The fantasy genre is one of the most divided genres in the aforementioned police state of genre fiction (1). I’m not talking about science fiction here, or perhaps I am. It’s harder to draw that boundary than you think. After all, there is the distinct old-school “hard” science fiction, where the point of the story is a hard-headed “what if” about some concept or other. It’s still being written, but it used to basically rule the world a while back, especially in the fifties and sixties. A lot of extremely intelligent stories, written by a lot of extremely intelligent people, although… some of those stories, a minority I’m sure, have not aged particularly well. There’s a whole slew of science fiction stories where the writer extends one invention or scientific concept to some theoretical advanced extreme, and leaves the rest of the world utterly untouched by it: the hero, tired from a long day at the chronostatic time-travel mind police space station, comes home to smoke his pipe, wear his slippers, and have his little wifie make him dinner. Yes, yes, the point of the story is to showcase that one advance, but the idea of a scientific advance of staggering implications that then has… apparently no implications at all, is a bit of a puzzler. (2)

 

Anyway, in travelling out from the centre of the Fantasy reservation, we aren’t planning to cross the fantasy/sci-fi border just yet, but know that there is a great deal of hinterland where the two meet. Not only is a lot of “science-fiction” devoid of the requisite science, making it space opera: heroic fantasy with lasers and starships (3), but there was a strong tradition once for fantasy set in a world that was, or turned out to be, a future earth, where some manner of apocalypse had inexplicably resulted in elves, dragons and goblins, or at least magic. You could be happily tromping through some kind of vaguely amusing Tolkien rip-off (4) when the wise old Gandalf/druid clone explains that “this was where the old men’s terrible weapons warped the land in their great war”. Now there’s nothing wrong with that, if handled properly. For example, Michael Moorcock makes explicit use of the idea in his Hawkmoon books, where the ravaged, newly-feudal landscape is pointedly Europe, and a fair amount of fun is poked at a certain island nation. However, when the writer is just cashing in on a science-fiction trend when the book is nothing more than a stock fantasy, it’s a bit of a sad gimic. It falls into the same big bucket as (unscientific) science-fiction books or films describing the bad guys as “mutants” as a generic substitution for “robots” or “zombies”. Mutated from what? And there’s a whole race of them that are just the same? Surely then the word is “species”?

 

I’d meant to pontificate on high fantasy and low fantasy but this has gone on long enough for now. More of that later, after something else.

 

(1)   Perhaps crime fiction beats it. I have no idea what’s going on in that place.

(2)   Now, if he’d come back to smoke his Arcturian Mega-pipe, well, that would be fine.

(3)   And lightsabres. Which makes the plot of a recent film concerning dragons all the more astonishing in its barefacedness because it’s that film but dressed back up as Lord of the Rings.

(4)   Or, more likely, trudging through some wholly unamusing one. There is a phrase that used to turn up on fantasy books, presumably when nobody could think of anything else to say. It was “comparable to Tolkien at his best”. It was universally true, as a boast. Compared to Tolkien at his best those books were rubbish. (5) and (6)

(5)   Believe me, you don’t even have to like Tolkien for this to be true.

(6)  I may have to edit this entry if they put that quote on Empire, of course…