Why Science Fiction AND Fantasy?

Cafe Society
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But there wasn’t a fantasy genre before the war, actually. There was Campbell’s briefly-lived Unknown Worlds magazine, and things like Weird Tales, but there wasn’t anything to point a stick at and call “fantasy.” The wartime paper shortages killed lots and lots of magazines (including Unknown) and little genres (railroad stories, etc.) but “fantasy” hadn’t forged an identity separate from “science fiction” or “the weird tale” yet.

And the big techno-boom (which mostly killed Westerns, not fantasy) was still a decade in the future, after Sputnik. The end of WWII created much more of a “let’s get back to the good, normal life” than a “forward into the technological future!” mindset.

You also seem to be conflating the end of WWII with Sputnik, when there was more than a decade between the two events – a period many people think is the richest time in SF history.

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The fact that genre fantasy grew out of genre SF is the main reason they were “clumped” together. Certain kinds of stories (planetary romances, for example) were considered “science fiction” in the '30s through the '50s, but started moving towards “fantasy” afterward.

And there really was no “fantasy market” in the '50s, and relatively few bookstores, either. Towards the end of that decade, the SF market collapsed, too. Actually, that was pretty much post-Sputnik as well – SF was still seen as so disreputable that even when technological advance was of paramount importance, SF was “Buck Rogers stuff” that would only steal attention from Real Science.

Note that the periodical that started as The Magazine of Fantasy changed its name immediately (with the second issue) to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction – SF was the big brother, genre- and sales-wise. There were certainly fantasy stories, but there wasn’t a clearly defined fantasy genre, and there certainly wasn’t a mass, self-defined fantasy audience as we have today.

The current fantasy market is a product of two things – primarily, the immense success of The Lord of the Rings in paperback in the '60s, and, secondarily, the fantasy boom engineered by Lester del Rey in the late '70s, commencing with Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara and Stephen Donaldson’s “The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.” Talking about a fantasy genre before the mid-60s is futile, and even the next decade is pretty diffuse.

If you want to talk about particular stories, of course, then there are some gems – a lot of good work was done in the fantastic areas in the '40s and '50s.

As far as I know, what actually happened is that, as fantasy works came to be published in greater numbers, stores re-named their “Science Fiction” section as “Science Fiction and Fantasy” (or, sometimes, reversed). But very few have ever had a completely separate “Fantasy” section, and I doubt any had one which was then amalgamated into “SF & Fantasy.”

Also, according to Locus magazine’s annual exhaustive summary (in their February 2003 issue), there were 256 SF novels published in 2002 – the highest number in ten years (and, I think, ever). Fantasy novels, though, were up more – to 333, also a new high – which may cause the impression that SF is less-published than it once was. According to their charts, there were more fantasy novels than SF in the years 1992 to 1994, and again since 1998.

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Your claim that there was no “Fantasy” market before WW2 is silly. Try reading some Dunsany. Or, read a little of De Camp’s various memours.

And I’m not “conflating” fantasy’s decline with Sputnik; rather, I connect it with the atmoic bomb.

As strange as it seems today, the Bomb was once viewed as a great achievement that “won the war”. There was a great surge of post-WW2 intrest in science–look at an newspaper “features” section from that era for proof.

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Maybe it’s silly, but it’s also true.

Fantasy novels were indeed published prior to WWII, but it did not become a marketing category until much later. People read Dunsany because the classified it as literature, not fantasy. Writers like Thorne Smith were just popular novelists, not fantasy writers.

Of course, the SF market for novels didn’t exist until after WWII, either.

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RealityChuck has already said what I would have said back to Bosda.

Bosda, in your previous post you were talking about SF basically piggybacking on the popularity of fantasy, and that was completely wrong. SF wasn’t all that popular, honestly (though its fans were far more dedicated, so SF pulps survived when just about all of the others died), but it was an identifiable thing in a way “fantasy” wasn’t until the mid 1960s.

There were (as I said) fantasy works, but they were either “literature” (like Dunsany, Cabell, etc.) or a sub-set of science fiction (again, let me point out John W. Campbell’s Unknown Worlds magazine).

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I did take a look at this. Step back, boys and girls, I feel an essay coming on.

Bosda’s statement is the inverse of the usual - that the atomic bomb caused science fiction to take off as a genre.

That’s not true. Science fiction sales, number of books published, number of magazines, any counter you can think of, did not go up in 1945. Not until the late 1940s do you get the influx of new magazines and specialty presses, and paperbacks and mainstream appearances remain rare into the 1950s.

