of themself. And I can’t help hearing this in your spurious claims:

The story believes… The narrative grammar of the impossibilities [in fantasy] is what you wish.

Pandering wish-fulfilment. Yeah, we got the stereotype already. Sorry, man. Carroll was wrong; you can say it as many times as you want and it still won’t be true. And as long as you cling to this dogma that every fantasist is essentially promulgating belief in the Flying Spaghetti Monster, you might as well be spitting in Otis Redding’s face and telling him his “soul music” carries the inextricable spiritual belief-structure of gospel and therefore foments lies, lies and more damned lies. Or heckling Eddie Izzard for not doing a solemn monologue about the trials and tribulations of tranvestitism because what he’s doing is truth-denying whimsy and malicious schadenfreude that corrodes the soul!

I can keep trying to explain the discourtesy of this “pandering wish-fulfilment” schtick, but the main point is that you’re closing off the discourse, circling the wagons, as Mark puts it, around Science Fiction by refusing to accept that any fantasist could be anything other than the Mortal Enemy. This is simply unproductive. And as I said to Mark above, what I’m trying to argue here as much as anything is that there’s no need for this abjection. The Serious Fiction loyalist could, you know, simply accept that comedy has its own agendas, that there’s fiction/drama which uses the comic to all sorts of variant purposes, that much of the result is legitimately known as comedy even though it doesn’t at all conform to the stereotypical shape of the dread spectre, Comedy, but then argue that Serious Fiction is doing its own thing, that it expunges all humour in a concerted effort to achieve its aesthetic agenda.

Dismissing concerns about this baggage when carried into fiction as lack of poetry in my soul is not persuasive.

But you *don’t* got no poetry in your soul. You don’t got no *soul*.

Literally speaking, that is, and you and I both believe this, right? That you *couldn’t* have poetry in *what doesn’t exist*. But me, I can happily say, in the words of the song, I’m a soul man. I like soul music and soul food and, yes, I think much of the pulp fiction I relish could comfortably be described as “soul fiction” — and without this implying that it’s any more religious in nature than “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay”. I mean those old Flash Gordon serials, for example. Read the lyrics to that song. There’s zero “spirituality” in the religious sense. But put them to music and there’s a whole lot of soul there, brother.

Few of us have any issue with using an idiom like “don’t got no soul”. The idiom does not “believe”. You talk about the story “believing.” By this logic, that idiom also “believes” that this is how the universe literally works, that there’s a magic sparkly *substance* inside of us. Maybe you think idioms like that do carry that meaning and have to be eradicated from our language or it’s the End of the Enlightenment, but if so, this is not about the qualities of fiction but about the qualities of language. I’d say most of us are actually parsing “don’t got no soul” to an entirely secular meaning, and if you dispute this, well, time is money and I don’t got enough to waste here opening that can of worms. And that doesn’t mean I believe I can go to a bank and take out some time from my account, dig? If you *do* at least accept that “don’t got no soul” is a figurative expression, well, most of us, even hard-line athiests like myself, have no issue with filching the semiotic framework of words like “soul,” “spirit,” etc., and applying it to the affective infrastructure of human experience that these terms are and have always been mere signifiers for anyway, the religious simply literalising and concretising the referent(s), essentialising the existential.

Even fiction should connect enough to the world to use the same language!

This is the point: the fiction *is* using the same language. I mean, you know that “poetry in the soul” comment is meant to be read with a certain irony, right? As a nod to the extent to which such figurative conceits are woven through our everyday speech? And it’s glib, but it’s pointed. I’d hazard that most everyday uses of phrases like “don’t got no soul” bear no relation to whether the speaker believes in the Big Bang, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, the Tooth Fairy or some aetheric puppet master driving the vehicle of the body as a MeatMech. “You don’t got no soul,” speaks to… not a lack of empathy per se but…. an inability (or refusal) to engage via affect, a hide-bound regulationism. It’s sort of a figurative way of saying a person’s behaviour and belief structure is a mechanistic rather than dynamic system.

Now, your concerns are political, ideological — the risk of fostering “superstition and fraud.” I appreciate the passion of your commitment, not least because I’m a hard-line athiest myself. But I’d be dubious to say the least if you were saying that whenever people use the phrase “don’t got no soul” in everyday parlance 1) that this essentially articulates a certain belief, 2) that the true materialist *never* uses such idioms, or 3) when they do this is a profound Wrongness. The first is simply demonstrably wrong, I’d say, a literalist interpretation of figurative speech that’s verging on neuro-atypical. The second is wrong in the same way; the idiom is so woven into daily discourse that even the briefest search on the interwebs brings up an admirer commenting on, for example, “Richard Dawkins’s spirited answer.” If your ideology would condemn such an idiomatic use of the term as encouraging “superstition and fraud,” frankly there’s no purpose in discussion; I might as well be defending a poet from the Platonic Republican Guard. That third axiom though? Within a domain of actual scientific discourse, certainly such informal idiom is not proper. The most fervent materialist might use it informally in day-to-day speech, but to use it in a research paper… hell, yeah, that would be as Wrong as a kitten in a dog show.

Hold that thought…

Scaling that attitude up, translating it to usages of the idiom writ large as conceits, saying that “the story believes,” what you’re saying seems to be that 1) fantasy articulates a certain belief, 2) that the true science fiction writer never uses such conceits, or 3) when they do this is a profound Wrongness. This seems fair, no?

