Why is fantasy more "standardized" then science fiction?

Night, I honestly don't read any science fiction books about warfare, so I'm not entirely sure how relevant that is.

That soft science fiction often in fact ignores real-world advances I think is orthogonal to the fact that the sciences and technology are constant sources of new inspiration. It just says that writers are crap at the bits of their story that aren't about their inspiration — in this case, they weren't going after the implications of real-world night vision technology, so it was unimportant to them to 'get it right'. Which I think the consuming public largely doesn't have a problem with, really. Only pedants tend to think works were ruined by under-research, rather than flaws in plot or characterization or the like.

One does have to point at the fantasy readership, here. Writers write what sells. Fantasy that fits within the standard parameters tends to have a much better chance of doing well than fantasy that goes outside the genre "comfort zone".

A brighter future for a darker age.

What about, say, more innovative works which eschews these familiarities? Would there be any chance of them outselling the Usual Stuff(R)?

It... depends?

edited 21st Mar '12 12:53:19 PM by CrystalGlacia

"Jack, you have debauched my sloth."

Can there be a better answer than "It depends?", or is that question too asinine to even ask?

edited 21st Mar '12 1:14:53 PM by QQQQQ

There's a chance, but it's a pretty long shot and fantasy readers tend toward the conservative and familiar. Science fiction had always had a portion of its readership that WANTS to be taken somewhere new and even disturbing — that's been part of the draw of the genre since its beginnings. Fantasy, not so much.

A brighter future for a darker age.

Huh.. how interesting. Do you mean though with Fantasy, the general readership would prefer another iteration of the familiar - as part of the escapism which features?

I think it depends on what you consider familiar.

I think fantasy readers can be different based on what they read. I enjoy JRR Tolkien, George RR Martin, and Brandon Sanderson. They have styles quite different from each other. Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings to make a home for his languages.*

Martin strives to make his characters relateable and then put them in conflict with each other.*

At least that is the impression I get from A Song Of Ice And Fire.

Sanderson tends to write with very interesting magic systems. Sure they tend to drift to the more epic scale of fantasy, but they are still quite different.

I found The Dwarves by Markus Heitz as the more Tolkienian fantasy romp, so I didn't care for it as much. However I must say some of the dwarven culture was neat.

Also I read fiction books from other genres so I guess I'm not the standard fantasy audience.

So I guess that Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson is outside the norm? It is fantasy but it does feel like a heist novel.

Has ADD, plays World of Tanks, thinks up crazy ideas like children making spaceships for Hitler. Occasionally writes them down.

But you've probably read one where it would be useful to see in the dark, and so has Morven. This is strongest in a military setting but it is by far not exclusive to it. Civilians can buy PVS goggles from their local surplus stores and wander around the neighborhood in a blackout safely but the future doesn't have them. It has nothing to do with hard or soft. It's a matter of dramatics or dynamics, sometimes, but usually it's just thoughtless. That doesn't make them bad stories always (although it's a warning sign), but it does mean they're somewhat bizarre.

The idea that new science provides more inspiration than history is inherently flawed; it's not like history is unchanging either (which Q touched on correctly) or that it's limited, which nobody has yet touched on. History isn't limited. We have several thousand years of it in the written record, several thousand cultures each with ten thousand conflicts and hundreds of thousands of leaders with a very much individual goal for each.

Science fiction is more likely to draw on historical parallelism than fantasy is. The Outside Context Problem, a description of a historical dynamic, for example, was coined by a writer of science fiction. Gundam built itself around an Allies vs. Axis ethic that got stronger the more they kept working on the One Year War (to the point 08th MS Team made it explicit with a "Sieg Zeon!"). People have copied historical battles for science fiction more than once (Berserker Fury, which I despise, comes to mind with its blatant aping of the Battle of Midway). Lifted historical dynamics and setups are rife in the morality tale aspect of scifi, from the X-men to Arthur C. Clark.

But nobody's copied Agincourt for a fantasy battle to my knowledge. Byzantium and analogues of it turn up more often in alternate history or straight sci-fi then they do in fantasy. Romans turn up in fantasy, at least, but they're pretty Theme Park Version usually.

So, with respect to Morven, I must absolutely disagree. The difference that lead to the relative diversity of science fiction, from alternate history to cyberpunk/post-cyberpunk to even the softest of sci-fi is, in fact, a need to do research. It is not only a need to do research, however; it's also a need to perform analysis. Fantasy does not require these things. It comes from deep-rooted things about the nature of the works in question and from whence they first emerged.

