The Speculative Divide: Science Fiction

At long last! My post on science fiction.

How to define science fiction? Well, it mostly has to do with the science, but people still get confused and still even a little angry about science fiction. Many people think that because it has "science," in its distinction everything must be one-hundred percent accurate. I do agree that the more accurate the science, many times it assists the fiction in its purpose and creates a better story. However, that really only applies to provable science, and by provable, I mean science that currently exists in the modern day. One of the most important parts about science fiction is the science that could be (and in recent years the science that could have been). Science fiction isn't always necessarily about science that currently is or was.

Now, this does contain a probability meter. Pure science fiction has to have some sense of probability to it. IE: Meeting Aliens on a foreign plant in 100 years would be science fiction, based on the fact that we have conducted space travel and our space programs around the world continue to grow. As long as the principles of the science that base the fiction are fairly sound. You have science fiction.

The divides on this become fairly blurred as with fantasy. When blending with fantasy (or horror for that matter), as long as it still has some kind of science that can be traced back to actual theory, it's technically a science fiction lovechild. There are many different names for these love children, science fantasy coming out into the forefront. One thing I did not mention about science fantasy in my fantasy post is something that happens as the science theory the fiction is based in degenerates: it becomes more of another genre. Science fantasy, for instance, can have almost none of the fantastic elements I mentioned before, but can have scientific principles not all that well based in modern theory OR just become a little far fetched but still use some kind of science (insert quotations as your mileage varies).

Horror, interestingly enough, while it began it's journey with fantastic leanings in it's monster films, now begins to turn to scifi leanings. (Don't get me wrong though--there's still a lot of fantastic horror and just messed up people with knives). I Am Legend gave a new take on vampirism, where the whole world became infected with a plague which turned them into vampires. Later media, such as the Resident Evil franchise used the same concept for zombies, only this time the plague was of man's creation. Then there are also media such as The Stepford Wives (released in print in 1972, in film in 1975 and 2004), a horror where men replace their wives with androids rather than deal with real women.  Another such film, (These Are) The Damned, based on H.L. Lawrence's novel The Children of Light, reveals a set of children who are product of radioactive fallout. Each are radioactive and quite poisonous to the world around them. They must live underground controlled by the government and problems arise when they are discovered by people from the town nearby.

These, in a sense are almost darker than fantastic horror as they imply that the circumstances are completely man's fault. In situations with magic, magic has always existed, and darkness tempts man into a fall. Man usually dives into the discovery of science as these films may show: many of the plagues and horrors which occur begin as "accidents" of discovery.

I mentioned above that some time ago (around the seventies, I believe) a series of subgenres emerged about what could have been. Over all this is called alternate universe genre, and I think that depending on the kind of alternate universe one creates (and what is used to create the shift from what is to what could have been). The reason I bring this up falls in one to two words, depending on stylization: steampunk. Steampunk works began with the idea of the steam engine evolving so that it became the greater power. Everything was powered by steam; cars, guns, boats. Eventually clockwork also became included in this movement and then it became a popular fashion movement (victorian wear and a lot of gears). But it was originally an intriguing science fiction literary movement and remains so. After all, there are many different variants of what happens with advance steam technology. Most of them stay in the Victorian era, for the clothing, though.

I'm not sure what else I can say about science fiction at the moment, so I'll have to leave you here and keep you tuned for the next (shorter) installment: Supernatural.

The Speculative Divide: Horror

Here's my first late week post as one of my friends reminded me I haven't been keeping up with the blog this week. To remedy this, I though I would expose on world building a little bit and my experience with it that led to the beginning of this blog. But that lead me to another topic entirely in prep for world building. That is, talking about speculative fiction, and expanding on that a little bit more, because well, it's kind of a broad topic now a days. Because even though it would seem to me that world building is fairly exclusive to speculative fiction--in any other type of fiction, you already have a world: reality-- speculative fiction has diverged along so many paths that this may not even be necessary in all cases of speculative fiction.

And hey, that's what this blog is about, right? Let's get started then.

The first thing you need to know about speculative fiction is that it divides up into three categories: fantasy, science fiction and horror. (In recent years, there has also been a call to add a fourth, supernatural, but I'll get to that towards the end.) Many people who don't write between these genres don't often see the difference, and truthfully there is a lot of overlap between the three, and subcategories that don't seem to fit into just one of the three main categories, and I think that's where people get confused. This may even be where some of the loss of appeal comes from a lot of speculative fiction. That and the willing suspension of disbelief does not get suspended far enough (but we'll get back to that later).

