Definitions

Making Light quotes the whole of Patrick's introduction to the anthology New Magics, which wrestles with the perennial question, what is fantasy? This quote tells us why the genre cannot be defined simply by what it's not:

Here's another: fantasy is tales of things that never were and never could be. That hardly narrows things down at all. Along with fantasy, it scoops up folktales, fairy tales, allegories, utopias, and loosely imagined historical novels. Admittedly, many of those do have a strong family resemblance to fantasy literature. Unfortunately, the definition also takes in 95% of the dramas ever written, 96% of the political memoirs, 97% of the spy novels, 98% of the real-estate brochures, 99% of the comics, 99.5% of the operas, and a great many bad novels that were supposed to be realistic, only their authors got things wrong.

I suppose it's almost impossible to define a rigid definition of what is and isn't fantasy; just about any such definition will end up excluding at least one major work that's definitely within the genre. It's even harder trying to decide where to draw the line between fantasy and science fiction (especially when some mainstream critics use the two terms interchangably). Is Dune SF or fantasy? What about Star Wars? It's got magic, knights and princesses in it!

But does it really matter?

Posted by TimHall at August 21, 2005 10:58 AM | TrackBack

Comments

Does it matter? If you mean defining fantasy, no, it really doesn't. Critics have been finding that it's much more productive to describe it, sort out its subcategories, and consider how it does what it does.

Posted by: Teresa Nielsen Hayden on August 31, 2005 01:27 PM

Thanks for dropping by!

I posted this around the same time as there was a very long discussion on Pyramid Online about the difference between Space Opera and Hard SF, which got quite heated, and I started thinking about angels and pinheads. I've always found the works I've really enjoyed tend to blue genre and subgenre boundaries anyway.

It does annoy me, though, when some mainstream (mundane?) lit-crit types use the terms Science Fiction and Fantasy interchangably, and use them to mean "Anything far fetched and implausible".

Posted by: Tim Hall on August 31, 2005 07:55 PM

Comments are closed on this entry


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