Even if you stretch this to make a rhetorical point - using the A-bomb as a metaphor for all the advances in science that WWII brought along with it - you can barely make a case for it. Was there increased interest in science and technology? Yes, there was - although this was hardly new if you look carefully at magazines from earlier decades. But in the “American Century” of progress and affluence, technology seemed ready to put the future into peoples’ lives. (Although Vonnegut’s 1952 Player Piano shows that not all the visions of technology were so sunny.) Television helped; talk about rockets and space travel helped; the coming of computers and automation helped; the conquest of polio helped – a million advances made it seem as if the world of the 1939 World’s Fair was coming true. SF boomed – from an extremely tiny nothing to a just barely noticeable something. A rising economy lifts all boats.

Was fantasy somehow an exception, destroyed by this overwhelming surge in interest in science and the future? I don’t know that I’ve seen this question directly addressed.

What evidence do we have?

Well, fantasy actually did pretty well after the war. Arkham House, founded in December 1939 to reprint Lovecraft, published only a handful of books through 1945, then exploded in the late 1940s with dozens of books. Gnome Press published a half dozen Conan books starting in 1950 and many other fantasies besides. Other major specialty publishers like Shasta, F.P.C.I., and Prime Press also published fantasies, along with many tiny presses that put out only a book or two.

And Boucher and McComas thought the late 40s were a good time to found a Magazine of Fantasy. Even if it added SF to its name and contents page with the second issue, F&SF steadily published fantasy throughout the 50s. Many other, though smaller and shorter lived, fantasy magazines followed.

The slick magazines (Saturday Evening Post and Colliers) brought Heinlein into their pages but also Bradbury. John Collier’s fantasies were collected into a best-seller in 1951. Some obscure professor in England published a very long novel in three parts.

No matter. In sheer numbers, fantasy never came close to equaling sf. I’m not sure it ever had, though, even in the pulp and pre-war era. And there’s a reason that sf was waiting to burst out that is usually forgotten.

Starting in the late 1930s, John W. Campbell at Astounding first published or published the best/most famous works of almost every one of the names that we now associate with the Golden Age of Science Fiction. They were young, ambitious, looking to make a career out of writing - and suddenly freed into a world in which it was possible to sell in book length.

Look at the names and titles that were published by Gnome Press: Pattern for Conquest, from Astounding; Sixth Column, from Astounding; Cosmic Engineers, from Astounding; Asimov’s Robot and Foundation stories, from Astounding; Seetee Ship, from Astounding, Renaissance, from Astounding; van Vogt, Moore, Kuttner, Wilmas Shiras, Nat Schachner, all writers from Astounding. There was this huge pent up volume of suddenly resellable work from the most famous names from the most famous magazine in the field. Not surprising that they dominated the book market when it suddenly sprang into being.

(And we’ll never really know what impact Sputnik had, because in 1957, coincidentally, the major magazine distributor went out of business, taking most of the magazines in the field with it.)

All this is relative: mysteries were far huger than any combination of fantasy and science fiction throughout the 40s and 50s, so we’re talking about slivers of slivers. That there was a larger audience for fantasy waiting out there became apparent in the 60s and 70s, although it’s true that those years saw science looked at differently than in the 50s.

Did the Bomb hurt fantasy? I don’t see hard evidence for it. I also don’t know enough about fantasy criticism to know whether others have taken a close look at the subject: the history of the sf field tends to be written by those primarily interested in sf.

You’re wrong, Bosda, but you made me work for it. :slight_smile:

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Cite?

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About half of what I read is SF or fantasy. Another third is mysteries, and the rest is either history or mainstream fiction. Mystery and SF&F novels have plots, something that I often find lacking in mainstream fiction. (The popular, Oprah-esque “strong woman triumphs over adversity” doesn’t count as much of a plot, in my book.)

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I ran across this interview with Michael Moorcock that reminded me of this discussion

Screen Rant: So you, and some of the formative figures, were just writing your own works. You weren’t trying to adhere to genre conventions, because there wasn’t really a genre to adhere to yet.

Michael Moorcock: Yeah, when I first started writing it, nobody knew what to call it at all. I mean, the publishers didn’t know what to call it. They thought that Tolkien was (writing about) a post-apocalyptic nuclear world. That’s the only way they could perceive an alternate world, in other words. And it was the same with Mervyn Peake… they’re all interpreted that way. The idea of putting ‘fantasy’ on a book meant usually meant that it was a children’s book. And if you put fantasy as the genre, they usually put ‘SF’ larger than ‘fantasy’ to show that it was what it was. So really, there really was nothing like an adult fantasy genre… Today’s experience is just totally different.

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Moorcock can charitably be called an eccentric iconoclast. This paragraph can charitably be called a load of codswallop.

To be fair, what comes tumbling out of one’s mouth in an interview isn’t likely to be rigidly logical and precise, but, c’mon. The British, far more than Americans, read, cherished, and honored their fantasy writers. Tolkien, and Peake, but also C. S. Lewis, and E. R. Eddison, and Charles Williams, and George MacDonald, and H. Rider Haggard, and Arthur Conan Doyle, and Lord Dunsany, and T. H. White, and hundreds more. They were published by the same publishers as “mainstream” writers, but fantasy had a long history and critical respect beyond that of children’s books, and they sold well. (A British publisher would have been the first to do a Conan book by Robert Howard, but the deal fell through.)

