G.B.H. H. You’re quite right about the general sales success of the Carter line. I was trying to compress my explanation too much.
And of course you’re correct about the importance of Judy-Lynn del Rey. I should have mentioned her, but again I couldn’t quite figure how to get it in without needing lots more explanation. She was a giant in the field.
I’m also a big fan of Sprague’s non-fiction. His works, though dated today, were standards in their time.
I always saw them both together as SF and Science Fiction as a sub-set of fantasy. I mostly read Science Fiction though.
If Bradbury started writting Magical Realism before 47 I’ll agree with all of you (but from what I remenber, at this time it was mostly horror).
Murilo Rubiao, a fellow Brazilian wrote Magical Realism from the start with his first book published in 1947. He had a really weird writing method, having written 22 short-stories throughout his career but constantly re-writing them. He got some attention in the seventies but has mostly been forgoten.
MusicJunkie, Citing someone who didn’t get attention until the 1970s isn’t exactly a refutation of the rant that Bradbury was denied his due until magic realism became fashionable in the 60s or later.
I personally don’t think that Bradbury wrote much of what I would call magic realism (a small bit of it may appear so retroactively) or that he was denied a place in literature. Although he never stopped writing for genre magazines, the majority of his post-1950 stories were published in mainstream. He was a famous writer, period, separate even from the Big Three of Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein, in the 1950s.
It really doesn’t matter when a few obscure individual storeis were published, except for historic reasons. Magic realism as a genre comes later.
It is funny, though, that the first story by Borges to appear in the US was the 1943 “The Garden of Forking Paths,” translated by Anthony Boucher, in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Aug. 1948.
I remember something Rod Sterling said in an episode of the old Twilight Zone series. To paraphrase - “Science Fiction and Fantasy are opposites. One is the probable made improbable, the other is the improbable made probable.” I don’t know if that’s an original quote or if he was quoting someone else.
To summarize the answers to the O.P., the main reasons for the dual categorizations are:
Historical - Early writers such as Wells and Verne blurred the line, so that later, when the sub-genres were better defined, the publishers and retailers still lumped them together.
Marketing - Many writers do both or blur the line some what, and both apeal to the same type of person, generally speaking.
Literary - Both are considered “pulp,” and therefore not worthy of any literary standing, so it made sense to lump them together (basically the same reason as #1 above).
For my own personal gripe, I’m annoyed that Vonnegut’s early work was considered Science Fiction at the time it was written (e.g. Cat’s Cradle, Sirens of Titan, Player Piano), but has since been “reclassified” as literature. I believe it has to do with his politics (Player Piano is downright Marxist). Meanwhile, writers with more conservative world views (e.g. Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein) remain classified as Science Fiction. This is a similar situation to Ray Bradbury v. Marquez and the Latin American school of Magic Realism discussed above. The books with fashionable politics are literature, everything else is genre fiction.
Sure. Just wanted to mention Rubiao, whom I like a lot, and point out that he wasn’t first.
Personally I know next to nothing about magic realism.
I don’t know that I can buy your argument totally, tjblack. Asimov was pretty liberal, especially if you read his columns for MF&SF, and I wouldn’t call Clarke exactly conservative, either. Some of Asimov’s views, especially on the desirability of world government, strike me as being close to communistic. I also think the Good Doctor was very proud of being a science fiction writer.
As for Bradbury being the first to write magic realism, that is quite possible. However, the first to write in a genre often isn’t the major writer or the one who transforms it into a literary movement.
John Daly’s Race Williams was the first “hard-boiled detective,” but Dashiell Hammett turned out to be that genre’s “ace performer,” to quote Raymond Chandler’s “The Simple Art of Murder,” and I think many critics would claim Chandler and Ross McDonald wrote even better hard-boiled stories than Hammett.
I think the majority of Bradbury’s output can accurately be labeled science fiction or fantasy, but it is a damn shame that he never won the Pulitzer or the Nobel Prize. He is a damn fine writer.
Then you run into the debates about whether things like warp drive is permissible in real science fiction. To the best of my knowledge, any notion that we may be able to invent such technology is still pure fantasy; yet without it, space travel in SF stories is hopelessly limited to the sleeper and generational ships–the interstellar equivalent to “boat people”.
