In two weeks I'll be driving down to Cherry Hill, New Jersey, home of PhilCon 2024, the Philadelphia area's longest-running science fiction convention. This year it runs from November 22 through 24, and I've got events all three days.
Friday, November 22, 8:00 p.m.: Let's Design a New SF Television Show! — A panel of fans and writers brainstorm a TV series which will be good, good science fiction, and (one hopes) popular.
Saturday, November 23, 11:00 a.m.: How Real Does the Science in Science Fiction Have to Be? — Science fiction sometimes leans heavily into "rubber science" but presumably there's a line between science fiction and fantasy. Where do we draw that line? I'll be discussing that with some other creators.
Saturday, 1:00 p.m.: Writing For Aliens: Realistic Yet Relatable Perspectives — Writing alien characters, especially alien viewpoints, has a built-in conflict. We want the characters to be human enough for our (presumably) human readers to identify with, but we want them alien enough to make good science fiction.
Sunday, November 24, 10:00 a.m.: Autographing — I'll be signing any of my works anyone cares to put in front of me. There will be special swag for anyone who comes by!
Sunday, 1:00 p.m.: What's Happened to the Traditional Ghost Story? — The ghost story is one of the oldest forms of fiction, but modern horror fiction has become something very different. Where did the ghosts go? Come hear me discuss that with some other writers working in different genres.
So come see the fun at PhilCon!
I've never liked the idea that the difference between "science fiction" and "fantasy" is that the science in science fiction is more rigorous by some metric. That's making the distinguishing characteristic of fantasy a negative one, the absence rather than the presence of a trait---like the old-fashioned definition of "invertebrates" as animals without backbones. Invertebrates so defined include a couple of dozen groups of animals with body plans as different from each other as any of them is from the body plan of chordates (the larger group that includes vertebrates); and fantasy so defined would include everything from space opera to fairy tales to superhero adventures to stories about talking animals. In either case the things included are so diverse that very little can be said about them as a class, and the things that CAN be said can generally also be said of the smaller complementary class.
One way of defining fantasy is as including all fiction with fantastic elements, of which science fiction is one case. Another way, one that fits genre fantasy as one of today's publishing categories, is to say that fantasy persuades readers to suspend disbelief about its fantastic elements by a rhetorical appeal to the precedents of myths, legends, and fairy tales, just as science fiction does so by a rhetorical appeal to science and technology. In this approach anything that makes the latter appeal is "science fiction," no matter how rigorous or handwavy the "science" is.
I'd note that E.E. Smith, who favored the approach I'm rejecting, claimed that his Skylark novels were "fantasy" but his Lensman novels were "science fiction," being scientifically rigorous. I still find the latter series enjoyable, but very little in it strikes me as having any trace of scientific rigor. So I think it's easy to misjudge such matters . . .
Posted by: William H. Stoddard | 11/12/2024 at 09:46 PM