Is it Fantasy or is it Science Fiction

A few years back, there was meme going around the online writing community about what the differences between fantasy and science fiction. Most of the answers were intended to be humorous, because, at first glance, fantasy and science fiction are easy to tell apart. Common answers included “it’s fantasy when you pay in coin, and science fiction when you pay in credits;” “it’s fantast when you ride horses, and it’s science fiction when you ride a space ship;” and other simple, fairly obvious explanations that basically boiled down to it’s fantasy when the speculative element is magical, and it’s science fiction when the speculative element is scientific. The meme resurfaces each year, and I was recently reminded of it three separate times during interactions on social media. During one of those interactions, which was a chat on BlueSky where writers were asked to answer a series of questions as part of a chat event, I gave an answer that fit into the character limit, which got a decent reaction, but which I feel needs to be explained in a longer-format piece like this one: Science fiction speculates based on the conscious, rational mind, whereas fantasy is derived from the subconscious or irrational.

To me, science fiction, for the most part, evolves from a rational premise taken to an extreme. What if some new piece of technology existed? How would we deal with that, both as individuals and as a species? AI, space travel, and even time travel would be examples of this type of fiction. What if a certain social construct or system in the real world was either amplified to the extreme or allowed to continue unfettered on its present course? Dystopian sci-fi, social-critical science fiction, and solar-punk would fit under that rubric. In summary, most of what is considered science fiction derives from a real world situation taken to a logical extreme.

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On the other hand, fantasy, generally comes from a different place, and since it is not based in reason, it will take a bit longer to explain. Let’s start with the father of modern fantasy, JRR Tolkien. In his essay “On Fairy Stories,” Tolkien writes the following:

“Now “Faërian Drama”—those plays which according to abundant records the elves have often presented to men—can produce Fantasy with a realism and immediacy beyond the compass of any human mechanism. As a result their usual effect (upon a man) is to go beyond Secondary Belief. If you are present at a Faërian drama you yourself are, or think that you are, bodily inside its Secondary World. The experience may be very similar to Dreaming and has (it would seem) sometimes (by men) been confounded with it. But in Faërian drama you are in a dream that some other mind is weaving, and the knowledge of that alarming fact may slip from your grasp.” [Emphasis mine]

This part of the essay is a part of a larger discussion, of great interest to Tolkien, about the magic–the spell–of words and their effect on the reader, but for our purposes, the point is that, in what some scholars have called his most successful attempt to define the fantasy genre (fantasy and fairy stories are synonyms for our purposes), he uses the metaphor of a dream.

A dream is one the most common manifestations of the subconscious. We could examine the implications of the dream being someone else’s rather than our own at a different time, because that is another essay entirely, but the important thing is that the realm of fairy, and by extension, secondary world fantasy, is associated not with reality or with something connected to reality like time or space, but rather with something from the subconscious, outside the realm of rational experience.

This, by the way, does not preclude the fantasy rules from having it’s own rules or logic. Tolkien discusses the need to keep the secondary world consistently logical with itself elsewhere in the same essay, but the rules there, are different than rules here, and what happens when you are under the glamour of the story, is outside of the logical, rational realm.

While Tolkien wrote about secondary world fantasy, which makes sense given that the vast majority of his fiction takes place in a secondary world, the root of all fantasy derives from the subconscious, even those stories which take place in our world.

I recently attended an online discussion with Alan Moore and Susanna Clarke, two of the greatest contemporary fantasy writers. Clarke and Moore both write fantasy set in the “real” world, yet when they talk about fantasy, it is tinged with the same types of allusions to the subconscious, the irrational, and the extra-rational.

Moore said, “there is a thin membrane between fiction and reality. It must be permeable.”

Clarke said fantasy “becomes a repository for all the non-human things which we are ignoring.”

Both of these statements reflect a psychoanalytic lens for looking at fantasy, and Clarke’s repeated references to Jung during the talk establish the connection between the subconscious and fantasy to an even greater degree.

If we look at where the fantasy element is found in fantasy stories which take place in the so-called-real-world, they often echo these archetypes as well. The fantastical or magical element comes from underground (as, for example, in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere), on the edge of town, from a foreign land, or from some distant past (as in Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell). Irrational states, like madness or religious fervor are often conducive to magic as well. Each of these metaphors relies on a common metaphor for the subconscious, a liminal state reminiscent of a dream.

Thus, fantasy, regardless of setting, bubbles up from the subconscious whereas science fiction is the logical extension of the rational.