Fantasy was born from a way to make the world match the conception of it inside the heads Greeks and Romans. Later it was a desire to return the world to compliance with the way it was once seen by others, because these appeared grand storytelling tools. (Note all the influences Mild Guy cited?) These are not revolutionary urges; not urges to change.

Science fiction as it was born around 1910 or so wanted to change the world. Not only is this a revolutionary impulse, it demands knowing where the world actually is. Twenties and thirties sci-fi talked about futuristic airplanes more than it did spaceships, because airplanes were new, and also because our problems were on the ground and they wanted to use these airplanes to overcome facisim, because facisim, as I'm sure you're all aware, was a thing then. Using airplanes lost its charm after tens of thousands of them fought in World War II and they weren't shiney anymore, so we shifted fully into spaceships. Star Trek's utopian vision of the future was born of the desire for a future different from the blasted radioactive wasteland that seemed most likely in the sixties, and is seen in many works of similar timeframe. Computers have been a thing since about 1950, networked ones since the sixties, but we didn't get cyberpunk until the economic downturns of the seventies. (Please note this is all social rather having relation to the state of science, or even engineering.)

Fantasy is complete within itself; science fiction reaches outside itself.

edited 21st Mar '12 6:38:11 PM by Night

Nous restons ici.

And that's quite possibly why I prefer the latter... but I'm not sure it really answers the question at hand.

I think it does; something that is viewed as already done doesn't change the way something that seeks outside influence will.

Nous restons ici.

But at the same time, the rhetoric you're using does give too little credit to fantasy at large and too much to science fiction. I for one would go with this qualified corollary:

Fantasy strives to create a self-contained universe that is not this one; science-fiction strives to take what we know of this world and reach beyond it. Neither is inherently limited.

I'll hide your name inside a word and paint your eyes with false perception.

I wouldn't really say that Night's rhetoric is "giving more credit" to science fiction.

edited 21st Mar '12 7:18:11 PM by nrjxll

The problem is that he seems to be pegging a number of problems with what has been produced lately in fantasy to the fundamental nature of the genre itself. As someone who writes and reads fantastical literature which to which these assumptions do not apply, I naturally take issue with such notions. But perhaps I am reading too much into all this; I do not know.

I'll hide your name inside a word and paint your eyes with false perception.

I tend to agree that whether it's what Night thinks or not, the reason why (modern) fantasy tends to be more "standardized" is related to the fundamental nature of the genre. That doesn't mean that it's impossible to venture outside that kind of thing, though.

Japanese media has it's own genre assumptions and it's own problems with over-reusing cliches and being too derivative of other works, just not the same works as Western Fantasy.

(Fixed your quoteblock tags)

edited 21st Mar '12 8:25:50 PM by Morven

to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee

I don't necessarily consider the way fantasy tries to standardize a problem. Like most choice issues in writing it's capable of being used poorly or well. I also don't think it's nearly as recent as you'd hope. It's easier to notice, now that there are more stories than ever before, but the standardization of fantasy goes back at least to Greek playwrights who worked with standard template of gods and characters.

I'd really argue the exact opposite. It's only in the last twenty-five years that fantasy has started to become a responsive genre rather than self-contained, starting to copy the morality-play bits science fiction has carried around since the early days among other things.

edited 21st Mar '12 10:39:14 PM by Night

Nous restons ici.

Hold on, you think that fantasy has only recently started using "morality-play bits"? Then how would you describe "The Devil And Daniel Webster", A Christmas Carol, The Mysterious Stranger, "Metamorphosis", Animal Farm, The Chronicles Of Narnia, and, oh yeah, medieval Morality Plays?

edited 22nd Mar '12 6:30:12 PM by RavenWilder

"It takes an idiot to do cool things, that's why it's cool" - Haruhara Haruko

I'd say the majority of those works I recognize are so generic that labeling them fantasy over something else is a hard sell. Containing fantastic elements does not necessarily make something fantasy. Animal Farm and A Christmas Carole are more Lit-Fic than anything else; actual morality plays, except for the Satan/God at the end, tend to be almost slice of life; etc.

The only good example in that list is Narnia, and anyways, since we're discussing trends and not individual works, what the hell is your point? So some people swam upstream.

edited 22nd Mar '12 6:37:27 PM by Night

Nous restons ici.

Morality plays aside (which I'd argue were not intended as fantasy and shouldn't be considered as such, anyway), calling any of those works "generic" is a downright absurdity.

If "lit-fic" is a legitimate genre, it's an absurdly broad one. Animal Farm is what Tolkien would have termed a "beast fable", though I don't see why that should disqualify it from being fantasy, while A Christmas Carol is a light take on the traditional ghost story concept.

