Definitions of fantasy vs science fiction
Jan. 29th, 2024 02:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI just read a guest editorial from Asimov's cover date march 2020 , and now I want to argue with it.
(I have been bouncing off reading the Asimov's from back then because I was feeling weird about the whole message from an alternate universe feel of people trying to write the future when they didnt Know)
Editorial is about a personal definition of Science Fiction vs Fantasy.
To David D Levine, Science Fiction is an Enlightenment way of thinking where "the universe is logical, predictable, and understandable, governed by rules that are impersonal and have no moral dimension"
whereas Fantasy "is based on a pre-Enlightenment worldview: the universe has a moral compass, and is governed by rules that, though they may be understandable, are not necessarily consistent, logical, or predictable in their application."
For examples he says "The fantasy universe is full of swords that may be drawn only by the pure of heart, unicorns that can be ridden only by virgins, and doors tbat open only for the rightful king."
And I immediately wanted to stop reading and start arguing, because no no no, he's got it all the wrong way up, he's talking about sword unicorn door as objects to be acted upon, and considering the rules as silly as if gravity has favourites. But they're two man made creations and one living being.
A unicorn, having subjectivity and preferences, chooses to be ridden only by virgins.
How the unicorn can tell is a longer argument, and involves defining virginity, so lets leave that one there.
Start with the easiest. Doors locked except for the king. For a moment I typoed 'kin', but that's the simplest reading of 'rightful' anyway in a hereditary system. We're talking biometric locks.
After someone I knew died I heard all of her kids could unlock her phone. Which was obviously useful, but not what the face lock is supposed to be. When I googled for how likely it is I found official answers that gave the odds of *unrelated* user unlock, which suggests to me related users give numbers that arent the same, and answers that asked if there had ever been password sharing, because the phone would learn the face of whoever used the password. Then I got bored and wandered after another thought, so, dont know how accurate or useful those answers are. But. Something looking for a similar face is in common useage today and while intended to keep it single user locked actually unlocked for their heirs. Something built for security has a loophole for kin.
Hopefully rightful kin.
Get as far as dna identification, which is getting faster and using more complex databases, and you've got a very science way to identify lost heirs. And why couldnt a door do it fast enough to unlock for them?
The sword for the pure of heart gets way more complicated, and wanders into the realms of kingship tests that actually ask you questions. I mean the sword could be choosing by pure prejudice, like I saw on tumblr someone saying a survey of HR managers said most of them reckoned who was good to hire or not just as soon as they saw them, and then the article pointed out that meant most of them should be fired because that's prejudice and also illegal. You get 'ai' bias automation in hiring right now. It'll search your CV rather than your actual person, but give it time, there's companies working on neural interface right now, it's pants but it's possible.
As for 'pure of heart' you've got a lot of different criteria to unpack. But it reminds me of a Torchwood bit from one of tbe novels, when an alien weapon shows Jack a kind of menu of all the things it could do for him and to others, and Jack puts it the hell down. Jack being the only one in the story that does. One can imagine, if there's the interface for it, a weapon that showed someone possibilities and then had criteria for judging their response. ... Jack's is the only one I'd trust personally, but then you get a lot of unused magic swords.
I mean fantasy is full of fully conscious intelligent weapons, and we dont call them AI and explain their programming and the moral problems of encoding all their choices like that, but we certainly could. We can get to the same end result by painting the technobabble green and black matrix style or saying it's a trapped soul. Murderbot or murdered apprentice. But either way we're talking about the dangers of intelligent weapons that want to do our thinking for us about targetting and destruction. Or about treating people as things when we treat them as a component of a weapon system. Or any of the myriad other things that come up in cyberpunk or summoning and binding.
If you want to treat science fiction as about consistent rules systems you have to actively leave out that these are rules that have created people. Thinking beings. Who make choices. Choices that have rule sets of their own. And some of those choices get encoded into their creations, which then react in ways associated with conscious choice, but possibly without the ability to reality check and change their rules.