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What I Learned From…Susanna Clarke and Alan Moore

 Posted on July 27, 2023 

One of the most effective ways for writers to improve their craft is to read intentionally. But, what does reading intentionally really mean? To me, when I read as a writer, I observe the way the other uses craft–either on the macro or the micro level–and see if there are any techniques or strategies I can incorporate into my own writing. I don’t always read like this, as it distracts, to some extent, from my ability to fully immerse myself in a story for pleasure, but, reading (or watching or listening, depending on the medium) for craft not only is an important part of my writing practice, but also has allowed me to get something out of almost anything I read, even if it is something which I would not–or do not–otherwise enjoy. It is especially important for a writer to read broadly and outside of their genre, as casting a wide net exposes one to a wider array or strategies and techniques.

In this series of articles, I will write about one element of craft I learned from a specific writer. Of course, in most cases, I learned more than one technique from each author, but for the purpose of this series of articles, I will focus on just one per post.

As with my Rules What Rules series, I will list previous entries at the top of each post, as while I plan on writing many of these, they, most likely, will not be in consecutive posts.

Previous Entries:

Oscar Wilde

Bob Dylan

Star Wars

Margaret Wise Brown

What I Learned From Susanna CLarke and Alan Moore: the Magic of Setting

Last week, I attended a virtual lecture with Susanna Clarke and Alan Moore presented by the British Library. Clarke and Moore are among my favorite writers. While the event wasn’t a writing seminar, perse, there was plenty in the panelists’ general thoughts about the fantasy literature which I found insightful from a craft perspective. One of these things was Clarke’s assertion that for her, magic comes chiefly from place.

One of the common gambits in writing classes is to ask the students whether they begin their writing process with character or plot. In the workshop setting, character is, generally given supremacy. Few, if any, mention other literary elements. (You’ll occasionally hear theme from a certain kind of writer). But, when the Alison Flood, the moderator, steered the conversation toward Clarke’s Piranesi, a different answer emerged: setting.

Moore described his experience reading Clarke’s book. The house which comprises the world of Piranesi dominates the first part of the novel. He described how the book begins with a solid wall of description describing the many rooms of the house/world, and how much he enjoyed the way the setting came alive before the characters were developed. Clarke responded by talking about how important place is in her writing. For her, fantasy derives from place. Magic comes from the place where it occurs, and it will be different depending on where it’s from.

While the primacy of the setting is more obvious in Piranesi, where Clarke spends so much of the opening chapters establishing the alternate world, Clarke said that setting was also at the forefront when she wrote her other major novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell.

“In Strange and Norell, she said, “Magic grows from the landscape itself.”

It was very much of Nothern England, of the old Fae legends, she went on.

Clarke went on to talk about how setting is what drew her into the genre of fantasy to begin with.

“I just felt more at home in places that weren’t the modern world,” she said. She was drawn to secondary worlds like Earthsea and Narnia precisely because they were different from where she lived, because they were other.

Moore took a slightly different approach. In his recent work, he imbues familiar settings with magic.

“We walk down the same boring, model streets and they are boring because they that’s all they are,” he said. “It is possible to…reenchant them with language, story, and mythology.”

Moore cited Jerusalem and Voice of the Fire as examples of this type of writing.

Moore believes that the concepts of literature and setting have been intertwined since humans started communicating. He recounted a theory that the first poems were actually maps, which told people how to get from one town to another before there were physical maps or roads.

Clarke and Moore are both fantasy writers, and it is often fantasy writers who speak the most about setting. Worldbuilding is, obviously, essential to any secondary world because the reader cannot have been there. The fantasist must, literally, create the world in which the story takes place.

In addition to fantasy, setting is at the forefront of historical fiction, gothic fiction, and science fiction as well.

Beyond the speculative genres, worldbuilding is not addressed as often. This, however, does not mean it is not important. One of my favorite recent literary fiction novels, Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann, is comprised of a myriad of interlocking narratives. What ties them all together is a specific historical event–Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk across the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and the backdrop of New York in the 1970s. On top of there is a fission between 1970s New York and the New York of 9/11/2001. Thus, the message of the book is dependent on both time and place, which are the elements of setting.

Classical literature is full of setting-dependent books as well. As Moore said during the event, “If we think about Victorian London, we’re probably thinking of Charles Dickens’ London. Fictions become parts of the place.”

So, as a writing exercise, the next time you sit down to write, forget story and character. Sit down with a blank page and describe a place. Describe everything you (or your narrator) sees. For the purposes of the exercise, don’t begin the story until you have fully established the setting. The opening chapters of Clarke’s Piranesi make an excellent model.

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Rules, What Rules: Avoid Alliteration, Always?