Is "fantasy" here being defined in such a way as to exclude works like Gormenghast that don't fit the mould established by high fantasy works in the latter half of the 20th century? Because if so, no wonder it seems more standardised than science fiction; anything that isn't standardised is being arbitrarily excluded.

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They're stories where supernatural beings/objects/events form a large part of the plot; that makes them fantasy stories, even if bookstores and libraries don't usually put them in the fantasy section. And I could come up with plenty more examples if I had a mind to, and there are undoubtedly even more that I'm not familiar with. I'd say there's enough stories like those, produced a century ago and being produced now, to count as a general trend within the fantasy genre; they're just not the stories that leap immediately to people's minds when you say "fantasy". For more on this subject, try the short story anthology The Secret History of Fantasy.

Oh, and my understanding was that medieval morality plays were filled with Anthropomorphic Personifications of abstract concepts. Isn't that a fantasy trope?

edited 23rd Mar '12 10:25:24 AM by RavenWilder

"It takes an idiot to do cool things, that's why it's cool" - Haruhara Haruko

^ The presence of abstractions could merely imply that the works are an extended metaphor; it doesn't necessarily imply fantasy. It doesn't even necessarily imply fiction, although those plays were fictional; mathematical works (at least from the mid-1800s onwards) are often wholly abstract, but neither fantasy nor fiction. This is also, incidentally, why Tolkien did not regard beast fables as fantasy, because the animals are merely stand-ins for human beings - which is certainly true of Animal Farm, though the case for seeing The Wind In The Willows in those terms is somewhat more problematic, and it's certainly not the case with Watership Down.

For the most part I'd agree with you that the presence of fantastic elements should be sufficient to qualify a work as fantasy, but I'm reluctant to apply the term "fantasy" to works written at a time when the supernatural events therein were held to be plausible by their societies, which to my mind makes them no more fantasy than most conspiracy fiction or hard SF. Paradise Lost, for instance, is not a fantasy; allegorical content aside, it's advertised to the reader as an expansion upon a passage from a non-fiction work which the author and the expected readers would not have regarded as fictional. Likewise, Macbeth is not fantasy, because at the time when it was written witches were considered highly plausible; the last execution for witchcraft in America was in 1692, nearly a century after the publication of the play, and the last in Britain in 1727.

Of course, with any attempt to define a genre there will be ambiguities. I'm honestly not sure where best to place Joan Grant's Winged Pharaoh, for instance, which can be read as fantasy fiction and was written in an era when magic was widely considered impossible, but Grant considered it to be not merely plausible but actually non-fictional. On the whole, though, I think a distinction can and should be drawn between fantasy works, works with supernatural elements which were considered plausible at the time (which could be considered proto-fantasy), and the myths and legends which inspired them.

As an addendum to my above post, I feel I should clarify that I don't mean to question whether lit-fic is a genre, but I do think that any definition that encompasses both Animal Farm and A Christmas Carol is clearly inadequate for classifying the works, and makes me suspect that the only criterion being applied is "this book appears on high school literature curricula".

edited 23rd Mar '12 2:42:43 PM by BobbyG

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I have a theory about why fantasy is so standardised, although I'm not sure I'm qualified to compare its standardisation to science fiction, because I've read almost none of the latter.

There seems to be a requirement that in fantasy literature the plot and story in general has to revolve around the supernatural elements. Most other genre elements can be combined in any number - romance elements, for example, fit into just about any type of story and are perfectly possible to have as a side note without them taking centre stage - but how many fantasy stories have you seen where there happened to be supernatural elements in the background but the actual overarching plot was about something completely unrelated? There's a very strong genre convention that the plot of a fantasy story has to be essentially a supernatural one; which in turn severely limits the number of plots available. To draw another comparison to romance, while literature involving romantic relationships is ubiquitous and very difficult to criticise, literature which revolves purely around romance with little other plot is often derogated as shallow and, crucially, unoriginal.

Scepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom. - Clarence Darrow

^ I think you just summed up why Magical Realism is so highly regarded—the magic stays in the background.

(If we look at Asimov's Three Kinds of Science Fiction, I think most fantasy that's marketed as fantasy is equivalent to the "adventure" kind, and most fantasy that's marketed as magical realism is equivalent to the "social" kind. Any of the three types can be marketed as sci-fi if they've got a scientific underpinning, so this necessarily makes science fiction broader than fantasy for marketing purposes.)

edited 23rd Mar '12 5:33:06 PM by feotakahari

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