I argue with you over the first because it fundamentally misrepresents fantasy and condemns it on that basis. If someone doesn’t *get* the humour of Monty Python’s “Three Yorkshiremen” sketch, their obtuseness is no big deal. If they refuse to accept that others do, insist instead that those of us who laugh must be maliciously revelling in the horror of suffering described, simply because they will not take any humour on any level other than pure literalism, that obtuseness becomes boorish. If they explicitly and repeatedly attack all comedy as essentially schadenfreude, set themselves up as a campaigner against the malign & pernicious infuence of cruel and callous humour, that boorishness becomes the soapbox oration of a prig. That’s how I take your “superstition and fraud” schtick. A wry joke that you’ve got no poetry in your soul is a tactful response to this sort of condemation, I think. If most stand-ups were faced with a comparable “all comedy essentially erodes compassion” denunciation, they’d do a lot more than shrug and say, “Have you had a sense-of-humour by-pass?”

OK, back to that third assertion…

Personally I never felt the slightest hesitation in classifying Star Wars as a yet another scientifically goofy (but, for once, cinematically innovative) SF movie, precisely because the Force felt to me conspicuously nonsentient. Thinking of it as a barely disguised entity explains any question about it being SF.

In the peculiar world of the comics, where not only is no one is ever forgotten (as in SF generally,) but it always comes back to a.) repeat his or her origin story and b.) have a fist fight with other heroes, it is notable that even the extravagant imaginations of comic book editors and writers find it difficult to do this for Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman and Dr. Strange. And Dr. Fate and Zatanna, too, I suppose, if they ever do anything but cameos. The fictional science rationalizing superpowers may be horrifyingly bad, and the scientific rationalization of their exercise practically nonexistent. But it is nearly universally the case that they are SF rationalizations, not supernatural ones.

Continuum and compartmentalization seem to me to be opposites.

Deep epistemological skepticism denies the possibility of knowledge, and questions of evidence are irrelevant. The modern skeptics are people like Berkely and Hume. Solipsism is a skeptical epistemology.

Thanks for the comments.

The continuum exists within readers and, therefore, writers in their daily apprehension of the world. The process of compartmentalizing occurs sometimes minute by minute, but most people seem to sustain both ends of the spectrum simultaneously. Consequently, the fictions we write and consume will land on some section of, yes, a continuum because of the nature of the characters used in those fictions.

Now, strictly in terms of SF vs Fantasy, again, sure there is a continuum due to the nature of some of the tropes deployed. It can confuse. To name a biggie, the continual confusion of how to classify “Star Wars”, which many see as SF (bad SF perhaps, but SF) because of the spaceships and ray guns and others (myself included) see as Fantasy because of the underlying cosmic sentience implied by The Force (at least until Lucas attempted to do a SFnal spin on it in Parts 1, 2, & 3) and the obvious quest plot.

The attempt way back when to “create” a third category called science fantasy failed, I think, because really readers wanted one or the other or, more likely, just didn’t want to think about their candy so deeply. So you have a continuum of effect if not strict taxonomy.

“Is it possible that it is not just a quibble, but a philosophical chasm? Deep epistemological uncertainty, aka skepticism, is historically a deeply reactionary philosophy.”

In the matter of actual scientific practice, it is indeed a chasm. In the matter of science fiction and fantasy, probably a little more than a quibble, but we are, after all, talking about fiction. I cop to a desire to see as much rigor in the latter as in the former, but concede that sticking to such dictums can lead to stodgy writing and editorial disputations which could harm the final product.

I would argue, however, that historically skepticism as embodied in the Enlightenment is not so much reactionary as revolutionary, since up till that point conservatism was embodied by accepting received wisdom without question and to say “But on what evidence do you base your assertions?” was a form of radical revolution. Skepticism may have become a hallmark of individual reactionary conservatism, but when effectively applied remains a revolutionary practice because it never concedes the status quo.

Consequently, SF as a concept remains the more radical of the two genres even if its execution harkens back to, as you assert, classical forms (an intriguing notion, btw, and I’ll have to think about that, especially in the comparison of Verne and Wells—I recognize Wells as perhaps the earliest practicioner of “modern” science fiction, but Verne was not—he wrote what we’d today recognize as technothrillers. Wells directly engaged the thematic consequences of radical change on the human landscape while Verne always safely returned the reader to the everyday Victorian day dream after sinking the nasty new gizmo) because it embodies skepticism in its very DNA. Even in examples of SF where deus ex machina comes into play, an honest reading tells us that this is a betrayal of the primary telos, and we read these as bad SF.

A comment on the comicbook superhero—that would be Batman and maybe Iron Man, but the rest are all intrusions into otherwise mimetic landscapes of supernatural agents. Wonder Woman explicitly so, all the rest to varying degrees iconic representations of “guardian angels” for a technological civilization. They function as a separate case, I think, and are not actually SF. “Watchmen” was an attempt to *make* comic book superheroes SFnal (and I applaud it for mostly achieving that) and as a result functions as critique of the entire corpus of superhero comics fully embodying the irony so often mentioned but seldom evoked in such comics.

As to its popularity, you may be right, but for different reasons—I question that most readers look to comics for science fiction, but look to comics *for comics*. Delany recognizes comics as their own “paraliterary” form, and I’m inclined to agree.

I actually can’t answer the question “where is the intellectual side of fantasy?” because I have never found one that I subsequently regarded as fantasy (for instance, Delany’s “Neveryon” novels are rigorously intellectual, but as I said above I simply cannot read them as fantasy—that may be an aesthetic quirk on my part, a mental trick that reclassifies something like that for me so I can “buy” the conceit).

