(3089/898) SF

1683) Both [science fiction and fantasy] do rise from the same impulse; first, the speculative urge to constantly examine other possible shapes for the universe and, with it, the belief that any person equipped with the proper knowledge can make changes in the milieu.

Fantasy and science fiction are highly similar arts. But in science fiction power emanates from the individual, whereas in fantasy it comes down from above; it is in a sense a gift, probably a loan, and subject to caprice in the giver. Science fiction recognizes a 'luck' — it was science fiction writers who did much to popularize Murphy's Law [...] but the characters in science fiction stories do not attempt to propitiate supernatural powers.

Wizards acquire capability and control over their milieux by learning what the powers will let them learn, or can be made to let them learn. Scientists, engineers, technicians, and simply ordinarily educated persons in science fiction acquire parallel capabilities by investigating the nature of reality, by codifying and then processing the data, and applying it to their milieux, but there is implicit as the central idea in science fiction the idea that the universe is not amenable to cozening or threats; it is not capricious. [...]

Fantasy presumes a hierarchical milieu, in which there is always some source of power above the individual. This is the essential difference from science fiction; the two coeval branches of speculative fiction, or sf, probably share all other attributes in common, and can freely exchange furniture and costumes, as in sub-forms like 'science fantasy.'

Algis Budrys
"Literatures of Milieux" in
Missouri Review (7/2/1984)
posted by Tom Dillingham [SF-LIT] (1/31/1996)

1684) The great attraction of cultural anthropology in the past was precisely that it seemed to offer such a richness of independent natural experiments; but unfortunately it is now clear that there has been a great deal of historical continuity and exchange among those "independent" experiments, most of which have felt the strong effect of contact with societies organized as modern states. More important, there has never been a human society with unlimited resources, of three sexes, or the power to read other people's minds, or to be transported great distances at the speed of light. How then are we to know the effect on human social organization and history of the need to scrabble for a living, or of the existence of males and females, or of the power to make our tongues drop manna and so to make the worse appear the better reason? A solution to the epistemological impotence of social theory has been to create a literature of imagination and logic in which the consequences of radical alterations in the conditions of human existence are deduced. It is the literature of science fiction. [...]

[S]cience fiction is the laboratory in which extraordinary social conditions, never possible in actuality, are used to illumine the social and historical norm. [...] Science fiction stories are the Gedanken experiments of social science.

R[ichard] C. Lewontin
"The Last of the Nasties?" in
New York Review of Books (2/29/1996)
[review of The Lost World
by Michael Crichton]

1685) Presenting that which cannot be, but is, fantasy exposes a culture's definition of that which can be: it traces the limits of its epistemological and ontological frame.

Rosemary Jackson
Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (1981)
quoted by R[ichard] (3089/9C. Lewontin in
"The Last of the Nasties?" in
New York Review of Books (2/29/1996)
[review of The Lost World
by Michael Crichton]

1686) You really can't predict someone's beliefs or attitudes based on what they read. People can read stories about aliens without believing in UFOs, or read stories about psychic phenomenon without believing in Uri Geller, or read magical fantasy without believing in wizards.

Stephanie A. Hall
posted on [SF-LIT] (1/30/1996)