The Boundaries of Fantasy

If you look at all the different things that are called fantasy — and I mean just in the context of fantasy literature, not sexual fantasies etc. — you start to wonder if there is anything that they all have in common or whether, in Wittgenstein’s words, they simply “form a family.” Fantasy is one of those things that gets harder to define the closer you look at it, like gender or — as Wittgenstein famously pointed out — games. In “Philosophy and Fantasy”, Laurence Gagnon gives us a definition which seems appealing at first sight: “any story might justifiably be called ‘a fantasy’ which gives us some explicit indication of the personality of one or more of the characters and which is also about a world that is conceivable but physically impossible.” However, there is the difficulty of saying exactly what is physically impossible; given what we know of physics, dragons are a far more likely possibility than faster-than-light travel, yet the latter is a staple of science fiction, not fantasy. Moreover, as Gagnon admits, the term “fantasy” is here used “in a very general way such that some writings called ‘fairy-tales’, some labeled ‘science-fiction’, and, perhaps, some designated ‘dream-stories’ will fall under the concept of fantasy.” Since Gagnon is interested in fantasy as a philosophical tool, that will do for him, but if we are interested in fantasy literature, we need something that will explain why The Lord of the Rings is definitely fantasy, The Day of the Triffids definitely isn’t and Star Wars and Twilight are on the fuzzy borders with SF and horror respectively. I recently saw Twilight described as “urban fantasy”, which is silly considering that it takes place in a village, but does at least note that fangs do not a horror film make. Twilight could fairly be described as low fantasy (i.e. a tale where fantastic elements are found in the normal world, as opposed to high fantasy, which has a world all of its own). But if that is true, then should we say the same of Dracula?

It could be that the distinction between fantasy and horror is of a different kind than the distinction between fantasy and science fiction. Horror is like comedy or pornography, in that it is a genre defined by the feelings it is designed to arouse, whereas fantasy, like westerns, is defined by the kind of things it describes. That is why such disparate creations as The Saw and The Omen can both be called horror films, and why when you reduce the scare quotient in a lot of so-called horror, you see that it is fantasy or SF. (Of course there are people who are genuinely scared of the vampires in Twilight, but they’re just wusses.) The categories of fantasy and horror overlap, not because of Wittgensteinian vagueness, but because they should. If you have an overlap between the sets of plants and animals, you assume that the concepts “plant” and “animal” are a bit fuzzy, but there is nothing surprising about an overlap between the set of plants and the set of edible things.

Coming to the more notorious overlap between fantasy and science fiction, we therefore need to ask which kind of overlap it is: is it a plant/animal or a plant/edible overlap? Both the fantasy and science fiction genres are defined largely in terms of what they describe, and both involve describing things which we are fairly sure do not exist and have never existed. They are also the kind of things which not only do not exist but would surprise us if they were to exist. If a connoisseur of nineteenth-century fiction were to read in the Times Literary Supplement that Madame Bovary was actually a real person, he might put down his teacup and murmur “Well I never!” This is probably not how we would react if it were proved that Sauron was a real person.

Both fantasy and science fiction, then, deal with things that make us go “wow!” They are “astounding tales,” and in this respect, the genres are also a little like horror, in that their definition includes the feelings they are designed to evoke. A novel set in a world which was exactly the same as ours with addition of toast that always falls with the buttered side up would fit Gagnon’s definition of fantasy, but would not be fantastic; neither would it make for interesting science fiction. But is the “wow” of fantasy the same as the “wow” of science fiction? If that were the case, fantasy would be decidedly less impressive, as Ryan Somma argues in a fictitious dialogue between “fanboy” and “scientist”: for every impressive fantasy creature, device or journey, science fiction has something bigger, stronger, faster or whatever. Shadowfax may carry Gandalf faster than any horse, but that’s still well below the speed of light … or even the speed of a family car. But this is not how it works: the “wow” of fantasy is subtly different from the “wow” of SF. As I said, dragons are a much more feasible proposition than faster than light travel, but dragons strike us as more magical and mysterious.

Let us imagine, then, a science fictional account of dragons (something Anne McCaffrey comes close to in the Pern books). Someone, somewhere, messes with the genes of birds to make them very big, featherless and scaly (in other words, to make dinosaurs). Then they work on the digestive system so that the creature produces methane which can then be ignited in its mouth. Voila, a dragon, which can then make the story interesting by escaping and laying waste to cities. We’re talking something between Jurassic Park and Godzilla here.

This would make passable, if rather unoriginal science fiction, but despite the presence of dragons it definitely wouldn’t be fantasy. The fact that the dragons’ genesis is explained identifies it as SF, but this is not the most important point; it is a side-effect of an essential feature of science fiction, which is that it follows, or at least claims to follow, the rules of our universe. It may bend them, as with FTL travel or telepathy, but it cannot flout them. If a SF novel has spaceships travelling faster than light, it doesn’t give a satisfactory explanation of how they do it; anyone who could provide one would already have a Nobel prize. They may have explanations of a kind (“tachyon drives”, “wormholes” etc.) but this is just a way of saying “This is happening in our universe, according to the laws of that universe.” They are most definitely not saying “Faster than light travel is physically impossible, but our hero can do it because he has a magic spaceship.” That would be fantasy. What fantasy does is not to bend or even flout the rules; it says “The rules here are different.” Not only are we not in Kansas any more, we aren’t even in hyper-Kansas. This may be what makes the “wow” of fantasy different from the “wow” of SF. When Shadowfax gallops at the speed of a Citroen, we aren’t saying “Wow, that’s fast!” We’re saying “Wow, a magic horse!”

This makes sense for high fantasy, when the author has created a world that has different rules from ours. But what about low fantasy, where strange things happen in our world? I think there are two ways to look at this. One is that our world is basically the world as we know it, but beings from other worlds have entered it (low fantasy is also tellingly called “intrusive fantasy”). In this view, low fantasy is like portal fantasy — where our heroes enter another world through some kind of gateway, as in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe — but in reverse. Buffy the Vampire Slayer uses this idea, with the Hellmouth being a kind of portal allowing various kinds of nasties to congregate in an otherwise normal American town. In other types of low fantasy, however, the supernatural creatures are very much part of our world. Here the “wow” factors comes not from the idea that there are magical worlds, or that magical creatures can enter our world, but that our world is itself magical, and we just need to wake up to the fact. As Vampire Bill puts it: “You think that it’s not magic that keeps you alive? Just ’cause you understand the mechanics of how something works, doesn’t make it any less of a miracle … which is just another word for magic. We’re all kept alive by magic, Sookie. My magic’s just a little different from yours, that’s all.”

If it is true that what makes fantasy is the idea of different rules, then that would explain why Star Wars sits so uncomfortably (but effectively) on the fence between fantasy and SF. It has all the trappings of space opera, but we are in no doubt that we are being told a fairy tale. When we see those words “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away …” we don’t think “Hang on, all galaxies are far away. I mean the nearest galaxy to us is Andromeda, and that’s 2,500,000 light years away.” What we think is “Once upon a time …” and what we understand is “The rules are different here.”

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