In the first post I published on this blog, I bemoaned the reductive nature of writing advice. “If you write like everyone else,” I wrote, “your writing will read like everyone else’s.” While I have gotten away from that theme from time-to-time, I try to return to it every now and then as part of my series: Rules: What Rules? which consists of a series of blogs that deal with common pieces of writing advice, and then present a famous work–by a successful author–which breaks those rules. My aim is not to criticize these authors—I enjoy all of them, that is the point. Rather, I present their works as examples of successfully writing, which might cause you to reexamine the writing “rule” critically. I am not advising you to ignore these rules, rather to take control of your own craft, and consider your choices actively. As always, I believe there is more than one path to success, more than one formula for great writing. Consider these posts synecdochally. The specific rule is not the point; it speaks to a general attitude which is prevalent within the contemporary writing community.

In each blog post in this series, I will give a brief summary of the rule, followed by a case study of a successful author, work, or series that breaks that rule. Finally, I will provide some analysis of the rule and the alternative techniques the featured author makes. Since the posts in this series will not necessarily be consecutive blog entries, I will link each piece to previous entries.

Previously in this series:

Dialogue Tags

Eliminating Adverbs

The Rule: Avoid Alliteration, Always

The pithy way this rule is usually stated is derived from a 1986 Writers Digest article by Frank L. Visco which took the form of a list of “rules” the author had “learnt” (sic) over the course of his writing career. The article, which has been quoted in numerous places, has been circulated widely, especially in recent years, through meme culture and social media. The statement in question leads off the set of rules, in which the statement of each rule violates the very principle it purports to teach.

While the article is a bit tongue-in-cheek, the rules it professes are, by and large, considered “good” advice by the writing community.

Alliteration, especially when done excessively, is supposed to be distracting. It supposedly takes the reader out of the story and makes them focus on the delivery rather than the content.

And yet…

There is a long tradition of using alliteration in English language literature. In fact, alliteration has been there right from the beginning. Anglo-Saxon epics, such as Beowulf, which is considered by many to be the first foundational text of English literature, is built around an alliterative structure. Seamus Heaney’s landmark verse translation keeps this structure, and his translator’s introduction explains his methods, the anonymous poet’s techniques, and the traditions upon which they both draw better than I ever could.

Shakespeare used alliteration (Love’s Labour Lost, for example), but I’d like to begin our discussion in earnest with a poet from the next generation, Alexander Pope whose poem Sound and Sense is both a poem and an instruction manual for writing poetry. Throughout the sonnet, Pope uses the techniques he wants his reader to learn, most of which have to do with the sound the language make, including alliteration, but also rhythm, meter, assonance, and consonance. These devices are categorized as “sound and sense” devices to this day. In the couplet that gives the poem its title, Pope writes:

‘Tis not enough no harshness gives offense,
The sound must seem an echo to the sense:

This couplet states the poem’s argument, which is that the poet–or any writer for that matter–should use their devices in harmony with, or to accentuate the content and/or message, of the piece. Throughout the piece, Pope uses the devices he intends to teach, but does not name them explicitly.

Pope employs alliteration throughout the poem, including in the above-quoted couplet. The leading “S” sound is repeated 3 times in the stanza’s second line, and five times in the next couplet:

Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;

The alliterative sound is not necessarily in consecutive words, which is actually the correct way to write alliteration. As least where poetry is concerned, alliteration is not, as it’s commonly defined the repetition of a sound at the beginning of a word, it’s actually the repetition of that sound on the stressed syllable.

One of my favorite examples comes from Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous poem, The Raven:

And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain

The repeated S sound occurs at the beginning of “silken” and “sad,” but in the middle of “uncertain” and “rustling.” But read the line out loud. Notice how the S sound falls on the stressed syllable, whether it comes at the beginning of the word or not:

AND the SILken, SAD, unCERtain RUStling

If you transpose “silken” and “sad”, the alliteration won’t read as well, first, because of the meter, and secondly, because the alliteration won’t sound as natural.

The reason Poe’s line works so well is that the sound does, indeed, echo the sense. Not only is there an onomatopoeia in the “s” sound, which mimics the curtains rustling in the wind, but the hypnotic use of alliteration combines with the trochaic meter–the opposite of iambic, which is the most common English language meter–highlights the dream-like quality of the encounter (“while I nodded nearly napping”; the nightmarish Raven perched atop the bust of Athena, a symbol of rationality)–to “shush” the reader to that dream state with the repeated, soporific “s” sound.

When I wrote my poem, The Widow’s Walk which was recently published, fittingly, in Love Letters to Poe, I attempted to emulate Poe’s alliterative style. The opening line of the poem reads:

She wends her way around her walk
And round and round she goes.

