I’m still wrestling with the comments issue at the new COF site. I take an enforced break today to visit another county fair. Pics later. (I won’t be deliberately seeking out shaved llama butt, but if it’s there, you know I’ll take a pic…)
Discover magazine runs a ‘top 5 space operas’ list today – a list SURPRISE! I mostly disagree with. Sadly, I don’t have the time right now to rant about it. No, I do have time to rant.
You can’t mix movies, tv and literature in a list like this – different standards apply.
YOU may think that there’s no difference between Space Opera and Hard SF, but there is. Unless you want to make the (false) connection between Space Opera and THE NEW space opera.
Any fan worth their salt ought to be protesting loudly about a list that gives parity to Doc Smith’s Lensman series and Star Wars…
And Frank Creed and I are discussing sub-genres over at the RayGun Revival forum.
He wants to create a comprehensive list of all “speculative fiction” sub-genres.
I’m playing the purist stick in the mud: speculative fiction is just another name for science fiction, therefore, science fiction should reside at the top of the list; drop all of this namby-pamby pseudo-literary hoity-toityness and get real. Science Fiction is a genre unto-itself which is capable of encompassing elements of all of the other genres (not sub-genres, genres) and if those genres don’t like it, that’s just too darned bad.
My posts over there are starting to be guilty of looking serious, but no one should take it that way. The ankle-biters are going to make up their own words and definitions no matter what Robert A Heinlein, the first SFWA Grandmaster of Spectulative Fiction Science Fiction had to say.
Is Shavellamabutt near Islamabad?
I hate the term “speculative fiction” – all fiction is essentially speculative. To me, it sounds like a weak back-justificaqtion for the initialism sf by people who write genre but don’t want to admit it. You don’t change the reputation of something by pretending it’s an entirely different thing. You make it better from within.
As for sub-genres… I’ll happily categorise science fiction into space opera, hard sf, etc. And there is certainly a difference between them. Although some works blend or mx & match. You can’t have “science fantasy”, though – they’re two entirely different modes of fiction. It’d be like saying “fictional journalism”. Oh, wait…
Ian,
wow, we agree, lol.
To the points you raised:
Heinlein used Spec Fic and SF almost interchangeably. To him, they were synonymous; the set of genres encompassed by speculative fiction was the same as that found in the set of things science fictional. He most specifically excluded fantasy, horror, etc.
I think he used the term deliberately to get away from the negative associations that had accrued to ’science fiction’ over the years. But note that while he changed the label, the thing that it stood for did not change.
The new wave preempted the phrase in an attempt to change the thing, not the label.
Now academics are again changing the thing, trying to encompass a broad range of genres that, because they sometimes share tropes and even authors, they believe are somehow ’similar’ or related.
The blurring of lines is, in my book, akin to straddling the fence. They can’t come up with an adequate definition of science fiction, so instead they wave a hand at all this similar looking stuff and call it spec fic. It’s smoke and mirrors. Broadening the things the definition supposedly stands for does not a definition make. It’s like saying that all green things are “vegetables” because they share greenness.
Genre categorizing should only work one way: as a descriptor for likely consumers. I hope authors aren’t sitting down and saying ‘today I am going to write a hard sf novel with slash/fic characters’.
They write the stories and then the marketers categorize it into a genre niche. Readers then use these descriptors as fuzzy sign posts. It is just as useful to identify ‘genre’ by authorial relationships as it is by genre name. Perhaps even more useful, because no single work is a perfect exemplar of a specific genre.
Weber writes the Honor Harrington series. It would be far more effective for me to decribe those stories as ‘militarized and feminized’ A. Bertram Chandler to a potential reader than it would be to describe them as ‘new space opera with strong military sf elements, political sf and faux hard SF elements’.
As for Science Fantasy: it’s a long-honored term. If you use the non-genre version of the definition of ‘fantasy’, then certainly science fiction qualifies as a story of ‘make believe’, which in this case has scientific (or pseudo scientific) elements in it.
Del Rey qualifies the term as standing for the essense of the sense of wonder – we get the ‘wow’ without having to be bogged down by the explanation that justifies the speculation.
In many respects I think it is a legitimate ’sub-genre’. One could construction a relationship list under SF that had two headings – ‘Hard’ and ‘Science Fantasy’; under science fantasy you’d place space opera, planetary romances and etc.
Genre taxonomy isn’t just for readers. Yes, there are those who prefer to read a “type” of science fiction, but many also prefer to read specific authors – irrespective of the sub-genre a particular book might be. So, if you were a fan of Kim Stanley Robinson, for example… you’d have the hard sf of the Mars trilogy, the soft sf near-future of the Science in the Capital trilogy, the alternate history of The Years of Rice and Salt… However, sub-genres do also help writers. If they’re writing down a specific line, within a specific sub-genre, then they have some idea of the expectations, traditions and mechanisms of that sub-genre. Which they can either adhere to, or subvert…
I’ve read the Honor Harrington series. They’re Horatio Nelson in space. Harrington is consciously modelled on Nelson – the villain of the series is named Rob S Pierre, after all.
Science fantasy might be a long-honoured term, but I still think it’s an oxymoron. If sf is realist/modernist fiction, and fantasy isn’t… Then the two are immiscible. Appropriating the furniture from one or the other doesn’t change the story’s essential nature.
isn’t that what I was saying?
I think it’s ‘Horatio Hornblower’, the Forester novels.
And Chandler was there well before Weber ever arrived on the scene.
“The science fiction characters of John Grimes, created by A. Bertram Chandler and Nicholas Seafort of David Feintuch are heavily inspired by the Hornblower series.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Hornblower
Baen Books e-book editions of Chandler’s works: “It’s a weird, wild romp in space-time—one of the most surprising adventures of the man that has been called
the Horatio Hornblower of Space.”
Diction definition of fantasy – “Also, fantasia. Literature. an imaginative or fanciful work, esp. one dealing with supernatural or unnatural events or characters: The stories of Poe are fantasies of horror. ”
The stories of Heinlein are fantasies of science.
Oxymoron indicates internal contradiction. There’s no inherent contradiction here – a science fantasy is an imaginitive and fanciful work dealing with things scientific. LoTR is not a science fantasy, it is a magical fantasy.
I originally wrote that Weber’s series was Hornblower in space – but since Harrington is clearly based on Nelson, I changed it. Besides, “Hornblower in space” is such an over-used comparison – everything from Bertram Chandler to Feintuch to Weber… and they don’t actually have all that much in common.
I’m using the definition of fantasy as a fantastic mode of fiction, rather than the dictionary definition of “fanciful work”. As such, it is not realist or modernist. Which science fiction is. You can’t have a realist fantastic fiction. Hence, oxymoron.
actually, Chandler’s works are the only ones that really qualify for the mention; his work-a-day rim worlds are drawn directly from personal experience at sea…
sorry – but what else can you call works of make-believe?
‘fantasy’ stood for everything non-real before it came to be used for a particular type of literature that featured elves and dragons.
SF comes in all stripes of ‘hardness’ and one common, effective way of summing up that degree of hardness is that term ’science fantasy’ – some science, some adventure, no mathematical formulae.
“sorry – but what else can you call works of make-believe?”
Er… fiction?