The new Bujold book is coming out soon.

[catsittingstill]

The Sharing Knife: Passage  is coming out soon.  I have already ordered my copy from Amazon.  8 days and counting :-)

There's a review here, along with an interview of Lois McMaster Bujold.  She brings up a very interesting point--I think I'll just use her words for it:

I have come to believe that if romances are fantasies of love, and mysteries are fantasies of justice, F&SF are fantasies of political agency. (Of which the stereotypical “male teen power fantasy” is again merely an especially gaudy and visible subset.)

I'm not sure I'm understanding it right.  But I'm interested in trying.  Are science fiction and fantasy stories "fantasies of political agency"?  I would take that to mean that the political results of the characters' actions are sort of the point of the story--the way in a romance the development of the relationship is the point of the story, and in a mystery, the discovery of the truth is the point of the story.

I'd always thought of science fiction as being stories about inventions or discoveries of scientific principles.  Some of these stories are about how they play out in a social arena (like part of the whole story of Wildside is how the government reacts to discovering that the main character has a Gate To Elsewhere, and how the characters deal with that).  I hadn't really thought about this being the point of the story, and certainly not about the political subset of the social being the point of the story, exactly, but I'm having trouble making a case that it's not, either.

Or take another book I'm reading because it was free: Lord of the Isles.  It's about several characters who are magical in one way or another.  And their magic certainly gives them a lot of potential to change events around them.  And some of that has political implications.  I'm not done with the book yet so it's premature to state that the political changes (or the potential for them) are the point of the story.  But they certainly add to the sense that the characters are important, and that their choices and achievements matter.  (Also parenthetically I had expected to not like it, but started reading because what the heck, I got it free.  It turns out to not be great--as one person pointed out, pretty much any baddie has short legs and long arms; why is that?--but it's not lousy.  I might like that author's military fiction a lot less, but the straight out fantasy isn't so bad.)

Whereas if I think of a non F&SF book--say Pride and Prejudice, the point of the story is the relationships between the characters.  Yes, they live within a social world that is not entirely apolitical, but I don't get the impression that the character's choices will change the political landscape.

Hmm.  Interesting.  Anybody want to help me think about this, for example with examples of books that support or fail to support the proposition that F&SF are fantasies of political agency?

Comments

Re: Fantasy vs. SF, film at 11

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Err...their readership overlaps enough that most SF conventions are also Fantasy conventions and vice-versa?

Though that does rather beg the question of why...

Um. They both occur in "worlds-that-are-not-our-world" whether they are, as mrgoodwraith put it "worlds that extend what we know" (SF) or "worlds that contradict what we know" (Fantasy). Thus they both involve learning-what-is-new-about-the-world-of-the-book as part of the reader's experience. (I remember being particularly struck by this while reading _The Golden Compass_, which was so densely new-but-not that I had to work hard to understand what was going on. I'd have given up in frustration, except that trying to understand what was different was part of the fun.) It's true that stories in this genre can fall into relatively generic patterns (the fighter, the thief, the wizard and the woman go off on a quest to find the magic thing that will save the world) but books that do this tend to be (I think) less valued than books that break new ground.

Hmm. That's all I can think of at the moment.

Re: Fantasy vs. SF, film at 11

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Oops, technoshaman also made the "worlds that extend" / "worlds that contradict" what we know division. And probably other people have two; I was just going with what I remembered seeing last.

Re: Fantasy vs. SF, film at 11

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, but this is still defaulting back to the old "what are the differences?" question. (Which tends to happen when one is poking at a new problem, I know. Like sculpture. "Take away everything that isn't the answer...) "What is common between the two genres?" is harder to get at, for whatever psychological or historical reasons.

Which makes it a very interesting question. The answer is not already to be found in the back of the b/o/o/k Internet.

Ta, L.

Re: Fantasy vs. SF, film at 11

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

"Worlds that extend" vs "worlds that contradict" indeed describes a difference.

But both are similar in that they are "worlds that are not our world"

So books in both genres involve revelation of the world the book is set in, and the way that world works. This revelation isn't present in works that are neither science fiction or fantasy--I don't need a mystery book to explain the concept of "policeman" the way I need a fantasy book to explain the concept of "Lakewalker" or a science fiction book to explain the concept of "designated alternate parent."

And this aspect of explaining a different world is part of what I enjoy about both science fiction and fantasy.

Re: Fantasy vs. SF, film at 11

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

This is a wonderful question.

To me, the unifying factor is that all this stuff postulates a different world and then puts people in it to see what happens. So what makes SF and fantasy alike (but different from "mainstream") is that world building is a fundamental part of the process. And another important thing they have in common is that the good stories almost always have more to them than just the world building; what matters is not the world, but what it means for the people in it. John Campbell famously declared "Science fiction is about people." So is fantasy. Actually, so is every other sort of fiction, but with other genres, it's not a point that I imagine editors need to harp on.

Fantasy and science fiction are the genres (almost by definition) where "people" and "human" aren't one and the same. While people who are not human are not part of all science fiction and fantasy, they are a defining feature of the combined genre (and one of the things I like best).

Re: Fantasy vs. SF, film at 11

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Fantasy and science fiction are the genres (almost by definition) where "people" and "human" aren't one and the same.

That's a very good point. Also, it seems to me that there's a fairly common theme about prejudice against non-human (in one form or another) people in F&SF. (_Friday_, for example, or house-elves in the Harry Potter books) Though sometimes there are just non-human people and there don't seem to be prejudice issues.