Like, I dont know, bias automation in facial recognition of criminal suspects. Known problem of not recognising a president when it could call them a criminal. Stuff like that goes into the things we make.
If you want to imagine a universe without a moral dimension, a universe that doesnt care, then you have to ignore that as JMS says "We are the universe seeking to understand itself" and as Brennan Lee Mulligan said “In the same way that your heart feels and your mind thinks, you, mortal beings, are the instrument by which the universe cares. If you choose to care, then the universe cares. If you don’t, it doesn’t.”
We are part of this system AND THEREFORE there will be doors that wont open unless you're the Rightful, by criteria only the doors maker thought they knew, but might have cocked up implementing. There will be weapons that work for only one user, because some bright spark observed the alternative and put some bloody locks on it. Biometrically locked tech, be it phones, transport, or weapons, is common in SF and is starting to be in use already, you can't just ignore it for the sake of an arbitrary distinction.
The editorial says "Technology is impersonal, predictable, and repeatable," but ask my mum how much those words apply to a computer system after an update. Or ask any software developer really, past a certain level of complexity, and number of other people working on parts of the system. Or there's apparently speed runs that happened but the best guess on how was a cosmic ray or something struck the computer at a random specific moment.
"Suppose there is a Colt revolver on the table between you and me. Even if you are a far better shot, the pistol will function for both of us and its destructive power will be the same in my hands as yours. But if that pistol is replaced by a wand, we can expect that it may function very differently for you than for me. If the wand belongs to you, or you possess the necessary bloodline or birthright or other personal characteristics, it may not perform at all for me or may even strike back against me for attempting to use it. Technology depends on what you have; magic depends on who you are. (Knowledge and training, which are personal but not inherent, are a special case and are often significant in both SF and fantasy.)" All same quote from Asimov's march/april 2020.
Specifying that knowledge is a special case means you cant tell if its fantasy or SF just because you need to know the magcpic words, and fair enough. But...
Typing 2020 made me think of examples from bio sciences, specifically responses to viruses. Biotechnology is a subject of SF too, but really thoroughly depends on bloodlines in a modern and detailed sense. Who you are in your genes and experiences changes how the exact same thing works on you. Whether that's uncontrolled biology like an infection or controlled stuff like an mrna vaccine, there's a lot of playing the odds on effects, and even really promising vaccines or treatments will turn out to have side effects nobody foresaw. You can argue that that is still the result of stupendously complex interactions of understandable individual parts, sure, but, you can argue the same about magic, if you want to.
Saying technology works the same way regardless is... so epically oversimplified it's basically wrong. I mean take watching pictures on a screen, the light may be the same for everyone but the effect will induce seizures or migraines in only some. I'll never get good at some video games because they make me motion sick as heck, yet a lot of people dont have that problem so can develop that skill. Can't just call that magic because it's personal and variable.
Granted as far as I can tell the tech isnt acting that way because it has deemed some people Good and others Evil. But see bias automation. Or asking if you're a robot in ways that actually filter out disabled people. The attitudes of the creators get encoded in their creations.
Even if the unmodified rules of the universe are reliable and predictable, we're all born into a world that has been modified over and over again, and we have to deal with systems that people made.
There doesnt have to be a single invisible watchmaker, there have been millions of years of everything trying to induce more favorable outcomes, and thousands of years of humans doing that and writing it down. Survival of the fittest reshapes the world until intelligent design emerges from intelligent life. Landscapes to individual plants, we live in a world rewritten by human influence.
Which favors some and shuts out others.
So, why does it become 'fantasy' when you take a particularly powerful example of this and label it, I don't know, a wizard, or a god?
The editorial says "Most important, the fantasy universe is *personal*. It is aware of, and cares for, humans and human concerns, and outcomes of actions are at least partly determined by the actors' attitudes, personalities, and heritage."
Which I find an odd thing to call 'most important', like gamers who think alignment is part of every rpg, but, also, I can get there using pure SF components. And many have. If you can swap out the words god and aliens and ascended masters then the difference isnt F or SF. It's just putting a judgey person in the loop at any point in time, with consequences.