Wow. It’s a good thing that Asimov isn’t alive to hear you call him a conservative. And Clarke and Heinlein stopped speaking over their differences on SDI. The field almost broke in two over Viet Nam. There’s a conservative streak in sf, all right, but there’s a huge liberal population among the writers.
Same thing in mysteries. Hammett was a communist, Mickey Spillane was an arch-conservative. People of every possible variation filled in the middle.
Vonnegut is not considered genre because he conducted a long, loud, public campaign to dissociate himself with the field, which finally worked after he stopped writing anything that even resembled genre fiction.
And Bradbury, as I’ve already said, has been considered a major writer outside the field since long before you were born.
The claim of a liberal/conservative fantasy/SF axis is just plain silly. Take the acid test: the Vietnam War. In the famous Galaxy ads for and against the war, you had Fantasy writers Marion Zimmer Bradley, L. Sprague De Camp, R. A. Lafferty (a magic realist if ever there was one), and Thomas Burnett Swain in favor of the U.S. involvement and SF writers, Asimov, Harry Harrision, Damon Knight, Robert Silverberg, and Norman Spinrad against. It’s as silly as the assertion that women write fantasy while men write sf (because, one critic said, evidently with a straight face, men had more thrust in their writing).
I would have said, fantasy also demands some intelletual rigor if it is to be “done right”, and “brainless babble” can wear any label.
I just want to point out, as someone who has read and enjoyed both for over 40 years, that the above might just be the clearest, sanest exposition on the subject I’ve ever seen. Bravo! (or Brava!, as the case may be).
Um, okay. Sorry if my phrasing doesn’t meet your standards.
It’s also because it is often hard to determine if a particular book is Science Fiction or Fantasy. Quoting from the rec.arts.sf.written FAQ
Many thanks, Hometownboy. That’s high praise indeed.
David Brin’s THE PRACTICE EFFECT and Morrow’s THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS are clearly fantasy.
And it’s been a while but I remenber Miller’s A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ as straight science fiction.
Why? It’s set in a parallel world (SF) with slightly different physical laws. That makes it SF.
What if a novel has witches and warlocks and elves, etc.? Fantasy, right?
Now what if all those have a scientific explanation? Science fiction (and I’m describing Stasheff’s Warlock series).
Ultimately, it’s Your personal definition of the two that separates them, not an intrinsic difference between the genres. Science fiction is what you mean when you point at something and say “that’s science fiction.” Fair enough (it is the only 100% accurate definition, at least for you). However, the lines between the genres are very blurred and ultimately meaningless. Everything that people say makes SF superior to fantasy is in fantasy and everything that makes people say the opposite is in science fiction.
As far as classification purposes is concerned, SF is a subset of fantasy. Fantasy is any work that describes events that never occurred (and yes, this makes all fiction fantasy). Justification: it’s not real, so it’s fantasy. SF is only that branch of fantasy that pretends to have a scientific justification.
Part of the unification of science fiction & fantasy was the post-WW2 collapse of the fantasy market.
After the techno-leaps of the War, & the prospect of space exploration & atomic energy, imaginative young people took to scorning magic.
So, bookstores & magazines tended to “clump” the two together, tying to hold onto the fantasy market, while expanding science fiction. It worked.
The 60’s counterculture turned the rejection of fantasy around, but the 2 are still linked in publishing fields.
The current shrinkage of the number of science-fiction novels, & a cynicism about the merits of technological advancement has turned many younger readers towards fantasy. So some store have taken to labeling their shelves “Fantasy & Science Fiction”.
Huh, where did the rest of that post go?
I don’t hate SF at all, it just doesn’t really appeal to me. To tell the truth, Swords n’ Sorcery type fantasy doesn’t appeal to me much anymore either. I’m more into Charles de Lint, Neil Gaiman and so on. Maybe if someone could recommend some Sci Fi more along those lines I would change my mind?
Thanks for all the good info, it’s been most enlightening.
Another question for you all then. Do you mainly read within the SciFi/Fantasy genre? I’d estimate that about 20% of my books come from the ‘geek’ section, the rest mainly from general fiction, with a few mystery and horror novels thrown in.