I was wondering if alternate history was going to come up in this. Some are clearly SF because there is a SFnal “cause” for history to have changed. Others are simply exercises in “What if?” for their own sake, like Keith Roberts’ “Pavane” and, more recently, Jo Walton’s rather excellent “Small Change” trilogy.

Is there really a continuum between a fundamentally religous view and a fundamentally materialist view? I think there’s lots and lots of bad SF that suddenly drags in a divine revelation or the Hand of God at the climax, in a jarring juxtaposition that undermines both the SF and religion. But there’s no halfway, just a pretense there’s a halfway, like people live without planning on miracles, then hope for heaven at the end.

“For the most part, this is a silly, territorial argument, true, except…”

But why is it silly? In practice, the market has spoken, fantasy and science fiction are exactly the same, totally mixed up. And fantasy has won the commercial battle. No one needs to provide a theoretical justification for fantasy taking territory that it already has, nor will the theoretical justification give the science fiction reader a conveniently separated (much smaller) shelf at the bookstore. Isn’t the issue what’s good?

“On some level, for the committed scientist to even get up in the morning, he or she must believe “figuring it all out” is at least possible. Assuming there is a solution, however, is not the same as presuming what the solution is. However, that may be a quibble.”

Is it possible that it is not just a quibble, but a philosophical chasm? Deep epistemological uncertainty, aka skepticism, is historically a deeply reactionary philosophy.

“For the record, I think most SF is stridently anti-Post Modernist, and I’m frankly glad of it.” Insofar as I understand it, there’s lots of use of fantasy in Post-Modernism. Is it possible that the insistence that SF/Fantasy are the same thing is about incorporating Post-Modernism into SF?

“What irritates mainstream writers so much about SF is its primary insistence that, no, things are going to be REALLY FUCKING DIFFERENT. (They have an affection for Fantasy, I think, because it’s “safe”—nicely Arcadian, mythic, used-to-be kind of stuff.)”

Strictly speaking, there are two factoids here. That SF primarily insists that tomorrow will be different tends to define SF as the good stuff, assuming that the weird stuff in good SF is a rational choice to achieve the serious artistic goal of depicting change? I would like to think so, but the most (only?) popular form of SF is the superhero comicbook movie, which is just as much heroic wankfest as the trashiest epic fantasy. Also, barring scientific polling, how can we assume that mainstream writers have so much affection for fantasy?
I suspect you’re right, on both counts, but aren’t these tricky judgments, not so much about the psyches of individual writers, but about ideological biases in conventional wisdom?

If there is a continuum between SF and fantasy, where do alternate history stories lie?

Is the problem in these discussion not the difficulty of distinguishing SF from fantasy but the practical impossibility of defining SF as a genre, especially Hard SF?

Is the whole notion that SF is a rationalist pole and fantasy a romantic pole belied by the fact that the historical opposition is not between rationalism and romanticism, but between neoclassicism and romanticism? Who even argues SF is really Neoclassical? Isn’t that a Straw Man? SF has had its romantic and intellectual sides from the beginning with Wells and Verne, but where is the rational side in fantasy? Isn’t it stretching to counterpose fantasy to intellectualism, given the novels of Charles Williams, Richard Garfinkle’s Celestial Matters or Alan Moore’s Promethea?

Last, is it possible there is an intrinsic difficulty in fantasy: Where the narrative grammar is what you wish, foregrounding wishful thinking as a metaphor, treating it mimetically, forecloses irony or disbelief? When Wells wanted to play with disabusing fantasies of power, he wrote The Invisible Man, and deconstructed a fantasy with science. When a fantasist like Alan Moore supposedly wanted to deconstruct similar fantasies, he and Dave Gibbons wrote Watchmen, which is not much success as deconstruction because he wrote it like there was no difference between SF and fantasy.

I say that fantasy is not a genre, but a narrative technique or grammar for incorporating impossibilities in fiction. Horror can use it, sure, but horror can also use science fiction. It was the original essay that seemed to posit fantasy as a family of genres. Science fiction is a different, incompatible technique for incorporating impossibilites into fiction. Just like fantasy, it too can be found in all sorts of genres. Near future thrillers are particularly fond of using it, I think.

I apologize if I was too cautious in thinking those two questions weren’t necessarily rhetorical.

Clarke’s Law is not even a social bluc by-law. If aliens raised the dead, like Klaatu in the movies, only people who already believed in magic would believe it was magic. Chiang’s version incidentally has a fairly well known counterexample I think in the (unfinishable by me) Ian MacLeod fantasies, where magic is industrialized so that an industrial society can be portrayed. Why then call it magic instead of a fictional element with fictional properties? To denote that MacLeod’s world was not Dickens’, i.e., ours, I think.

In fiction, if the story believes that semiotic agency can really do things, then it is fantasy. Or if the story believes that the world is semiosis or that there is another place beyond our reality or that there are persons, objects, powers (effects, generally) that come from someplace outside reality, then it is fantasy. The narrative grammar of the impossibilities is what you wish.

But if the impossibilities are supposed to be have material causes in this world, or that the world obeys laws instead of esthetics or ritual, that there are paths from here to the strange worlds it depicts, that there are all persons, objects, powers, effects are within the cosmic order, then it is science fiction. The narrative grammar of science fiction is not what you wish. The slovenly depiction of our world as it is or the unmarked path from here to the strange new land are bad syntax.

