Who's Genre is it Anyway, or What Exactly is Science Fiction?

Yesterday, Steve Trower wrote a guest post over at the Speculative Faith blog with the wonderful title, "In Space, Nobody Can Hear You Sing." He defined space opera as being more concerned with fights of good versus evil and grand sweeping adventure than technical details, pointing out that "Nobody cares what powers a Tie Fighter or how the Millennium Falcon can travel faster than light;" then he opined that this waving of the hand separated it from the "hard" science fiction of the genre proper.

I was surprised he listed Asimov's work as space opera. I'd always thought of him, if not as "hard" as Bradbury or Clarke, at least not "soft." The Foundation series became a galactic globetrotting adventure, but was rooted in real social science theory. Which brings me to the question that's plagued this genre since its relatively modern conception: what, exactly is science fiction? And what differences, if any, separate the works therein?

Trusty Merriam-Webster defines science fiction as "stories about how people and societies are affected by imaginary scientific developments in the future," with the earliest known use coming all the way back in 1851. Wikipedia claims it is "a genre of fiction dealing with imaginative content such as futuristic settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, time travel, parallel universes, and extraterrestrial life."

However, the World Science Fiction Society, the organization in charge of the annual Hugo Awards, one of the best known prizes of the genre, has the following to say regarding hard and fast rules (emphasis added):

While the organization sponsoring the Hugos is named the World Science Fiction Society, our charter explicitly makes fantasy as well as SF eligible for our awards. Works of fantasy have often won Hugos, and, in fact, Hugos have been won by works that some people consider horror or even mainstream. There will never be universal agreement about the precise distinctions between genres and sub-genre, so WSFS’s position is that eligibility is determined by the voters. To paraphrase the great SF editor and writer Damon Knight, a Hugo winner is what the Hugo voters point to when they award a Hugo.

Well, that's not very helpful at all, is it? Here's another definition from Merriam-Webster to start your head spinning: according to that publication, a space opera is a "a futuristic melodramatic fantasy involving space travelers and extraterrestrial beings," (emphasis added).

The old adage used to be that fantasy used magic and science fiction used science. But the revered "hard" science fiction Arthur C. Clarke once famously posited that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Do you see the problem with definitions here?

Such difficulties tempt one to shrug with a "Whatever," or link arms and sing "Kumbaya," or even pitifully admit that ">2 + 2 = 5." If it's so difficult to find a division, why have one at all? Is there any truth, or is it all an illusion? Why bother?

I'm against fandom and genre wars: I can proudly wear my Jedi Academy hoodie while saluting someone the Vulcan way, and for good measure proclaim to "Live for the One, and Die for the One," (which, if you missed that last reference, is from the little known Babylon 5 television show). Often I'll describe myself as agnostic in my fiction tastes, which are not limited to the spec genres. A good story, is, after all, a good story, no matter what the classification.

But (and it's a very big, important but): labels matter to help us make sense of the vast world around us. Scientists classify new animals according to an agreed upon taxonomy not out of spite, but to further the general knowledge of the world in a system others can study and learn from. Without order one book is just a book, which I may not even attempt to describe. Multiply that one book by the number of novels, radio programs, television shows, and movies now inhabiting the science fiction genre, though, and without order you'd have chaos. Definitions allow us to speak about a body of work as a whole rather than just the parts making it up.

So, science fiction, what is it? It's a genre that is rooted in an exploration of ideas, often in space, sometimes here on Earth, but always looking toward something unknown and wondering, "What if that were true: how would we live?" Pioneers of the genre looked at the contemporary world around them and pushed things to their limits: Verne's Captain Nemo in his submarine, Asimov's three rules of robotics, the killer martians of HG Wells.

Fantasy, of course, also wonders about the unknown. I'd say fantasy, by and large, as we understand it today, draws on the established mythos and beliefs of a culture to develop the world of the story. The grandaddy of the current genre, Tolkien, looked to Norse cosmology and culture to develop Middle Earth.

Why have these two genres seemingly intersected with space opera, steampunk, and even the "pure" science fiction stories of today? I believe it's because science fiction is no longer the new kid on the block but a mature genre old enough to have an established canon of work. The average person now uses words like "robot," "warp speed," and "ray gun" in ordinary speech, often in a quaint way, looking back on an era rather than looking forward. Similarly, once foreign scientific principals like atoms, cells, and even Einstein's theory of relativity are now common, if imperfectly understood, knowledge. The Space Age, at least in the cultural sense, is now a nostalgic era of the past.

Also, most of the early works of science fiction have lived long enough to see their prophecies unfulfilled, their science debunked. In 1863 Jules Verne wrote a relatively unknown but intriguing novel called Paris in the Twentieth Century, which imagined what his home would look like in the far distant 1960s. While it's a wild, imaginative ride of a story, there are no hippies or supercomputers, missiles or spaceships. Neither Pan Am or manned trips to the moon survived long enough to make 2001: A Space Odyssey a reality, and Star Trek's had to live down that World War III in 1999 idea ever since "Space Seed" aired in 1967. Our contemporary view of these stories is as escapist and fantastic as our appreciation of the Odyssey or Don Quixote.

If fantasy is the method of using common cultural touchstones to create a fresh story, and science is the language of our current culture, then there is only one conclusion we can draw: science fiction is the new fantasy.

But I still think there is a division separating such stories from the modern fantasy genre, with its wizards and castles and trolls, even if only by the finest of fine lines. While science fiction now draws heavily from the past works of Flash Gordon, Star Wars, or even Asimov for ideas, the best of this genre also pushes such concepts forward based on new knowledge. Contemporary science fiction is gradually shucking off the "megacomputer" motif and theorizing about new forms of space travel with smaller, more integrated technology. The superheroes of today aren't transformed by the old boogeyman of atomic energy but newer concerns such as genetic experimentation and nano particles. The online trends of today are being pushed to the far limits of danger in recent novels and stories.

These continually new crops of science fiction sometimes take on new names and breed new strains. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein certainly draws on "imaginary scientific developments," specifically the affect of electricity on the human body, but it also spawned the now developed horror genre/subgenre (depending on your point of view). William Gibson actually named his own subgenre "cyberpunk," with its emphasis on the near future world as seen from the 1980s technological innovations, but the term now describes an aesthetic as much or more than its original scientific meaning, Steampunk and space westerns are pushing the boundaries of the genre even further, and of course, there's the curious quandary we may one day find ourselves in with this genre: if we do eventually reach a point where space travel is commonplace, can we even call it science fiction anymore?

If we go by the old spaceships equals scifi, then no. But as I've pointed out, that's not really the heart and soul of any science fiction story, whether "hard" or "soft" or anywhere in between. All of these stories take the past, mix it with the present, and then ratchet it up a few years or decades or even centuries. Sometimes what comes out of the oven smells an awful lot like last week's lunch, and sometimes it's not anything we even have a name for yet. But it's become something more than the sum of its parts, something that isn't defined only by its technical specifications or plucky adventures.

Science fiction shakes things up, forcing people (human and alien and reader alike) to confront what may eventually come, for good or for evil. That's about the best definition I can come up with, at least until the next frontier comes along.