Examining The Terms “Science Fiction” And “Fantasy”

Hang on, let me put that song in your head.

Someday I want to see Robotech: The Movie. Or at least find time for the original Megazone 23, which I can find. Looks like an interesting bit of science fiction.

Ah, that term. Science. Fiction. The science is fictional. Maybe that’s why it can’t save her. I didn’t even know the terms “science fiction” and “fantasy” were debatable terms outside of the snooty types who insist that “sci-fi” is somehow an insulting shortcut or something. However, here we are.

The source of this commentary comes from author Brian Neumeier, a name that’s come up on this site more than once. Usually it’s in the form of article links as he has some fascinating ideas, being a published author and all, and a chronicler of “cultural ground zero”, the point where our culture stopped changing as media and merchandise failed to advance out of fear of trying. Other times…I have notes. Guess which time this is. In this case we’re looking at a blog from his Kairos Publications site titled “Why ‘Science Fiction’ And ‘Fantasy’ Are Dead“. He doesn’t mean the genres because his whole thesis is that the terms were never real to begin with.

If you want to understand why it’s time to stop pretending these labels matter—and why clinging to them has done irreparable damage to readers, writers, and the art of storytelling—then buckle in. We’re going to take a hard look at how these terms were born, how they were corrupted, and why the age of these arbitrary divisions is over.

Big shout out to author JD Cowan who did the hard work hitting the books on this topic.

I looked up Cowan’s site via that link, an article series titled “Science Fiction Doesn’t Exist”. I considered using that as the source of this discussion but it’s a full series, with article lengths that make mine look tame in comparison. Let’s just say I learned my lesson with Seduction Of The Innocent and I might read that on my own someday. I’ll stick with Neumeier’s take, as I trust his honesty. We don’t always agree but there’s a reason I read and use his articles on this site.

It’s one of those truths that everyone suspects but few dare say aloud: The terms “science fiction” and “fantasy” are dead.

Not just dead in any quaint, nostalgic sense, but utterly irrelevant, useless, and unfit for purpose.

Worse still, they were never meant to be anything other than inventory tags for publishers and booksellers—crude labels slapped onto bookshelves and warehouse bins, designed to corral products; not communicate literary content or reader tastes.

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Let’s clear a major misconception out of the way first: “Science fiction” and “fantasy” were never designed to help readers figure out what to read. Instead, they were marketing tools for booksellers to organize and track their inventories. These labels were invented to separate stacks of pulp paperbacks by superficial characteristics: spaceships or dragons. That way, clerks could restock shelves faster, and warehouses could count inventory efficiently.

Honestly that’s just trivia to me. It doesn’t matter where a term comes from. We use other business terms in everyday life that are closer tied to the business world than what shelf to put a book on at Barnes & Noble. My question is the accuracy of the term in describing what we’re getting. That said, I don’t use it to chose what to read or watch or play or listen to or whatever. It’s what I’m in the mood for at the time. At one point I may want to watch Star Trek, another time I want to read To Kill A Mockingbird. I admittedly gravitate to science fiction and superheroes, as you can tell if you’ve been on this site for any decent length of time, but that’s just the type of escape I look for more often than not because I really like those elements.

As one critic once put it, Amazing Stories succeeded because it offered a simplified future to an audience “ignorant about science, politics, and sociology.”

That wasn’t a compliment. It was a tacit admission that these labels catered to a less intellectual crowd: those who bought magazines rather than plowed through “sophisticated” European books. These readers didn’t want to be alienated by tedious existentialist or nihilistic pessimism masquerading as art.

Yet even as (Amazing Stories creator Hugo) Gernsback’s pulps brought mass-market appeal, later gatekeepers looked upon his success with disdain. They dismissed the audience as simpletons and began reshaping the genre into an elitist, insular ghetto where bitter intellectuals debated the “correct” way to write stories, leaving behind the same readers who made the medium viable.