The SF/fantasy divide is like the division between free verse and the various metrical forms of poetry. Plainly poetry is poetry, because it is not prose. Similarly, fantasy and science fiction are not realism. Admitting that concedes nothing of interest. Science fiction’s pseudorealism is like metrical forms in poetry. Insisting that they are the same is like insisting there is no bad verse, because all poetry is fundamentally the same: Poetic forms don’t really exist as definitions of poetry. Therefore bad rhymes and bad scansion are merely insults against the text by the unprivileged reader.

So anti-paradigmatic, sure. Maybe I should have used that term for what I described as anti-fantasy. (And I just reread the first line of your Vellum and laughed my ass off, yes, indeed, you threw down a gauntlet there.)

I agree with your assessment of Bradbury completely—he has always been mostly about nostalgia, and it permeates everything he does (even Fahrenheit 451) and you can’t read one of his stories without everything going late-afternoon-in-September-tinged.

I suppose my stance can be best illustrated this way: you have two anatomists. They both are very good at what they do, but one is a Lamarckian, the other Darwinian. Even though in the specifics of their job they are equally competent, their definitional perspectives are irreconcilable. And at some point deep down into the guts of their practice they’ll inevitably find a crossroads that sets a boundary across which they can’t move without giving up a cherished ideology.

I put “The Stress of Her Regard” in the SF side of the Powers canon because it is essentially a SFnal take. The vampires are no more than an unrecognized species, living parasitically on humanity, and despite the Gothic sensibilities it plays out on my grid as SF. “Declare” rests atop a swamp of sentient universe assumptions and so slips over to the fantasy side.

Yet I can still read it with immense pleasure without my automatic tripwires being effected because what Powers does is pretty much deny the whole destiny thing throughout. That universe is there, but it only comes into play if someone (like Philby) fucks with it. (Such is not quite the case in Last Call, because those powers are applied to characters without their consent. Even so, I read enjoyed Last Call and Expiration Date because he managed not to deploy the Good vs Evil motif in a grandiosely implausible manner.) But, yeah, “Declare” is fantasy that reads like SF and “The Stress of Her Regard” is (more or less) SF that reads like fantasy.

It may be that there is a different label for what you and Mieville and Crowley (in the Aegypt cycle) do, but good grief that last thing we need is another category!

Lastly, though, I’m not sure I want this whole issue settled. I rather like that it’s constantly being turned over because the result is new stories that do different things. (When I hear someone declare, as I have often heard them, that SF and Fantasy are The Same Thing, what I hear is someone attempting to end the argument by asserting a hierarchy with their favored candidate in charge. My hackles rise.)

I think your take on Epic being as great a determining factor is a good one—in a way, Tolkien ruined fantasy and it is damnably hard to get out from under that overwhelming mass of iconic verbiage.

On a panel many years ago, the question came up about Destiny and I was asked “Does the starship captain have a destiny?” No, I said, he (or she) has potential. There were several people who didn’t grasp the distinction. For me it’s fundamental. Destiny, in my mind, is inextricably linked to Destination. Preordained equals dull, boring, and ideologically deadly. I pick up a lot of that in the fantasies I peruse and it turns me off almost at once.

To cop to a bit of waffling, the fantasies I enjoy I seem not to recognize as fantasy while I’m reading them. (Try as I might, I cannot read Delany’s Neveryon novels as fantasy. No more than I could read Mary Stewart’s Merlin cycle as such. And I don’t read Mieville that way.)

A minor thing—Vonnegut’s dismissal of SF was possibly one of the few false steps he ever took in print. It wasn’t the genre he despised—obviously! he used it!—but the marketing category that limited his potential audience. He stated it badly. Ellison is more precise and a minute’s thought shows he means no mean against SF, just the thick-skulled way in which critics, publishers, and readers slot it in a category sublabeled “Garbage.” (What I can’t stand about Vonnegut—and he did this quite intentionally—is he decision to write everything for a fifthe grader. His language turns me off. I’m not an idiot, I have vocabulary, and I resent being talked down to, which he did in everything except his first novel, in which he showed he really could write. That’s personal, though.)

Anyway, this has been fun. It’s nice to talk about this thing with someone who prefers to open out the discourse rather than circle wagons.

You could, of course, just say that the New Wave *was* anti-sf. I mean, you could say that the dominant paradigms are essential in both sf and fantasy, and that which challenges them directly is anti-sf or anti-fantasy, while that which adopts other paradigms is… marginal, impure, quasi-sf or quasi-fantasy. There are the hardcore genreheads on both sides of the fence who hold to exactly that. But this risks, I think, driving away any writer who wants to offer “something different” rather than “more of the same”. Cause if you’re mixing it up, writing something at odds with these dominant paradigms, trying to move the idiom with the times, you’re going to be seen by one side as anti-sf and by the other as anti-fantasy. And if you’re *essentially* so, well, there’s not much point in trying to carve out a place for yourself where you really don’t belong. Result: at best, like Lethem or Chabon, they publish in general fiction and acknowledge the tradition that they, sadly, had to leave to die away into insularity and irrelevance; at worst, like Vonnegut, they actively disavow the genres for their reactionary autocracy of aesthetics.