Scanning the opening line, we get:

she WENDS her WAY aROUND her WALK

The alliterative “w” sound is used on the stressed syllable (although I use iambic rather than trochaic meter in this poem.)

Some might say that alliteration is an antiquated device found mostly in older poems (and poems like mine which pay homage to them), but modern poets use alliteration prominently as well.

In her poem, Fugue, from her new book, Call Us What We Carry, superstar inaugural poet Amanda Gorman writes:

excerpt from “Fugue” by Amanda Gorman

The first line of the excerpt employs alliteration in the same manner as Poe. The D sound is repeated on the stressed syllable. Later in the excerpt, Gorman uses alliteration in a similar manner to an anglo-saxon poet, as she moves the “f” sound around to different places in her lines.

Later in the collection, Gorman highlights alliteration as an essential literary technique, one which defines the poet, and speaks to the power of poetry. In her poem “Memorial”, Gorman writes:

But why alliteration?
Why the pulsing percussion, the string of syllables?
It is the poet who pounds the past back into you.

Thus, arguably the biggest contemporary superstar in poetry (is that even arguable at this point?) uses alliteration in her poetry.

Gorman, Poe, Pope, and the Beowulf poet refuse to avoid alliteration; the rest of us should follow their example.

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Alliteration works in non-poetic writing as well. One of my favorite examples of alliteration in prose writing comes from Charles Dickens’ description of the storming of the Bastille in A Tale of Two Cities:

Deep ditches, double drawbridge, massive stone walls, eight great towers, cannon, muskets, fire and smoke. Through the fire and through the smoke — in the fire and in the smoke, for the sea cast him up against a cannon, and on the instant he became a cannonier — Defarge of the wine-shop worked like a manful soldier, Two fierce hours.

Deep ditch, single drawbridge, massive stone walls, eight great towers, cannon, muskets, fire and smoke. One drawbridge down! “Work, comrades all, work! Work, Jacques One, Jacques Two, Jacques One Thousand, Jacques Two Thousand, Jacques Five-and-Twenty Thousand; in the name of all the Angels or the Devils — which you prefer — work!”Thus Defarge of the wine-shop, still at his gun, which had long grown hot.

In the first line of each of the two excerpted paragraphs, Dickens uses similar phrases which feature alliteration. In each example, Dickens’ uses the repeated hard “d” sound to represent the thud of the cannons against the walls of The Bastille. Like Poe’s, Dickens’ alliteration is also onomatopoeia, and, therefore, as Pope advises, even in prose, the sound echoes the sense. Moreover, the missing “d” in the second paragraph highlights the fact that one of the two drawbridges has been taken out by the rebels’ cannons. The missing “d” sound highlights the missing drawbridge.

Another more modern example is found in the film V for Vendetta, written by the Wachowskis and directed by James McTeigue. In one of the most popular scenes from the film, V, played by Hugo Weaving, gives a speech in which nearly every word begins with the letter “v,” in tribute to the Alan Moore’s comic which inspired the movie, in which each chapter title is a “v” word (in fact, many of the “v” words used in the speech are taken directly from those chapter titles).

V for Vendetta “V” speech

When I watched the movie in the theater, this speech drew appreciative applause from the audience, who seemed thrilled by the alliteration as the speech built to a crescendo–take that, Frank L. Visco!

Of course V for Vendetta followed a long tradition of comic book alliteration. The great Stan Lee loved alliteration, especially when naming characters: Peter Parker, Sue Storm, Read Richards, Matt Murdock, The Fantastic Four, the list goes on.

I could go on as well, but I think I’ve made my point.

Analysis

So, why is alliteration looked down upon? It seems that it’s because people misinterpreted a joke. Visco, who ironically uses alliteration to criticize its use, was clearly writing tongue-in-cheek. One could even say that the fact he opens with the alliteration “rule” shows he recognizes its power. Meme culture has contributed to the proliferation of Visco’s rules, and, as with so many other things, its has stripped the the original article of its context.

While it is true that alliteration can take a reader out of the story or be distracting if its used poorly, the same could be said for any literary technique. A bad simile or metaphor will take the reader out of the writing just as quickly; poor rhythm in poetry will do the same. Any device can be overused, and the writer must strive use them all judiciously. That is true about alliteration, but it is not unique to alliteration.

The fact is that proper alliteration makes writing memorable, which is why it often used in marketing. It is a signature device of writers ranging from Edgar Allan Poe, to Stan Lee, Charles Dickens, to Amanda Gorman.

Avoid it at your peril.

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