In this article ❧ I explain you how Science Fiction and Fantasy are similar and Different, so you can decide which novel you'll write.

I stumbled upon this article when I was consulting the MIT website. I used to do that to find bibliographical sources, but above all, because I believe they are good at making things (including syllabi on Science Fiction). It turned out that MIT has devoted at least one session of a syllabus to discuss "Why is science fiction so hard to define?" An article Quentin Cooper published in 2014 on the BBC website. 

The text is rich in references. I found amusing this one.

“Arthur C Clarke, who co-wrote the screenplay for 2001 [A Space Odyssey], neatly summed up the difference between the two [Fantasy and SciFI] as being "Science fiction is something that could happen -- but you usually wouldn't want it to. Fantasy is something that couldn't happen -- though you often wish that it could.”)  Even more succinctly Rod Serling said: “Fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science fiction is the improbable made possible”.

Science Fiction deals with our expectancies about the future, while Fantasy deals with our wants about the past.

Which kinds of expectancies does Fantasy elaborate? One way to think about it is the tension between dystopia and utopia. Science Fiction tends to pay more attention to the harmful sides of civilization. Why? Possibly, writers believe literature is a tool for criticizing society. Perhaps, they believe their ideas improve our world by emphasizing the perils of technology.

But that’s too simple to understand Science Fiction. A dystopia may have romance, good endings, and feminism. It is more realistic to assume that there is a mix of dystopia and utopia. On the other side, I’m aware that it’s easier to find the dystopia flavor in Science Fiction than her sister: utopia.

Some  writers tend to associate Science Fiction with aliens. For example, Doris Lessing said her Shikasta and her further deliveries were not Science Fiction because it has to do with things other than aliens and ovnis. But those are not the essential traits of Science Fiction. An in-depth design of a Science Fiction work could do without any alien element, including spaceships, ovnis, martians, creatures, and mysterious planets: any fiction accounting the future of humanity —even the nearest— is Science Fiction.

Along the lines of futurology, many audiences regard Science Fiction as a preview of a brilliant future. They feel that Science Fiction anticipates our flying cars and quantum computers (and the healing machines that will make humans immortals). But, as Eileen Gunn pointed out, “the task of science fiction is not to predict the future. Rather, it contemplates possible futures”. This approach underlines the subtle philosophy behind any Science Fiction work.

Gunn commented on Ursula Le Guin's idea about the comfort writers feel in future settings: the future is the safest laboratory to try out ideas, held Le Guin. Perhaps, the most remarkable achievement of this laboratory has been to disclose the ambiguity in the relationship between humans and science. Are Science Fiction writers visionaries looking forward to finding deep insights? In many senses, they are. One unsuspected discovery has been design fiction, a method to commission writers to create what-if stories “about potentially marketable products”, said Gunn.

I remember an anthropologist on Bloomberg. Several years ago, I would have found weird such an image. I would ask: Aren’t anthropologists revealing the secrets of primitive people and defending them from ambitious corporations? I’m talking about Professor Genevieve Bell, a former scholar at Stanford University. In a lecture, an Intel executive reached her and proposed to work for Intel. Her job would be leading a team of qualitative researchers. They had to travel around the world to observe people with ethnographical tools and deduce what would be best for the company in product design. They did extraordinary things. For example, they asked people to open their trunks and glove compartments to see what they needed the most: the soluitons they meant could not come from a marketing director or an engineer.

Wars were technological horrors that motivated the turn of Science Fiction toward a critical perspective of contemporary society, chiefly during the Cold War. Nevertheless, there is a marketing consideration to enhance our view. After the Second War, the American dream of prosperity came true (yet, research has shown that whites did better than populations like African Americans and Hispanics). The well-being helped new markets develop, including leisure and entertainment. I don’t know the data, but It wouldn’t be surprising that the number of Science Fiction writers, publishers, magazines, and genres would have grown faster. It is paradoxical because the technological horrors that scared writers and turned them against the undesired consequences of technology made possible the context of prosperity that favored Science Fiction as a cultural market.

Nowadays, Science Fiction still charms MIT (besides the syllabi, they have one of the few Science Fiction Libraries in the World with 60,000 books). Why? Gunn holds that the popularity of contemporary Science Fiction —like The Hunger Games— expresses the pessimism of many about the actual state of affairs. Agree. But, it would be a pitfall drawing the same conclusion for the whole Science Fiction. What about Wall-E? What about Psycho-Pass? It is a mistake to watch them in terms of black or white; one can even say Wall-E ends up being optimistic. MIT’s penchant for Science Fiction is not naive. They know what they toy with (a sample of this is Science Fiction to Science Fabrication, a course to create prototypes following Science Fiction books). To put it another way: Science Fiction is as cynical as optimistic.

Let me discard other things that apparently differentiate Fantasy from Science Fiction. People associate Fantasy with dragons (as much as they do the same with Science Fiction and aliens), but that’s not the essential trait of Fantasy because dragons could make sense in Science Fiction plots too. Many say that Fantasy retells ancient myths, but this is not the case either: we’ve seen nearly the same mythical sources in both genres (Prometheus, Odysseus, Daedalus, Narcissus. The reader may remember at least one title in each genre for anyone)

We’ve watched Fantasy TV series fictionalizing historical events and popularizing Fantasy books. In these stories, there are constructions —even judgments— about what is wrong or fair. Fantasy is as moral as Science Fiction.

Both Science Fiction and Fantasy are very profitable (Of course, as with any other product, they are cyclical and have ups and downs as long as the demand grows or shrinks.)

We hardly found any other difference between Science Fiction and Fantasy than the contrast between past and future. There is no aesthetic, ethical, moral, or political difference between Science Fiction and Fantasy. Therefore, Clark was right: the only difference is the way they see Time. Both need it to start any story, but one tilts forward, and the other tilts backward.