Spastic Fantastic

            This is a moseying blog post.  It keeps slipping away from its subject, hopping sideways, categorically refusing to tread a linear path.  My ostensible topic today is the difference between science fiction and fantasy.  I write them both—as well as poetry, straight-up literature and, as you can see, a screwball kind of memoir. 

I was thinking I’d start with an objective distinction: “Science fiction is such and such, whereas and thereat fantasy can only be this and that.”  Ha!  There’s a reason the two genres are stocked on the same shelves in most bookstores.  A number of great stories could easily be classified as both.

There are familiar tropes, of course: for fantasy, dragons and wizards and incognito heirs to the throne.  The most pop culture kind of fantasy (which is by no means, thank goodness, the only kind of fantasy) takes place in a faux-medieval society where magic operates as a kind of physics + chemistry + religion.  For science fiction, by contrast, the staples are aliens and galactic federations and time traveling cowboys.   

I’m tempted to say that science fiction is a more heady genre: slower and more speculative, bent on framing questions about human existence.  On the other hand, I’ve read plenty of speedy SF, and plenty of sedate fantasy to which questions of human existence are quite at home.   

I’m beginning, in fact, to despair of ever finding a system of classification.  Where’s Linnaeus when you need him?  I might as well talk of other things—of shoes and ships and ceiling wax and cabbages and rings of power and Grendel’s mother and “Use the Force, Luke!”…

Yikes.  What have I gotten myself into?

&

Here’s something I can latch onto: I think I got a sizable chunk of my imagination from Jim Henson.

Thank goodness for all the supremely fantastic, supremely dark children’s movies of the eighties.  Thank goodness for Mrs. Brisby using a magic ruby to drag the sinking house with her trapped children out of the mud.  Thank goodness for that wine-drinking, riddle-clacking skeleton head in The Last Unicorn.  Thank goodness for the broken, dystopic Yellow Brick Road in Return to Oz (how cool was that!).  Thank goodness for the Bog of Eternal Stench, and David Bowie’s tight white pants.

            And thank goodness for my parents, who watched all those movies with me.

            It was a rich stew, to be sure.  A rich stew full of strange lumps, some delicious, some tasting of garlic and hard taffy and magic shoes.

            Fantasy, for me, is the stuff of dreams.  Death.  Unexpected love.  Existential decisions. 

Magic shoes.

            A few years ago, in fact, I did have a dream about magic shoes; I found them in Costco.  They were slippery and elfish, with silk skins, rather (now that I think about it) like the ballet slippers I wore as a child.  The special power of these shoes was that, whatever color they were currently painted, the wearer could find a refrigerator of matching color and use it as a portal to other worlds.

            Since I then found myself being chased by a pack of Velociraptors (thanks for that, Jurassic Park), it was quite lucky that Costco was, at that moment, having a blowout sale on refrigerators.  There were the usual black, white, and silver ones—which were utterly useless, since my shoes were currently pink.  Craning my head, I noticed a few more refrigerators on the second shelf.  I hopped onto a forklift and shimmied up to its roof.

            Having climbed onto the thin ledge of the higher shelf, I spotted what I was looking for: a refrigerator as pink as Elvis’s mother’s Cadillac.  I swung the door open and dove through. 

            Fittingly, the place I ended up was a very cold prison cell.  There was one window, which overlooked a square where a bride was about to get married.  The only other occupant of the cell was a mottled-brown falcon, who introduced himself as the Viscount of Silence.  

The Viscount of Silence was my loyal, enigmatic, and taciturn companion for the rest of my adventures, which would have been much longer if a crow outside my bedroom hadn’t woken me up, trying to gobble the cat food.

&

            All right, then.  After that notable interlude, returning to the question at hand…

In reality, I don’t consider as many of my pieces SF as an average reader might.  To be counted in the genre, I require that the story integrates, in some manner, science.  An achievement of science, a conjecture of science, or the facts about science itself.  Science fiction, as I define it, is about a peculiarly rational process of inquiry, and its repercussions.

            Fantasy, on the other hand, doesn’t have to be so analytical.  Princess Umba, in her magical world, could meet her own double without ever questioning how this came about (though she might want to).  Fantasy, as I write it, is about myths, dreams, poetic language.  Uncertainties. 

Jokes.

My fantasy stories tend to move in circles, like this blog post, pivoting on an emotional reality rather than a tangible fact.  They tend to be the kind of stories that teach the reader to think in a different way: to imagine other perspectives and realities, to leap beyond the pale...

            For anyone who wants to write fantasy, I say: go for it.  You may end up thinking in extended metaphor, or carrying a falcon named the Viscount of Silence on your shoulder…but there are worse fates.

You may even look up one day and realize, with a great swoop of clarity, “Damn!  I’ve been writing the wrong thing all along!”  I’ve come to that conclusion, once or twice.

And then I smiled to myself, and kept going.