The Relationship Between Science Fiction and Fantasy

Fantasy is my favorite literary genre. As a genre, it enables storytellers the greatest flexibility to express their ideas and tell truths that might be rejected in a genre based on stark reality.

I’m also a big fan of Science Fiction stories. Like Fantasy, the Science Fiction genre is an exploration of the fantastic while using science as a strong or loose basis for how the impossible happens.

Both achieve many of the same goals. So are they really so different? How are they related?

The distinction between Science Fiction & Fantasy is obvious for a lot of people, but not so much for others. Generally, we wave our arms and say Fantasy is about magic and the past, and Science Fiction is about technology and… future stuff.

But what happens when we start to examine the boundaries of these genres with a bit more rigor?

Stories we tend to put in camp Fantasy transport us to a world that is concretely or vaguely in the past. Because of this, there isn’t likely to be any contemporary technology. While there is no specific amount of “oldness” that is required for us to place a story in the fantasy category, we’ve come to expect much of our post-industrial advancements to be absent from most fantasy stories.

Stories we tend to put in camp Science Fiction transport us to a world that is concretely or vaguely in the future. We expect to see technology that isn’t possible or currently achievable at the time that we’re experiencing the story. The story can be in the near or distant future relative when the story is told, but since it needs to feature technology we can’t currently experience, it’s likely to occur at least a decade or so in the future.

But what about Star Wars? That has magic and future tech in it, doesn’t it? What about superhero stories? A lot of them have what is functionally “magic” and future technology. And what about fantasy stories that occur in contemporary settings like Urban Fantasy?

We could point to a number of stories that blur the line between the two genres and it only serves to complicate the matter. How do we tell when something is fantasy and when something is science fiction? They’re clearly related. We even talk about them together almost as if they’re the same genre.

We’re familiar with story genres according to how publishers and retailers present them to us. We walk into our favorite bookshop and see sections for Fantasy & Science Fiction, Thriller, Young Adult, Women’s Fiction, Crime, etc. Many of the retail genres we’re presented with in a bookshop can be descriptive of the narrative journey you’ll take like Crime and Western, but other sections like Young Adult and Science Fiction & Fantasy describe something entirely different.

What we don’t see is how storytellers view their stories. For us, the reader, all genres are more or less equal. Fantasy is a genre as much as Mystery is a genre.

Not so for the experienced storyteller. 

Genre for a storyteller can be divided into various types of genres—different genre groups that describe certain features. We might talk about the “Time” genre group by categorizing a story as flash fiction or a novel. We might also talk about the “Style” genre group by categorizing the story as a comic, epistolary, or even interpretive dance. 

Fantasy & Science Fiction, along with Factualism, Realism, and Absurdism sit on the spectrum that describes the “Reality” genre group. This group of genres refers to how much suspension of disbelief the story requires from the audience.

A factual story such as a biography or historical retelling requires little to no suspension of disbelief because the story is recalling actual events. On the other end of the spectrum, Absurdist stories often lack much or any basis of reality or consistency. We can watch a roadrunner paint a tunnel on a rock and run through it and then watch a coyote fail to walk through the same passage without any explanation other than “that’s the rules of the particular moment”—the rules the storyteller has chosen to express a specific idea, message, or evoke a response from the audience.

Fantasy sits between these two extremes. Fantasy may be inspired by real-life events, but isn’t factual. It’s not a retelling of real events like Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup or Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins. 

Fantasy doesn’t sit in the same space as stories such as Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut or The Stranger by Albert Camus because the narrative isn’t so absurd that it has little resemblance to a world we understand or fails to follow an established set of rules or patterns. 

But Fantasy also bends reality more than “Realism” where realistic stories aren’t based on actual events but could be somewhat believable as something that could actually happen like Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, or The Fault in our Stars by John Green.

Both Fantasy and Science Fiction sit within the same “Fantasy” subgenre of the Reality genre group, and I would argue that Science Fiction is simply a subgenre of Fantasy along with Steampunk and Space Opera. A large and well-developed subgenre for sure, but a subgenre all the same. 

And I don’t mean that to take anything away from it. It’s simply the conclusion one might come to when we look at the underlying function rather than the labels grafted over the surface by our bookshop.

Like Fantasy, Science Fiction resides between Realism and Absurdism. Neither explicitly tells the reader what kind of story they will experience, only the kind of world the story will take place in. All we know is that the story will ask a “what if…” question that requires the reader to imagine a world with rules that aren’t quite the same as our own.

This is why Fantasy and Science Fiction can so easily be found in blended forms that we see with Superhero comics, Star Wars, and Twilight. The genres aren’t really about “oldness” or “future-ness.” It’s about bending the rules of reality to create magic abilities or magical technology and then seeing how the characters within this new world react to the myriad of stories that can then occur.

The reason we separate Fantasy and Science Fiction as readers is purely aesthetic. It’s a convention set in place by the stores and libraries where we search for entertainment—a convenience to help us find the specific flavor of fantasy we prefer when exploring the human condition.

Both Fantasy and Science Fiction serve the same narrative purpose. And when an author uses the genre of Fantasy to tell a story—a truth—that is difficult or impossible to tell in any other reality genre, the form is elevated, a blend of craft and art that sticks with us for the rest of our lives.

But what do you think? How do you think Fantasy and Science Fiction are related? What are the defining characteristics of the genres to you? And how do you draw the line between the two genres?

Let me know in the comments. I’d love to know what you think and discuss it further with you.

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