Look I know Doctor Who is a genre traveller that engages with different genres in different eras or individual episodes, but, you can pull a few individual technologies and put them together elsewhere and still get a universe with an afterlife and with conscious beings that observe and judge and intervene in ways mysterious to lower tech levels. I mean google imaging isnt up to tracking every sparrows fall, but we can see the principle of how, just a lot of lenses from far away and a smart enough artificial intelligence to keep track of them all. DW ups that to beings who can stop time to move between tick and tock and take a recording of everyone who ever lived. Because that's a verse with time travel in it. Time travel is solidly SF, but once you imagine it, you can use every other bit of ultratech you also plausibly imagine *throughout all of space and time*.
So the nanogenes that leak from an alien hospital ship are solid SF, right? I've read dozens of stories about medical nanites. And using medical nanites to make a record of individual personalities turns up a lot. As does the very drama ship of theseus arguments about what are you even recording and how much the result can be considered you. But if you have time travel in your universe you can just drop said nanotech off at the dawn of time, have it coexist with all life everywhere, and then use the results in your ... I dont know, computronium dyson sphere/cloud setups where River Song in the library is a kids drawing with crayons and actually all life in the universe can be represented as data in that cloud that is in some senses immortal. I mean that's SF, right? If you say nanotech and computer enough you get the rapture of the geeks and imagine life eternal with no deities involved.
But you also end up with an individual experience of pure fantasy if you setup the whole thing as a virtual reality with as few rules as the Great Beyond.
... I can start talking about Mage the Ascension and virtual adepts and make an argument for the Matrix as magic and fantasy, but, my point is more like:
Once you get proper ultratech that puts us in wild degree of control over the rules or the impact of the rules on us as individuals
YOU GET FANTASY
because you get
the output of many human minds
and demonstrably they dream of fantasy.
We can Clarke's law this whole conversation, obvs. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and that includes being locked to particular individuals and caring about if you've done the training modules and have an ethical track record, because the humans who make it are going to care about the stuff they we always care about.
And you'll get people with more power in uktratech systems than others, be they thenowners, admins, or designers. Their choices and judgements affect all users, even if everyone is living in the world their design pervades. There's a long jump from there to calling them gods, but far before you get gods, you get a world that makes judgements about you.
"The science fiction world is a collection of physical processes that have no consciousness or personality and cannot be influenced by human moral codes."
But every single thing you use to interact with those processes is going to be made by humans, unless you the reader are not human, in which case hi how are you welcome and the editorial should have said person there not human.
"In a science fiction story, building a world-destroying machine may be morally wrong, but the universe will not do anything to prevent it from working"
Except that WE ARE THE UNIVERSE and we build things and learn things and oh yes install safety systems and have a lot of inspectors to make sure other people are using them. As the tech level rises these systems can become smarter and more pervasive. For unpredictable results, good and ill.
Positing a world where an individual human literally cannot build a world destroyer because of wizard intervention is like positing a cyberpunk future where you literally can't access your own systems because the designers said no. Your replacement fingers wont type it and your replacement eyes wont see the answer? Plausibly achieveable. It doesnt stop being science fiction.
"But in a fantasy universe, the characters can expect that immoral or ungodly actions will eventually be punished by a just universe." ... mate, we're back to 'not all games have alignment'. Fantasy can and does exist without gods? And a great many games *with* gods have enough of them that there's a bloody scrum on when someone has to decide 'godly'. Gods can punish actions they consider unjust and thereby reveal themselves as being unjust. Have you just... never read a greek myth? Where is this coming from?
Then the editorial reckons that predictable and repeatable magic is a function of games not fiction.
No, just no.