Bottom line: I always saw the sf community as pissy about Vonnegut’s disavowal precisely because we considered him as being in our camp, as sf, regardless of what he said. I always saw the New Wave as in that same camp, as sf, regardless of its anti-dominant-paradigm stance. I always saw all sorts of strange fiction as sf because I was working with an open definition. But if the tag I end up with from writing my own openly-defined sf is “fantasy,” well, OK, maybe sf isn’t any longer what we point to when we say “sf”. Maybe it *has* (re)set its limits, narrowed its range, closed the definition. If so, either fantasy has opened up its definition such that it happily accepts crazy-ass shit like mine — in which case sf writers/readers (and the hardcore epic fantasy genreheads who don’t want nothing but) are going to have to ditch their closed definitions and come to terms with the fact that fantasy has taken over the default label role — or I’m mislabelled and doing something else entirely, one of those writers who “employ the tropes of both for other purposes rather than engage fully with the essential thematic discourses” — in which case there are dimensions to strange fiction that are orthogonal to that polarity, other discourses at play. Practically, I think fantasy has become the default label. But there’s still pressure for a closed definition, and I probably *am* working at cross-purposes to that polarity. So it’s probably natural that I’m going to tear down any fence designed to box in fantasy and fight with a reductionist sf/fantasy polarity that elides those other discourses.

Of course, I’m sure a lot of it is just a geeky sf writer obsession with How Things Work. That “OK, how can I take this apart?” response.

My concern with sf would be that this plays into: on the one hand, a conservatism on the part of hardcore genreheads that would basically deny sf the relevance of reflecting the zeitgeist, changing with the times, thereby rendering it a literary museum piece of the Rocket Age; on the other hand, the “if it’s good, it can’t be sf” argument, where “good” basically means “engaging with that old ‘human condition’ rather than serving as a diversion from it,” because those who’d argue that can then turn around and say, “look, these writers who question are basically kicked out for not toeing the party line.” I think it’s better for the sake of sf to treat it as a discourse of paradigms, where one may be dominant, but others are allowable, and where adopting a directly oppositional paradigm doesn’t render a work “anti-sf”. Further, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander; if this logic applies to “anti-sf” it applies to “anti-fantasy.”

If you apply it to sf, but not to fantasy, that’s where I see privilege & prejudice. It might not be the active “sneering disdain” style of dismissal, might even be quite tolerant of… all that fantasy stuff. But if an sf reader/writer isn’t willing to accept the consequences of a closed definition in their genre, imposing that on another genre is just not on. This is where I scent an underlying agenda, because the obvious result is to make sf look dynamic and diverse in comparison with that stultified and stereotypical fantasy. And this, in fact, is where I immediately look for abjection, look at sf to see if there’s a revulsion at the qualities projected onto the object — the details of how that definition is closed — and whether those same qualities are in fact also present in sf, maybe even fundamental to it. That being what abjection is all about, a rejection/revulsion at that which is/was a part of oneself.

And it strikes me that the same frontier myth Bradbury turns into little elegies imbued with a sense of lost idyll is writ large in sf, and that in the hands of other writers — writers who are considered more purely sf — actually *does* lead into a narrative grammar of epic, replete with Darlings of Destiny and Restorations of the Realm. Kind of my point about ” where there’s essentialism, there’s God” is that the supreme confidence in Man’s endeavours that you trace back to the Victorian Age (and I agree, though I’d say it’s reinforced in Rocket Age America and tied into that frontier myth and notions of Manifest Destiny,) has written an element of “spirituality” into sf at its roots (in inverted commas because, as I say, it’s more about epistemic certainty written into the worldscape.) DUNE, with it’s epic narrative grammar, is sort of evidential of the… presence of that which is rejected. While many hardcore genreheads will defend it as valid sf till their dying breath, others just as decisively label it (and similar works partaking of the aesthetics and narrative grammar of epic) as “science fantasy”. Where that term was coined for works like “Magic, Inc.” that applied an sfnal methofology to fantasy, it’s become, I think, a mechanism of marking out sf works as “impure,” the term “fantasy” signifying as foreign, as Other, this monomythic heroism that seems to me a pretty big aspect of early pulp science fiction, something that could well be seen as the very fuel that sent Space Opera to the stars.

Contrast that “lost idyll” twilight with TITUS GROAN and the aesthetic of Dickensian/Hogarthian grotesque that pervades it, the greyness of dust and stour, the way it works as a figuration of British society, the End of Empire. Different culture, different aesthetic take, Peake sitting nicely alongside, I think, Waugh’s A HANDFUL OF ASHES. Again those metaphors are foregrounded, the conceits made concrete so the character interacts with them, but I don’t think Peake’s fantasy has anything to do with a sentient universe. I’d say it’s entirely materialist, addressing heritage and society in a universe that’s not at all interested in what Steerpike’s up to. As a more metaphysical example on the same housey theme, there’s Danielewski’s THE HOUSE OF LEAVES. This house that has an impossible door opening into endless empty grey corridors and spaces of impossible size could be taken as articulating some sort of bleak existentialism, if you want to see its aesthetics as expressing a view of reality. I see it more as one vast figurative exploration of the nature of loss.

To me, these are just… different potential flavours of the jam that is fantasy. It’s not a matter of all jam being strawberry but sometimes with different flavours added to the mix. And it’s not the case, I think, that if you extract the essential strawberry flavour entirely what you’re left with is some sort of anti-jam.

