After I said what I said about science fiction earlier this week, I started thinking. It’s not true that nobody reads sci-fi, and maybe it’s even less true because we aren’t labelling books properly. If they have to be labelled.
We’ve become so keen on fantasy in recent years that it has become the label for anything not totally real. And we may have travelled to the moon and back, but in general space travel isn’t terribly real. That makes it fantasy. Maybe.
It was my use of the clever word dystopia when I reviewed WE by John Dickinson which really set me thinking. Is it only sci-fi when it involves travel through space? Because there’s Oisín McGann’s Small-Minded Giants, for example. Pretty dystopic, if you ask me. Future world (on Earth) where people live in a way totally alien to how we live here and now. And not in a nice futuristic way, either.
Oisín’s book reminds me very much of Julie Bertagna’s Exodus; of where the people fleeing their flooded islands end up. ‘Paradise’ to some maybe, but dystopia to others. Fantasy or sci-fi, or neither?
I always had this theory that the Retired Children’s Librarian dislikes fantasy because she equates it with sci-fi and she equates that with space travel, which to her mind is dreadful. Pippi Longstocking is fantasy, while not having much to do with rockets and interplanetary adventure. And she likes Pippi.
Terry Pratchett said how he fancies himself as a sci-fi writer for a bit, while he reckons his partner-to-be, Stephen Baxter, in their next book venture is a sci-fi writer who quite likes the idea of writing fantasy. It is very close.
So perhaps we need to re-label some fantasy? There’s more to sci-fi than Robert Heinlein or Isaac Asimov. In fact, how much do the Asimov robots differ from J K Rowling’s characters?
The Resident IT Consultant added his question when we discussed this. Is Patrick Ness’s Chaos Walking sci-fi? There are spaceships.
It’s interesting that we categorize science fiction and fantasy together in the bookstore where I work, even though they are two pretty distinct though sometimes overlapping genres. I think this is a fairly standard procedure here in the U.S., but it’s odd, as in some ways they represent polarly opposite realms.
Apparently I made up the word ‘polarly’, but you get my meaning.
This is the right place to make up words. I do so all the time. I used to worry about it, but now I make my own whenever I need them.
I suppose the hard thing for a shop is that if a book doesn’t come with a label from the publishers, then it’s up to people working in the shop to decide, and we can’t all know the finer details of something we’ve not read.
I think sci-fi is like a warning sticker to some, and they wouldn’t touch it with a brage pole. To me sci-fi is a good thing, but again I’m not your average 13 year old. But yeah…. Sci-fi would engourage me to read the book, while my (annoying) best friend would run screaming.
Chaos Walking is sci-fi. They’re on a new planet and everything. But it’s also partly horror and partly war. My aforementioned (annoying) best friend, thinks of the book, which I forced her to read, as a romance.
She disgusts me.
You really like your friend, don’t you? But if it’s a romance, then that’s fine.
Nah my buds are awesome….
To me sci-fi signals science (robots & machines taking over) + future. There are some interesting stories (i.e. some stories that I can live with teaching my classes), but I prefer fantasy (especially nice and nasty witches). It is not a genre I read much, though, but if I didn´t blog about crime fiction exclusively, I might read more of the other stuff now and then (I know I did earlier).
The practitioners of both genres do seem to hang out together as well. A great example of one who can do both well is Ursula LeGuin, but that’s perhaps because she was the child of anthropologists, and anthropology can be a helpful foundation in both kinds of stories.
I think they stack them all together (Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Horror) on the same shelf because the traditional Sci-Fi (Robert Heinlein or Isaac Asimov type topics and content) is said to be losing ground in popularity, so they stack those in with the other stuff and call it all sci fi or sci fi/horror.
Me, I like Sci-Fi and “Sword & Sorcery” type fantasy. I grow tired of going through the SciFi section titles like this…Zombies; zombies; vampires; vampires; zombies; vamps and werewolves; S&S Romance? (what’s that one doing here?); S&S; Vampires; (ick) really bad zombie title; more vamps; Oh look, there’s a space ship on the cover of that one…
…oh…zombies, vamps, and werewolves from another planet…
…vamps; vamps; more vamps…
I hate these labels.
Why do we classify two books together just because they have (say) a wizard in them? Or a spaceship in them? Are readers really so shallow that they’d read any old book about robots just because they loved (for instance) Marge Piercy’s android novel ‘Body Of Glass’?
I’m all for destroying the genre system in bookshops. What does it tell you, really? Nothing. For years, as a teen reader, I was convinced I ‘liked fantasy’ because I was a Tolkien fan and a Pratchett fan and a Le Guin fan and a Wynne Jones fan… No. All that meant was I liked the way those authors wrote. It suddenly hit me that I would like them no matter WHAT they wrote about.
Who really cares what a book is about? I don’t think they do. They just believe they do. Creating a ‘fantasy’ genre is no more informative than putting all the red books on one shelf and the blue b0oks on another (as the Two Ronnies once did in a comedy sketch).
By the same token, Nick, one could dislike fantasy because of a dislike for Tolkien. Which is wrong.
Though I too hate these labels, I’ve found myself referring to some of my fiction, particularly Corvus, as science fantasy in order to subvert expectations – or prepare readers not to be entirely confounded!
You mean I didn’t make that word up myself?