We're looking at a whole anticipation and payoff cycle. In romance books its yearning having. In books with magic it's... well, still thing you desire and getting the thing, but possibly with more glowy? If you get repeatable results then the reader can look forwards to seeing them later in the story. If you have to create a new poetic metaphor thingy to resolve your problems every time, you dont get the anticipation. It's like the difference between 'Buffy stakes another vampire' and 'Willow does a spell'. You can anticipate vampires going poof in response to wood, you cannot anticipate or look forwards to how spells work there. Different appeals to the reader.
Editorial reckons that repeatable magic lacks a sense of wonder but that would rule science fiction out of sense of wonder ane *gestures broadly at genre*.
Wait the next paragraph says both F and SF deliver sense of wonder. "Science fiction, and indeed science itself, can provoke wonder at the grandeur, complexity, and scope of the universe; fantasy can do so in many of the same ways, and also adds a subtler, more personal dimension."
Well one that's a very vague way of contrasting them, and two I dont agree, fantasy can do everything SF can do and vice versa.
... I meant that in the sense of 'make you feel' but now I think it's broadly true.
I'm not going to go through the last half of the editorial because it's worked examples, and also, I've been arguing with this for... two hours?? Which seems like enough when no one is arguing back.
His judgement of Star Wars is "dependent on bloodline and has an explicit moral dimension, looks like pure fantasy to me" according to this definition he just made. But if you want to read it as midichlorians storing beings soaked in them as luminous beings, who then have great big arguments in The Force, which have knock on effects for other users, does that change the genre?
But the editorial do end with saying neither genre is morally superior. It just says it in a way that seems to me to come down in favour of SF.
The only useful definitions of genres are about a genre being a set of works in conversation with each other. F and SF have such blurry edges the conversation wanders in and out of them often, however you define things. And the changing understanding of science changes any definition based on factual accuracy, demoting or promoting ever so many things.
But I realised while I was typing why this whole definition wound me up. It's doing that thing where 'science' leaves out people, but, it's also doing the argument I've seen most often being heavily gendered. Look at this objective Science Fiction! Look at this Fantasy, which has people all over it and cares more about motives than accuracy! So! Different!
Except you have to actively bail out the peopley bits to get a science fiction that doesnt have variable individual results based around human or posthuman or alien judgements, so what even is the point?
(I have been bouncing off reading the Asimov's from back then because I was feeling weird about the whole message from an alternate universe feel of people trying to write the future when they didnt Know)
Editorial is about a personal definition of Science Fiction vs Fantasy.
To David D Levine, Science Fiction is an Enlightenment way of thinking where "the universe is logical, predictable, and understandable, governed by rules that are impersonal and have no moral dimension"
whereas Fantasy "is based on a pre-Enlightenment worldview: the universe has a moral compass, and is governed by rules that, though they may be understandable, are not necessarily consistent, logical, or predictable in their application."
For examples he says "The fantasy universe is full of swords that may be drawn only by the pure of heart, unicorns that can be ridden only by virgins, and doors tbat open only for the rightful king."
And I immediately wanted to stop reading and start arguing, because no no no, he's got it all the wrong way up, he's talking about sword unicorn door as objects to be acted upon, and considering the rules as silly as if gravity has favourites. But they're two man made creations and one living being.
A unicorn, having subjectivity and preferences, chooses to be ridden only by virgins.
How the unicorn can tell is a longer argument, and involves defining virginity, so lets leave that one there.
Start with the easiest. Doors locked except for the king. For a moment I typoed 'kin', but that's the simplest reading of 'rightful' anyway in a hereditary system. We're talking biometric locks.
After someone I knew died I heard all of her kids could unlock her phone. Which was obviously useful, but not what the face lock is supposed to be. When I googled for how likely it is I found official answers that gave the odds of *unrelated* user unlock, which suggests to me related users give numbers that arent the same, and answers that asked if there had ever been password sharing, because the phone would learn the face of whoever used the password. Then I got bored and wandered after another thought, so, dont know how accurate or useful those answers are. But. Something looking for a similar face is in common useage today and while intended to keep it single user locked actually unlocked for their heirs. Something built for security has a loophole for kin.
Hopefully rightful kin.