Riffing off Clute’s notion of narrative grammars, I think you can identify a spectrum of narrative grammars running from epic with all it’s “Thinning,” through adventure, mystery, thriller and noir to horror with all it’s “Thickening”. In that middle zone, Clute’s narrative grammar of SF, I think, can be seen as a special case of a more general structure I’d call “Twisting”. I break from Clute’s model because what I’m calling epic he calls (Full) Fantasy and I think that’s misleading; the way I see it, you also get fantasy with that “Twisting” narrative grammar, and fantasy and sf are both best seen as modes that may occur at any point on that spectrum. In sf, you have DUNE at one end, “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” at the other.

In the more general narrative grammar of “Twisting” I think the sfnal novum has correlates in other flavours of… call em “quirks” — units of strangeness, those metaphors we treat as mimetic. I think one reason some of Tim Powers’ works might read as sf, and one reason many works like THE BOOK OF SKULLS are still published as sf (despite the fact that it’s about four guys going to a monastery to try and gain immortality in a mystic ritual!) is that metaphysical quirks — call em “chimerae” — can be exploited in the same way the novum is. The conceit is worked through as the driving force behind the Twisting rather than just clicked into place in an epic formulae. The whole text becomes an exploration of the idea.

Anyway, that narrative grammar is, to a large extent, a product of the protagonist’s relationship to the worldscape. At one end, you’ve got the Darling of Destiny in a worldscape that is itself on his/her side. At the other, you’ve got the Fool of Fate in a worldscape that is itself out to get him/her. In between…? Well, I think you can see the hero of adventure shading into that of epic, and the anti-hero of noir shading into that of horror, and a pretty much seamless transition, in the mystery/thriller region, between the two. And all of this is, in turn, to a large extent, a product of the aesthetic of the worldscape, I’d argue. It’s interesting that you pick up on LAST CALL as sliding towards Fantasy. To me, it plays an interesting game of creating a Twisting that flips back-and-forth between the hero being Darling of Destiny and Fool of Fate, and especially with the note of “restoration to idyll” at the end, I can see how this would push the “epic” buttons, so to speak. Where THE ANUBIS GATES, in contrast, is straight down the middle adventure/mystery/thriller. I’m curious why you’d put DECLARE and THE STRESS OF HER REGARD in that order, though? To me there’s very little difference in the approach, and if I were recommending “fantasy that reads as sf” to a curious sf reader, the more contemporary setting of DECLARE and the more Gothic/Romantic vibe of THE STRESS OF HERE REGARD would probably incline me towards the former.

I think your “sentient universe” is very pertinent here actually, though I think it’s too literal. In the epic, I’d say, Good is written into the cosmos as a sovereign power, whereas in horror it’s Evil that’s ultimately in charge. But is it sentience? Horror isn’t always spiritual/religious and neither is epic, I’d say; rather I think it’s to do with a sense of epistemic certainty coded into the work via the aesthetic of the worldscape. Your comment about fantasy being “safe” — “nicely Arcadian, mythic, used-to-be kind of stuff” — ties in; it speaks to an idyllic aesthetic to the worldscape that contrasts with horror’s grotesque. It’s more complex than “everything’s nice” in epic, with the idyll usually poldered, a sublime wilderness (for adventuring) beyond it, and a baroque aesthetic introduced in terms of societal structures. Still, if the idyll is disrupted, much of the epic *is* about its restoration.

Absolutely. That’s why I talk about breaking science fiction / fantasy down to genres like Technothriller, Epic Fantasy, and so on. Because in sf, you could have, structurally speaking, a murder mystery (Asimov’s THE CAVES OF STEEL and umpteen short stories,) a Harlequin romance (Niffenegger’s THE TIME-TRAVELER’S WIFE,) a western (some of Heinlein’s work maybe, or better examples might be found in the 40s/50s pulps,) or a spy thriller (Stross’s THE ATROCITY ARCHIVES.) You can even see the genres which people are less inclined to talk about because they don’t necessarily have bookstore marketing categories — e.g. war story and Buchan/Haggard style adventure. Crucially though, the all-time bestselling sf work is an epic, structurally speaking — Herbert’s DUNE.

To me, it’s more useful (or at least more interesting) to break science fiction down that way; in fact, it would be silly to… well, stridently assert that there’s no difference. Of course, we *do* want a wider perspective that treats of the commonalities making these works all sf, but by breaking it down that way, it seems to me you’ve got a better start-point for asking what it is that actually makes a work sf. I mean, you can strip out the narrative grammars and see what’s left, or overlay them to see if maybe they’re different flavours of a more general narrative grammar that *can’t* be stripped out.

Now, I think fantasy actually works the same way. Again, of course, you can also take a wider perspective that treats of the commonalities, but it’s not all Epic Fantasy; it does come in a variety of narrative grammars. Truth is, you could have a murder mystery (Ford’s THE GIRL IN THE GLASS, maybe,) a Harlequin romance (that whole genre of Paranormal Romance,) a western (Bishop’s THE ETCHED CITY maybe, though I think a purer example could be found,) or a spy thriller (Powers’ DECLARE). Again, there’s a good whack that could be seen as war story or Buchan/Haggard style adventure. Crucially, I’ve spoken to epic fantasy writers who explicitly said they felt “out-of-place” at WFC, while in the UK there can be a lot of grumping about Fantasycon’s horror bent.

Thing is, this diversity in fantasy is denied by characterisations that say fantasy simply *is* this or *does* that. Strident assertions that there is no difference within fantasy. And the closure of the definition is invariably towards epic. Not at all surprising given the birth of the label, but this is where *I* stir the ashes. To me there’s a commonality at the lower level — where both genres utiise the same set of narrative grammars — and a commonality at the higher level — where, as you say, “Modern fantasy and science fiction use the same trick of foregrounding the metaphor and treating them as mimetic” — but much of this is obscured and denied by an insistence on a specific difference. Where those denials are based on closed definitions that mask off the presence of epic in sf and mask off the presence of anything but epic in fantasy, I’m inclined to knock em down. This comes out as “it’s all strange fiction” but that’s… a start point. A clearing out of the Augean Stables.

