*cracks knuckles* Challenge accepted, Carlos Arturo Serrano.
Short answer: Yes.
Wait wait, put down the pitchforks! You know I started out answering this, “No.” Back in the 1980s, flipping through my pack of Star Wars Bubblegum cards, hoping to find a Leia, one of my fellow-urchins would scratch her ankle and say, “You know, Star Wars isn’t science fiction. It’s science fantasy. Because there’s telepathy and FTL and stuff.”
I agreed wholeheartedly, feeling this wonderful thrill of being smugly superior to a multi-million-dollar franchise. I was into REAL science fiction. Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury. They wrote the HARD stuff… with… *checks notes* telepathy and FTL and stuff.
Pitchforks DOWN. The question here is deeper than you think. You’re really asking —
What is a genre?
The way we define science fiction is different from the way we use the label, and this has to do with the difference between commercial genre and literary theory.
Literary theory will approach genre as a sort of genealogy. Stories refer to stories, build on them. This backstory of shared readings creates a set of shared assumptions. People who pick up Galactic Hellcats, for example, have heard of science fiction, have read other books with spaceships, space travel, or imagined technologies. I don’t have to explain to them what these things are because of that shared cultural heritage. Of course, my shared cultural heritage with my readers also includes popular movies of my generation, Bugs Bunny and Sesame Street, best sellers my parents left lying around like The Stepford Wives, sitcoms, Saturday morning cartoons, national and local commercials… books are written in a cultural moment and we can ourselves be blind to how much shared past we’re drawing on as we craft a simile or metaphor.
It can be fascinating to pick apart this intellectual soup and look at the formation of memes; I mean the original, pre-internet definition of “meme” as distinct artifacts of memory. Sweet, sweet academia and ideas about ideas! Yes, here is a place to argue about what separates science fiction from fantasy, what shares cultural DNA with Tolkein and what Asimov; what Vagner and Flash Gordon. The influences can combine, can split off, can oppose each other.
However, I feel that the casual arguments engaged in online are not literary theory, but are rather addressing the commercial genre.
When I was in high school, I eagerly quoted this definition of science fiction that I had picked up… somewhere… possibly Billion Year Spree:
SF is a genre of fiction wherein an invented science or technology is integral to the plot. Remove the science, and the story doesn’t work.
paraphrase from memory
A lot of what I write fits this definition, but not everything, and these days I realize that many “hard sf” stories fail that definition, having no original or new speculative technology in them. There might be spaceships or ubiquitous holograms or what have you, but the plot ends up being about people competing against people, or running from baddies.
And what does it mean for the story to still “work”? Work how? Remove the science from “Story of Your Life,” say, and the human story doesn’t collapse. Maybe the aliens are a metaphor and everything is personal reflection. Replace the spaceship with an ancient temple in Rendezvous With Rama and the characters would have the same personal arcs (or lack thereof). The plot could be unchanged. The Handmaid’s Tale takes place in a near-future with plausible extrapolations on the technology around when it was written, but Margaret Atwood famously denied it was science fiction. Most James Bond movies revolve around some imaginary technology, either ejector seats and mini cameras or doom-machines, are they science fiction? Only Moonraker? Are you sure?
My learned “definition” of science fiction is not a workable definition at all, merely a purity test. It can be used against existing material, and argued about, but it doesn’t help someone trying to write a new science fiction story. I think it would help come up with a more workable definition of the science fiction genre to look at the definition of genre, itself.
A commercial genre is a marketing tool. It isn’t a literary movement, it isn’t a stamp of approval, it is a way to identify works you might like, for the mutual benefit of book-sellers and book-buyers.
If you liked Star Wars, you’ll like Galactic Hellcats!
Me, crossing my fingers.
That’s it. Moonraker can be classed as Science Fiction because I watched it for the rockets and space bits, though I was not fond of James Bond movies in general back then.
Or, to put it more bitterly: I’m tired of guys telling me I can’t write about faster-than-light travel while they spend another quarter of their earnings on Star Wars and Star Trek tie-in novels.
Which brings me to my next point…
These Types of Purity Tests are Most Often Used to Punish Minority and Women Authors
I know you want to cling to your purity, and YOU, dear reader, are not LIKE THAT, but I have had this conversation way, way too many times:
Dude: [Female Author] is not a real science fiction author! She made [tiny, debatable mistake]!
Me: Who is a real science fiction author?
Dude: Larry Niven. [They always pick Niven for some reason.]
Me: [lists the top 8 egregious crimes against physics in Ring World]
Dude: Yeah, but HE WAS TRYING. Her mistake was worse because I assume she is incompetent because she’s a woman whereas the old white guy gets the benefit of the doubt. [not what he said, what I heard. More likely it was “She should know better because TODAY we have the internet.”]
And yes, I’ve had this same argument with dudes about authors of color, and authors in translation and honestly I AM DONE HAVING THIS ARGUMENT.
Because when it comes down to it, no one wants to enforce this rule 100%. Even the dude in question wants to apply it to some things and not others. They want to enjoy being superior to the popular thing, but also oo over the Big Damn Machine in That Old Book and buy yet another 18-book series about space battleships that have gravity inside how? Some rule-bendings are more palatable than others.
But Space Wizards!
Is it really just that? Would you be happier if there were a “tech explanation”? I think we can all agree that “midichlorians” added zero to the story, or the debate.