Get as far as dna identification, which is getting faster and using more complex databases, and you've got a very science way to identify lost heirs. And why couldnt a door do it fast enough to unlock for them?
The sword for the pure of heart gets way more complicated, and wanders into the realms of kingship tests that actually ask you questions. I mean the sword could be choosing by pure prejudice, like I saw on tumblr someone saying a survey of HR managers said most of them reckoned who was good to hire or not just as soon as they saw them, and then the article pointed out that meant most of them should be fired because that's prejudice and also illegal. You get 'ai' bias automation in hiring right now. It'll search your CV rather than your actual person, but give it time, there's companies working on neural interface right now, it's pants but it's possible.
As for 'pure of heart' you've got a lot of different criteria to unpack. But it reminds me of a Torchwood bit from one of tbe novels, when an alien weapon shows Jack a kind of menu of all the things it could do for him and to others, and Jack puts it the hell down. Jack being the only one in the story that does. One can imagine, if there's the interface for it, a weapon that showed someone possibilities and then had criteria for judging their response. ... Jack's is the only one I'd trust personally, but then you get a lot of unused magic swords.
I mean fantasy is full of fully conscious intelligent weapons, and we dont call them AI and explain their programming and the moral problems of encoding all their choices like that, but we certainly could. We can get to the same end result by painting the technobabble green and black matrix style or saying it's a trapped soul. Murderbot or murdered apprentice. But either way we're talking about the dangers of intelligent weapons that want to do our thinking for us about targetting and destruction. Or about treating people as things when we treat them as a component of a weapon system. Or any of the myriad other things that come up in cyberpunk or summoning and binding.
If you want to treat science fiction as about consistent rules systems you have to actively leave out that these are rules that have created people. Thinking beings. Who make choices. Choices that have rule sets of their own. And some of those choices get encoded into their creations, which then react in ways associated with conscious choice, but possibly without the ability to reality check and change their rules.
Like, I dont know, bias automation in facial recognition of criminal suspects. Known problem of not recognising a president when it could call them a criminal. Stuff like that goes into the things we make.
If you want to imagine a universe without a moral dimension, a universe that doesnt care, then you have to ignore that as JMS says "We are the universe seeking to understand itself" and as Brennan Lee Mulligan said “In the same way that your heart feels and your mind thinks, you, mortal beings, are the instrument by which the universe cares. If you choose to care, then the universe cares. If you don’t, it doesn’t.”
We are part of this system AND THEREFORE there will be doors that wont open unless you're the Rightful, by criteria only the doors maker thought they knew, but might have cocked up implementing. There will be weapons that work for only one user, because some bright spark observed the alternative and put some bloody locks on it. Biometrically locked tech, be it phones, transport, or weapons, is common in SF and is starting to be in use already, you can't just ignore it for the sake of an arbitrary distinction.
The editorial says "Technology is impersonal, predictable, and repeatable," but ask my mum how much those words apply to a computer system after an update. Or ask any software developer really, past a certain level of complexity, and number of other people working on parts of the system. Or there's apparently speed runs that happened but the best guess on how was a cosmic ray or something struck the computer at a random specific moment.
"Suppose there is a Colt revolver on the table between you and me. Even if you are a far better shot, the pistol will function for both of us and its destructive power will be the same in my hands as yours. But if that pistol is replaced by a wand, we can expect that it may function very differently for you than for me. If the wand belongs to you, or you possess the necessary bloodline or birthright or other personal characteristics, it may not perform at all for me or may even strike back against me for attempting to use it. Technology depends on what you have; magic depends on who you are. (Knowledge and training, which are personal but not inherent, are a special case and are often significant in both SF and fantasy.)" All same quote from Asimov's march/april 2020.
Specifying that knowledge is a special case means you cant tell if its fantasy or SF just because you need to know the magcpic words, and fair enough. But...