I can’t believe British publishers considered Lord of the Rings post-apocalyptic. They would have remembered The Hobbit! I can believe they weren’t friendly to Moorcock’s work in the early 1960s, because by then fantasy was in a deep downturn and science fiction was crawling into its grave before Moorcock and his gang helped revive it with New Worlds magazine. He was angry then and seems to be still angry now, a curmudgeonly octogenarian. But, c’mon.

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Thanks. I thought that was a bit bizarre.

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Geez. Even deep within the genre, Campbell’s “Unknown” was a clear fantasy spin off of Astounding.

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Forget SF&F and what bookstores do. I’ve been to library sales where they threw Westerns into the mix labeling the section “genre fiction”. Imagine having to wade through Louis Lamour to find Heinlein. And another where they put the “Left Behind” books in with SF&F. I told the lady what a dumb idea that was. “The people who see them won’t want them and the people who’d want them won’t see them.”. Oh, and for genre bending (or perhaps genre blending), I give you Amazon.com. Read this one. Not great but not bad either.

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To be fair, I’m not sure where else you’d put the Left Behind books, besides fantasy. Unless you have a specific “religious fiction” section.

But yeah, lumping westerns (or mysteries, which I’ve also seen) in with F&SF makes no sense. If you don’t have enough westerns to make their own section, then just put them in with general literature. And I’ve never seen any sort of book sale or library that didn’t have enough mysteries to justify their own section.

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Are you a lumper or a splitter? Demons, aliens — same thing?

There was an article by an author who had adapted a short story into a novel about a werewolf who lives in a city and hosts a late-night talk show; she even threw in vampires and other stuff. Supposedly there was a bit of confusion because the publishers/marketers did not have a precise “genre” to pigeonhole it into. But eventually they sorted and shuffled things so you have your “urban fantasy”, “paranormal” something-or-other, “weird fiction”, “new weird”, “gothic”, you name it.

Not sure if it is a good thing or a bad thing if I were to write something I fancy to be slightly original only for it to get categorized as an “urban fantasy”

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I thought that the urban fantasy genre was relatively well named. It implies a world mostly as we know it, but with fantasy elements in it. Usually the fantasy element is hidden from the mundane world, whether that by active effort on part of the supernatural entities, or explained away that mundane people just don’t notice when magic is used, or demons walk the streets. Sometimes the supernatural is more prevalent, but for some reason, that doesn’t change the world to be too unrecognizable.

Though I do find it a bit city centric in name, and most urban fantasies do tend to be set in major cities. I wonder if it would actually be a different genre if it were “suburban fantasy”, or “rural fantasy”. In the future, if we have regular space travel, maybe we’ll end up with “space fantasy”, and figure out what happens to a werewolf when they are on the moon.

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Someone needs to write that “werewolf on the moon” story.

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A werewolf talk-show host is squarely in the realm of “urban fantasy”, if you’re making distinctions that fine, and if you’re not distinguishing that finely, it works in just plain “fantasy”, or whatever you’re calling your big “speculative fiction” category.

Maybe an author is annoyed that it’s not as original as they thought, but, well, it isn’t. At least not in the big elevator-pitch theme: The fine details might well be original. And originality is overrated, anyway.

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I wonder if it was Carrie Vaughn- she had a werewolf radio DJ/talk show host

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Yes! Though I cannot readily find her account. It would be better to quote her exact words here.

IIRC (maybe not though) she was not annoyed that they had her under “urban fantasy”, more that, in 2001 or whenever it was, the publishers / other agents did not know quite how to spin the thing: it had werewolves and vampires and whatever else, it wasn’t about zombies or whatever the fad was at the time, etc. Her novel does not predate the very term “urban fantasy”, sure.

I see that she is still trying to mix it up deliberately: her website advertises a new novel, which sounds sort of like Jurassic Park or Westworld, except the island is “full of fantasy literature and culture made real, with magic rings that work via neurotransmitters, invisible cloaks made of nanotech smart fabric, and mythological creatures built from genetic engineering and bionics”. The protagonist is— naturally!— a literature professor hired to guide a mercenary strike team.

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Ok. That sounds cool (I really enjoyed her werewolf DJ novels too).

(Vaughn also wrote a pair of superhero novels I enjoyed “Dreams of the Golden Age” and “After the Golden Age”)

ETA: The werewolf DJ novels (the Kitty Norville series) violated one premise of the usual urban fantasy - Kitty (the werewolf) was open about being a werewolf, and over the course of the series, more and more of the previously hidden stuff was brought out into the open, with various consequences.