Down the line, I want to get into the nuts and bolts of how I do see all those “sub”genres allying with each other, or opposing each other, because of very real differences, the way we end up with a sort of phase-space of multiple dimensions of potential literary strategies that different readers automatically (and decisively) parse into zones of sf and fantasy, to actually tackle that “I know it when I see it” spidey-sense. Still, I think the boundary disputes indicate the absence of a single essential polarity, never mind a clear dividing line. So, I reckon you can talk about strange fiction as a whole, and individual genres, but that “what the idioms of sf and fantasy are” is always a projection/decision on the part of each individual reader/writer, that the rationales of thoses decisions are too varied for consensus, and that the result can only ever be a conflict of arbitrary judgements. If the debate is trivial on one level, because the readers *will* always be making those decisions when they come to choose the next book, I do think the territorial/political impact makes it worth getting into when it comes to not alienating new writers and readers — c.f. my comments above about sf losing slipstreamy writers to fantasy.

Anyway, the key point here is that even if there *is* a difference, to get to it, I think, you have to be willing to accept that fantasy comes in distinctly different flavours, even if losing the stereotype completely destabilises a polarity dependent on it. It’s no great loss if that polarity misrepresents both genres by putting them in a relationship of abjection, with the qualities of epic denied in one (e.g. DUNE in sf) and projected onto the other as an essentially characteristic Wrongness.

When you pick up a book and find you dislike it, not for bad writing, not for plot necessarily, but because there’s an innate aesthetic “take” you just can’t accept, you’re tripping over a difference between it and something you do like. It can be intellectually amusing to break it down and figure out why.

“Again, this is a closure of the definition. Fantasy is at base symbolic, I’d say. It’s about entity and identity and the way we make sense of it via signs, the way those signs interrelate with each other. To take those conceits literally as articulating a religious/spiritual worldview is like imagining that Joyce actually believed there was a giant gone sleepy-bye-bye somewhere under Ireland.”

My only comment here is that, while structurally you’re correct, artistically there’s a difference between Joyce and Crowley (or yourself) in that Joyce knew he was playing with symbols and that the world through which Bloom moved wasn’t “really” any different from the one you or I move, but Bloom’s perceptions altered the landscape for our interpretive benefit. Whereas in what we now call Fantasy, the intention it to assert that, no, the landscape is changed. Modern fantasy and science fiction use the same trick of foregrounding the metaphor and treating them as mimetic. That turns the character interaction away from slippery Jungian mind-rambles and gives it that adventurous kick we all really like.

““Asserting that everything can be figured out” is a pretty good example of where the sneaky influence of that Romantic aesthetics reveals itself, I’d say. Personally, I think a truly scientific aesthetic doesn’t make such an assumption, because that would be taking for granted the truth of a proposition when the only way we can prove or falsify it is by running this ongoing experiment of science as a whole and seeing what the outcome is.”

On some level, for the committed scientist to even get up in the morning, he or she must believe “figuring it all out” is at least possible. Assuming there is a solution, however, is not the same as presuming what the solution is. However, that may be a quibble. Even so, there is an aesthetic of confidence the non-scientist attaches to science which includes this and that is what we see in SF.

I grant you all the Romantic baggage SF and Fantasy have dragged along from, in my opinion, the Victorian Age when supreme confidence in all things Man does reigned. After the New Wave failed to flense all this from the genre, what remains is a thin strain of belief that the enterprise is nevertheless worth doing—or trying to do.

For the record, I think most SF is stridently anti-Post Modernist, and I’m frankly glad of it.

I did mention a continuum. Along which you do encounter writers who employ the tropes of both for other purposes rather than engage fully with the essential thematic discourses. I think Delany’s “Dhalgren” and the “Neveryon” series are prime examples of this. They are not exactly within either side of the polarity and take advantage of the tropes to make points most SF or Fantasy don’t (or at least didn’t) bother to address.

Tim Powers’ novels bounce around inside a bubble that’s a lot like this. I read the “Anubis Gate” as SF, likewise “On Stranger Tides” and even “The Stress Of Her Regard” but “Declare” and the “Last Call” trilogy are edging toward Fantasy…

But this fails to address potential counter-arguments with the nature of Fantasy that tend to look like fantasy but are something else. China Mieville’s books are what I consider anti-fantasy (as are yours, btw) because they tackle the landscape of fantasy while extracting the sentient universe element, leaving behind a structure that manages to function without the organizing principle most people presume. (I claim there is no god in Mieville’s universes, but they are constructs that require one, and therefore they are shit house messes.) Bradbury likewise writes about a universe permeated by the numinous, but there’s no trace of the source (unless it’s humanity bringing their own perceptions and expectations to it without realizing it).

Lastly, the main problem I’ve seen in so-called mainstream fiction since Philip Roth declared the death of the novel is that most of it refuses to acknowledge that things change. Material things, that is. While people interact in ways that appear to accept change within mainstream work, all of it seems perfectly in line with the whole Henry James enterprise of a century ago. The world goes through “episodes” but is essentially the same. What irritates mainstream writers so much about SF is its primary insistence that, no, things are going to be REALLY FUCKING DIFFERENT. (They have an affection for Fantasy, I think, because it’s “safe”—nicely Arcadian, mythic, used-to-be kind of stuff.) I don’t think most SF writers view mainstream in negative terms, I think we see it as being about the sorts of things we’re interested in as well but also about this other stuff which we think ought to be taken seriously.