Typing 2020 made me think of examples from bio sciences, specifically responses to viruses. Biotechnology is a subject of SF too, but really thoroughly depends on bloodlines in a modern and detailed sense. Who you are in your genes and experiences changes how the exact same thing works on you. Whether that's uncontrolled biology like an infection or controlled stuff like an mrna vaccine, there's a lot of playing the odds on effects, and even really promising vaccines or treatments will turn out to have side effects nobody foresaw. You can argue that that is still the result of stupendously complex interactions of understandable individual parts, sure, but, you can argue the same about magic, if you want to.
Saying technology works the same way regardless is... so epically oversimplified it's basically wrong. I mean take watching pictures on a screen, the light may be the same for everyone but the effect will induce seizures or migraines in only some. I'll never get good at some video games because they make me motion sick as heck, yet a lot of people dont have that problem so can develop that skill. Can't just call that magic because it's personal and variable.
Granted as far as I can tell the tech isnt acting that way because it has deemed some people Good and others Evil. But see bias automation. Or asking if you're a robot in ways that actually filter out disabled people. The attitudes of the creators get encoded in their creations.
Even if the unmodified rules of the universe are reliable and predictable, we're all born into a world that has been modified over and over again, and we have to deal with systems that people made.
There doesnt have to be a single invisible watchmaker, there have been millions of years of everything trying to induce more favorable outcomes, and thousands of years of humans doing that and writing it down. Survival of the fittest reshapes the world until intelligent design emerges from intelligent life. Landscapes to individual plants, we live in a world rewritten by human influence.
Which favors some and shuts out others.
So, why does it become 'fantasy' when you take a particularly powerful example of this and label it, I don't know, a wizard, or a god?
The editorial says "Most important, the fantasy universe is *personal*. It is aware of, and cares for, humans and human concerns, and outcomes of actions are at least partly determined by the actors' attitudes, personalities, and heritage."
Which I find an odd thing to call 'most important', like gamers who think alignment is part of every rpg, but, also, I can get there using pure SF components. And many have. If you can swap out the words god and aliens and ascended masters then the difference isnt F or SF. It's just putting a judgey person in the loop at any point in time, with consequences.
Look I know Doctor Who is a genre traveller that engages with different genres in different eras or individual episodes, but, you can pull a few individual technologies and put them together elsewhere and still get a universe with an afterlife and with conscious beings that observe and judge and intervene in ways mysterious to lower tech levels. I mean google imaging isnt up to tracking every sparrows fall, but we can see the principle of how, just a lot of lenses from far away and a smart enough artificial intelligence to keep track of them all. DW ups that to beings who can stop time to move between tick and tock and take a recording of everyone who ever lived. Because that's a verse with time travel in it. Time travel is solidly SF, but once you imagine it, you can use every other bit of ultratech you also plausibly imagine *throughout all of space and time*.
So the nanogenes that leak from an alien hospital ship are solid SF, right? I've read dozens of stories about medical nanites. And using medical nanites to make a record of individual personalities turns up a lot. As does the very drama ship of theseus arguments about what are you even recording and how much the result can be considered you. But if you have time travel in your universe you can just drop said nanotech off at the dawn of time, have it coexist with all life everywhere, and then use the results in your ... I dont know, computronium dyson sphere/cloud setups where River Song in the library is a kids drawing with crayons and actually all life in the universe can be represented as data in that cloud that is in some senses immortal. I mean that's SF, right? If you say nanotech and computer enough you get the rapture of the geeks and imagine life eternal with no deities involved.
But you also end up with an individual experience of pure fantasy if you setup the whole thing as a virtual reality with as few rules as the Great Beyond.
... I can start talking about Mage the Ascension and virtual adepts and make an argument for the Matrix as magic and fantasy, but, my point is more like:
Once you get proper ultratech that puts us in wild degree of control over the rules or the impact of the rules on us as individuals
YOU GET FANTASY
because you get
the output of many human minds
and demonstrably they dream of fantasy.
We can Clarke's law this whole conversation, obvs. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and that includes being locked to particular individuals and caring about if you've done the training modules and have an ethical track record, because the humans who make it are going to care about the stuff they we always care about.
