The State of Speculative Fiction Today

[darkwing_duck1]

I question Tolkien inventing the fantasy genre. Sure he's probably the reason we have such a section in our bookstore but he was hardly the first. George MacDonald, Lord Dunsany, William Morris, and Lewis Carroll all wrote what have to be considered fantasy stories, not to mention The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Most of these were acknowledged by Tolkien to have a heavy influence on his work. Plus (even if Lewis was Tolkien's friend), The Chronicles of Narnia began to be published before The Lord of The Rings was, though after The Hobbit.

Those are all fair additions. I admit freely to not being as up on the history of fantasy as I am on the history of science fiction.

Fantasy had it's roots laid down long before any of that in any event...consider all of the Arthurian material going back centuries....

 

[stj]

Speaking practically, both SF and fantasy are marketing labels, identifying fiction with some fantastic element. In the first, the fantastic is supposed to have a natural cause of some sort, and in the second, the fantastic element works by magic. It's true that this is primarily a stylistic distinction, but isn't that a vitally important distinction when discussing fiction?

As marketing labels, SF and fantasy date back to the pulp magazines of the Twenties. As modes of fiction? I think the difficulty in identifying the origin of fiction with fantastic elements that were still to be regarded as natural in cause and at least possible in reality (aka SF) lies in the slowness with which the concept of natural law permeated people's thinking.

It's not really fantasy when the author and readers think, at some level, that the fantastic goings on are not really fantastic---it just happens to be the sort of thing that happens far away or long ago or to specially favored people. Nor is it SF if the author and readers don't believe that science could do or find something strange, wonderful and new that would be good to have in a story.

Gullivers' Travels sure qualifies as an early form of SF. Of course, it's a satire. But SF isn't a genre like the horror story, so SF can be satire. The way that Swift works out the arithmetic for Lilliput and Brobdingnag is so much like SF exposition it isn't funny. But Gullivers' Travels most certainly is not the origin of SF the marketing phenomenon!