*Shudder* midichlorians.
These are not the plot holes you are looking for.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Arthur C. M-F Clarke
What, in the end, is the role of the Space Wizard? Is it more world-breaking than, say, the Space Witches in Dune? The Space Elves in Star Trek?
Now we have 98,457 Star Wars continuities to choose from, there might not even be a space wizard in a particular story. That doesn’t mean that particular story is the most “science fictional” in feel.
Much like that Awful Star Trek Movie With Sherlock In It, any sufficiently poorly-weilded mcguffin can break the story, be it a magical tech or a technical magic.
For this blog post, I posted a poll on a couple of my socials asking “If you like Star Wars, do you also like other science fiction?”
My Twitter poll had 63 votes, one no, one comment admonishing me for the sampling flaw, one remarking that comic books were their gateway into Star Wars. I had 136 respondents to the same question posted on Facebook, the vast majority talking about how they got into SF, either through Star Wars or before Star Wars. ONE person said Yes, but also “I am with Patrick (h) Williams—Star Wars is Space Wizards.” (I had to look up who that was. He’s a youtube movie reviewer who presumably posted on this topic on the opposite side of the debate.)
Other than that one comment, no one out of 199 questioned my use of the phrase “other science fiction.” By accepting that statement, they were accepting that Star Wars IS SF.
Shush, I’m not tricking them. I’m pointing out what I’m trying to say – the way we use the words “science fiction” includes Star Wars, Star Trek, all the space fantasy and space opera and near-future techno thrillers. The level of magic in the science isn’t the point. The presence or absence of “invented technology” isn’t the point.
Can you imagine Star Wars without space? If you took the same plot, the same characters, and put them on dragon-back instead of spaceships… how different is that? How would it affect your enjoyment? For me… a lot. I am drawn to space, and spaceships. I won’t actively avoid dragons, mind, but I’m not going to ever pass up a spaceship for one.
The Real Difference Between Fantasy and Science Fiction
Here’s another definition I remember from my high school reading – probably from the same source:
Science fiction is taking the impossible – say, manned spaceflight to other solar systems – and makes it possible, through appeals to science.
Fantasy takes the possible – say, manned flight from one city to the other – and makes it impossible, by replacing technology with magic.
paraphrase from memory with added examples
While Star Wars has its space wizards, it also has its space ships, and light sabers must be MADE.
We call it Science Fiction when the underlying principle of the world is: Science Can Make These Things. We don’t know how, we don’t know how feasible they are, but we do know, in this universe, science can do this.
The underlying principle of Fantasy is that these things Are Not Possible Without Magic. Whether that magic is postulated to exist in our world or not.
Is The Force magic? Or is it a religious explanation for a natural phenomena? In MY fanfic, it’s the latter. Anyway, they aren’t using the force to power their ships. (Are they? Please don’t tell me this is in some extended-universe thing.)
And while I like this definition by “possibility”, it, like my earlier one, is really only a conversation starter. There are fantasy stories that dig into the “science like” nature of their magics, requiring math, even. There are science fiction stories that never dig into things, just “I put the key in and it goes.”
I am sure I can think of more counter-examples, but this post is getting long already. Any definition I try to come up with, there will be exceptions.
Another definition I heard was that fantasy is “normative” and science fiction “transformative” – fantasy is about restoring the world, science fiction about changing it. And yet there are fantasy stories were the world changes and science fiction stories where you just need to beat back the alien threat. And yet…
And yet
I was at a book fair, sitting next to a fantasy author. A man approached our shared table wearing a t-shirt with a wizard and a dragon on it. “Ah,” the fantasy author said, “You look like you might be interested in my epic fantasy series!” The man perused the table, said, “nah,” and turned to me. “I’m more into science fiction.”
After the man in the wizard shirt bought my book, I joked to the fantasy author, “That fan mislabeled himself.”
Did he, though?
I posted a poll on Twitter, “If you like Star Wars, do you also like other fantasy?”
A lot fewer people answered, no way of knowing why, but 41 said yes, 2 said no, and the only comments were “I also like other stuff where people zoom around in spaceships” and, “Well, not all of it.”
And here is an uncomfortable truth: Science Fiction and Fantasy overlap more than they don’t. There is a reason they are shelved together, and a reason all your friends who like spaceships also like dragons. Non-fans often don’t even know the difference between the genres!
Here are some responses I’ve gotten from Real People when I say I write science fiction:
“Oh, I don’t like that superhero stuff.”
“You mean like Lord of the Rings?”
My high school library, to my unending fury, put a “science fiction” sticker on the back of The Hobbit and Arrows of the Queen, as well as other pure fantasies. When I complained, they said, “We don’t have a ‘fantasy’ sticker.”
Ultimately, fantasy and science fiction are both branches of speculative fiction, of adventure fiction, of escapist fiction, and even – I’m gonna say it – literary fiction. Because genre and sub-genre is a marketing tool, and demarcating these categories with rules is at best a topic for literary theory and at worst an exercise in sophistry.
Rather than apply arbitrary rules to play games of gatekeeping, it’s much more interesting to talk about what speculative fiction DOES, and where it takes our imaginations. What does it say about the moral world of Star Wars that some people are born with special powers? What does it say about the political world that there are empires?
It’s also fun to argue if Superman could beat The Green Lantern, so we’re always going to have these debates, too.