And you'll get people with more power in uktratech systems than others, be they thenowners, admins, or designers. Their choices and judgements affect all users, even if everyone is living in the world their design pervades. There's a long jump from there to calling them gods, but far before you get gods, you get a world that makes judgements about you.
"The science fiction world is a collection of physical processes that have no consciousness or personality and cannot be influenced by human moral codes."
But every single thing you use to interact with those processes is going to be made by humans, unless you the reader are not human, in which case hi how are you welcome and the editorial should have said person there not human.
"In a science fiction story, building a world-destroying machine may be morally wrong, but the universe will not do anything to prevent it from working"
Except that WE ARE THE UNIVERSE and we build things and learn things and oh yes install safety systems and have a lot of inspectors to make sure other people are using them. As the tech level rises these systems can become smarter and more pervasive. For unpredictable results, good and ill.
Positing a world where an individual human literally cannot build a world destroyer because of wizard intervention is like positing a cyberpunk future where you literally can't access your own systems because the designers said no. Your replacement fingers wont type it and your replacement eyes wont see the answer? Plausibly achieveable. It doesnt stop being science fiction.
"But in a fantasy universe, the characters can expect that immoral or ungodly actions will eventually be punished by a just universe." ... mate, we're back to 'not all games have alignment'. Fantasy can and does exist without gods? And a great many games *with* gods have enough of them that there's a bloody scrum on when someone has to decide 'godly'. Gods can punish actions they consider unjust and thereby reveal themselves as being unjust. Have you just... never read a greek myth? Where is this coming from?
Then the editorial reckons that predictable and repeatable magic is a function of games not fiction.
No, just no.
We're looking at a whole anticipation and payoff cycle. In romance books its yearning having. In books with magic it's... well, still thing you desire and getting the thing, but possibly with more glowy? If you get repeatable results then the reader can look forwards to seeing them later in the story. If you have to create a new poetic metaphor thingy to resolve your problems every time, you dont get the anticipation. It's like the difference between 'Buffy stakes another vampire' and 'Willow does a spell'. You can anticipate vampires going poof in response to wood, you cannot anticipate or look forwards to how spells work there. Different appeals to the reader.
Editorial reckons that repeatable magic lacks a sense of wonder but that would rule science fiction out of sense of wonder ane *gestures broadly at genre*.
Wait the next paragraph says both F and SF deliver sense of wonder. "Science fiction, and indeed science itself, can provoke wonder at the grandeur, complexity, and scope of the universe; fantasy can do so in many of the same ways, and also adds a subtler, more personal dimension."
Well one that's a very vague way of contrasting them, and two I dont agree, fantasy can do everything SF can do and vice versa.
... I meant that in the sense of 'make you feel' but now I think it's broadly true.
I'm not going to go through the last half of the editorial because it's worked examples, and also, I've been arguing with this for... two hours?? Which seems like enough when no one is arguing back.
His judgement of Star Wars is "dependent on bloodline and has an explicit moral dimension, looks like pure fantasy to me" according to this definition he just made. But if you want to read it as midichlorians storing beings soaked in them as luminous beings, who then have great big arguments in The Force, which have knock on effects for other users, does that change the genre?
But the editorial do end with saying neither genre is morally superior. It just says it in a way that seems to me to come down in favour of SF.
The only useful definitions of genres are about a genre being a set of works in conversation with each other. F and SF have such blurry edges the conversation wanders in and out of them often, however you define things. And the changing understanding of science changes any definition based on factual accuracy, demoting or promoting ever so many things.
But I realised while I was typing why this whole definition wound me up. It's doing that thing where 'science' leaves out people, but, it's also doing the argument I've seen most often being heavily gendered. Look at this objective Science Fiction! Look at this Fantasy, which has people all over it and cares more about motives than accuracy! So! Different!
Except you have to actively bail out the peopley bits to get a science fiction that doesnt have variable individual results based around human or posthuman or alien judgements, so what even is the point?