Time, though, does strange things to fiction. After all, have you ever heard the term "Action/Adventure," used to describe a novel or (more likely) a movie? Well, as it would happen, action and adventure are two different genres, but they often overlap because of similar themes between the two. For instance, people in a film mostly described by it's action may go on an adventure to catch the bad guy/stop the world from ending. But the reverse is also true: people on an adventure to find pirate's gold may encounter some scoundrels who are hoping to use the gold for diabolical purposes, and action ensues. In fact, much fiction (films being an especially guilty party) overlap genres, whether speculative or not.

My point of that rather random paragraph was to point out that at their sources, there were things that were pure science fiction, fantasy or horror. But as time goes on, ideas get mixed in together and things happen to the way people perceive fiction. I'm also digressing into problem that not a lot of people understand speculative fiction, because they aren't quite sure what to call it, and where the genres overlap. So, I'll try and give a description to the best of my knowledge of where the areas over lap, and how they stay true to themselves.

Let's start with a fairly easy category: horror. Horror is probably the easiest of the three to categorize because these are the stories that are intended to frighten you. And not just frighten you, but do terrible things to you every waking and sleeping moment for many years to come (all right, that was a hyperbole, I apologize, horror writers and lovers of all ages). But even in it's simplicity, horror has divulged into its own subcategories  and crosses over with fantasy and science fiction.

Some of this probably comes from the roots of horror. For instance, if you want to look at horror that crosses over with fantasy, all you have to do is look back far enough to many original fairy tales. While it might be hard to believe, many earlier fairy tales were stories of rape, demons, pillaging, princesses being quite willing accessories to murder and villains dying in terrible deaths, such as, but not limited to being rolled down a hill in a barrel full of nails, being made to dance in hot, iron shoes, and being burnt to death. The originals were not kids stories, and were meant to frighten the bejezzus out of people, but most had fantastic elements to them, such as actual fairies (and in later versions, the Virgin Mary). But also in later projects such as say, Dracula, or the Wolf-Man, there are a lot of unexplained fantastic elements, such as say, where vampires and werewolves come from (aside from, you know, hell). This also links back to the the supernatural genre, but again, I'll get to that later.

If you go later into one of the most famous examples of horror writings, even today, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. While Frankenstein has some fantastic elements, it is more routed in a science fiction background. After all, it is speculative science, mostly medical science such as dissection, tissue donation and resuscitation (only of a being that had never technically lived at all), that creates the Monster and dries Dr. Frankenstein into madness. In fact, I might even consider the original novel more science fiction than horror, but that's another debate entirely. The point I'm trying to make here is that when horror began it was a lot of political fiction. Perhaps not Frankenstein, but many of the films and novels that followed after were trying to relay a message about the way man lives and treats it's fellow man--and how maddening things can get. But, since they would not do this with out people at first, they had to rely on monsters, such as the Wolf-Man, Frankenstein's monster and Dracula.

As time went on horror continued it's flirtation with fantasy and science fiction, and eventually began to create its own subcategories beyond the other two genres. These being mostly slasher fiction and realistic horror (heaven forbid, there actually be such a thing). Slasher fiction denotes the type of fiction where the reader/watcher is introduced to a fairly large cast at the beginning of the work, and watches as members of the cast are slowly picked off until only one or two are left at the end. The most popular of these seem to still have their roots in fantastic (and occasionally science fiction) elements, such as Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th and even Final Destination, where the slasher is Death, though not all slashers are like this, such as I Know What You Did Last Summer or Scream where the slashers are people. These last slasher films tend to overlap with realistic horror in which the killer is a person who seems to be normal, but obviously wants to kill people. These occur in relatively normal situations, such as road trips, or renting out apartment space.

Out of the three, I want to saw that horror has probably expanded the least, but I am not a huge fan of modern horror, and I would also say that it has crept into other genres. There should also be something said about the thriller genre, which overlaps occasionally with horror as they both can use excessive murder to frighten the audience, but thriller does not always use these techniques, and can rely on other means to create tension and adrenaline in the audience.

I'm hesitant to continue with either science fiction or fantasy, because I realize this post is getting quite long. So, I think I might split that up into three posts and maybe map out more thoroughly the differences between science fiction and fantasy, and also plan out how to go about talking about the newest (sub?) genre supernatural fiction. So, until tomorrow.