Comments on: Update; On Writing Different Genres

By: Black Gate » Blog Archive » Strange Cities

Black Gate » Blog Archive » Strange Cities — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 08:12:50 +0000

[...] much Black Gate fiction), I’d like to detour today into some quite different fantasylands. A comment by braak last week on the differences between sf and fantasy started me thinking about fantasy works in [...]

By: Judith Berman

Judith Berman — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 06:03:29 +0000

I don’t think that exploring the ramifications of your fantastic elements is sf-nal; it’s just good world-building. I think there’s an sf “attitude” that to a significant degree resides in style and diction. An example is Walter Jon William’s Metropolitan and City on Fire, which some people took as sf, but are emphatically (as he affirmed to me) fantasy. The tropes and the root assumptions are all fantastic ones, but the treatment within the story feels like sf. You have an urban setting in which magic power accumulates in buildings… but a lot of the story is about public utilities and bureaucracy dealing with magic. A comparable but still quite different take is Rachel Pollack’s work, especially Temporary Agency. Geez, maybe this is worth a post in and of itself.

By: braak

braak — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 15:33:46 +0000

It is certainly true that the present is unlikely to catch up to Excession any time soon.

China Mieville once made the distinction between science fiction and fantasy like this:

What is the difference between science and magic? In real life, loads. In SF, I think the question’s misleading, because I think that whatever SF may think and claim, and however much individual books may justly pride themselves on scientific accuracy, fundamentally the genre is not predicated on ‘real’ science at all. It’s about apparently authoritative use of supposed scientific language, or, to put it another way, bullshitting. And that is not (necessarily) a dis.

Which is something I quite like. All of it’s made up; the difference is that science fiction appropriates a technical vocabulary that makes it sound true(ish), where fantasy is under no obligation to do so.

It’s weird, though; when I was writing my book, I wanted it to be fantasy, but I kept finding myself hung up on the ramifications of particular fantastic elements. If I want such and such a thing to be able to happen, what does that mean about the universe? What is that world like, if it’s possible to, say reanimate the dead?