I will say that Henry James did first-class damage by giving us a justification for taking the romance out of The Novel.

Lastly, though, I think this debate is essentially pointless, because we are nevertheless talking about a continuum, and a given work is either your thing or not. I only stir the ashes when I hear it stridently asserted that there is no difference between the two. Because that’s silly. It’s like saying there’s no difference between a murder mystery and a Harlequin romance. Or between a western and a spy thriller. Break them down far enough you can find sufficient commonality to make a serviceable argument that this is true, but it’s meaningless to the reader choosing the next title. If someone doesn’t like spy thrillers, all the analysis in the world saying that they’re no different from a Jane Austen riff will make them see it—nor should it. Otherwise we’d all be writing the same thing, over and over and over and over….

My argument is that the dichotomy is false, based on a premise that Hard Science Fiction and Epic Fantasy are the cores of the respective “genres” and that the essential aesthetic stances of the two modes are a) discrete in and of themselves; b) mutually exclusive. I just don’t buy that. I think the polarity between these two is, in fact, of negligable import, and serves largely a political/territorial purpose: it denies unpalatable qualities that are fundamental to science fiction as an idiom born of the pulps, and projects them onto fantasy, binding it to a closed definition that does it a grave injustice. At root it’s designed to legitimise one by delegitimising the other.

This is exactly the same argument I’d have with someone positing a polarity between contemporary realism (as intellectual, edifying “literature”) and science fiction (as sensational, pandering “genre”). We’re all familiar with the way that abjection works, right? Readers of contemporary realist fiction will set up a polarity of aesthetic stances as essential natures to the genres. There’s something off-putting about science fiction, they’ll say. And then they’ll give a closed definition of science fiction as pandering pabulum.

What it is, they’ll say, is that contemporary realism is about the novel form as exemplified by Zola, Proust and so on, focusing on character and prose, aiming for profound social relevance, while science fiction is about the romance form as exemplified by STAR WARS, BUCK ROGERS and so on, focusing on plot and sense-of-wonder, aiming for shallow vicarious gratification. (They may use other terms, but that’s the thrust of it.) You and I know this is grossly unfair, but any examples offered to refute it will be met with dismissal. Sure, they’ll say, maybe along the continuum you can describe books that do a little of both, but so what?

I’m not just attacking this sort of abjection when applied by sf readers/writers as hypocritical. I’m not just opposing it as a reader/writer of fantasy. I think it’s profoundly harmful to science fiction, never mind fantasy. Over the last two decades or so, it appears to me that centring science fiction on that aesthetic stance has led to a mass of works that could be labelled simply strange fiction — sf in its most inclusive form, encompassing novels like DHALGREN and VALIS and THE BOOK OF SKULLS — being positioned instead as “slipstream,” “interstitial,” “cross-genre” and ultimately fantasy.

My copy of THE BOOK OF SKULLS is under an SF Masterworks imprint. It’s canonical sf, but given the conceit, if it were written today it would almost certainly be published as fantasy, and that’s nothing to do with science having outpaced it. Seems to me the same is true of novels like Zelazny’s ROADMARKS, Priest’s INVERTED WORLD maybe, and all too many besides, I’d hazard. Write a collection of stories like Thomas Disch’s “Descending” and today it will be seen as fantasy belonging beside, say, Kelly Link. As the upcoming writers of unconventional strange fiction hit the market they’re liable to find that market is largely the indie press magazines and anthologies that populate the dealer’s room at WFC, and that their “slipstream,” “interstitial,” “cross-genre” novel largely influenced by 60s/70s New Wave is branded as fantasy rather than sf. And then they’re going to find themselves constantly running face-first into the blanket dismissals of Science Fiction loyalists who refuse to even countenance the notion that fantasy might be an entirely different creature now than it was as a ten-year-old in 1981.

That attitude only means that the writer of the next ROADMARKS or THE BOOK OF SKULLS or DHALGREN or THE CORNELIUS QUARTET is actively alienated from sf. I know I used to identify wholly and utterly as sf. Not any more. I wrote VELLUM & INK as sf in the mould of books like those four named — sure, with some influence from other idioms, poncy and pulpy, (James Joyce & Jorge Luis Borges, H. P. Lovecraft & Grant Morrison,) but primarily seeing the New Wave as a core influence. This apparently makes me a fantasy writer.

I shrug and say it’s all strange fiction, but oh noes, it’s gotta be either science fiction or fantasy according to the Science Fiction loyalists. I shrug and say it’s sf then in that messed-up way, but oh noes, all those metaphysical and logical quirks in the New Wave, all those textual chimerae and suturae, have no place amongst sf’s novae according to the Science Fiction loyalists. I shrug and say it’s fantasy then, but oh noes, fantasy doesn’t actually do that sort of shit at all according to the Science Fiction loyalists. I shrug and say it does, actually, if you take an open definition, but oh noes, the only possible way to talk about fantasy is with an absolute closed definition of the state of the commercial marketing category circa 1981… according to the Science Fiction loyalists.

This is the point where I walk away in disgust. As does the next writer. And the next. And the next, and the next, and the next. I don’t think that’s at all good for sf in the long term.