That’s not exactly ever stopped. I’ve brought up a surprising amount this year, but my go-to example of Francis Ford Coppola trying to talk George Lucas out of making his silly sci-fi movie Star Wars in favor of his own Apocalypse Now still holds up. And yet there are probably more people who watched Star Wars because it was a fun action story that gave people an escape. A dissection of the Vietnam War like Apocalypse Now is not to everyone’s preference after a hard work week that you want to have a fun family bonding experience. I’ve never seen the movie and my dad (a solider who served stateside during the Vietnam War while his brothers saw combat) prefers his war movies to have more action. As I start to write this he just finished watching Red Tails, about the Tuskegee Airmen.

By the way, Steven Spielberg made a TV series inspired by Amazing Stories.

The thing is I’ve never been one to let a media snob tell me what to enjoy and what not to. According to them I shouldn’t read comics books, play video games, or watch cartoons for my storytelling fix. Guess what I enjoy along with live-action, audio dramas, books, and whatever else gives me a great storytelling experience. I enjoy what they enjoy. If they don’t like it, I don’t care. It’s not their experience, it’s mine. Snobs don’t like things with “mass market” appeal because to them it’s no longer special or important or some crap. When reading itself got to be enjoyed by the masses thanks to the printing press taking less time and effort than handwriting every copy, even the Bible was a target because it was no longer something exclusive to the rich and privileged few. They hate that, the prototype for the everything for meeeeeeeeeeeeeee crowd.

That insularity was no accident. Fandom, the self-appointed magisterium of sci fi and fantasy enthusiasts, arose not to celebrate storytelling but to control it. They weaponized genre labels to erect barriers, pushing out anyone who didn’t conform to their ideological and aesthetic standards. Over time, “science fiction” and “fantasy” became not just labels on store shelves, but fences keeping out undesirables—those who liked hopeful stories, heroism, or simple escapism.

That’s not the terms’ fault, and “fandom” just means a grouping of “fans”, itself short for “fanatic”. Sports have fandoms. Cars have fandoms. Jane Austen has a fandom. To me there are good and bad versions of “gatekeeping”. Not allowing other people in so they can’t enjoy it is wrong, as is the whole “if you don’t know/like (X) you aren’t a ‘true fan'” is BS. On the other hand, people who come in wanting to change what the fans already like into something made for them (the aforementioned everything for meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee crowd) and exclude existing fans who don’t share their tastes should be kept out of controlling specific franchises. Let them design an original in their own taste. They might even get crossover from the more open-minded members of the other fandom, provided the work is good.

Both the original post and the Bleeding Fool repost (easier to copy/paste from) features an image quoting J.R.R. Tolkien: “Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier if imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?…If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!” Tolkien wrote high fantasy, a subgenre of fantasy I rarely get into. He didn’t seem to have a problem with the term “fantasy”. I mostly brought it up because escapism is becoming a dirty word with some of the modern day snobs.

Consider this ironic turn of fate: The same gatekeepers who now decry the pulps and their populist appeal are descended from the fans who grew out of Gernsback’s creation. These fans thought themselves intellectually superior to the masses and sought to remake the genre in their own image. The self-proclaimed elite viewed readers not as customers but as pests to be controlled or ignored. They excommunicated authors who dared write with optimism or heart and elevated tales of loneliness, alienation, and transcendence that smothered any humanity.

Someone else pointed out that the pulps were the precursors for many of our modern day superheroes, and we know there are people in the Hollywood system who hate superheroes. And others might look down on Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers. I know some look down on different versions of those franchises, like the 1970s Buck Rogers TV show, which happens to feature one of my favorite spacefighter designs. Again, elitist nonsense isn’t the fault of the terms.

The tragic result of fandom’s cultural coup is a genre that no longer speaks to the majority of readers. The wider world still craves heroes, stories of courage, and a sense that the future can be better. Meanwhile, speculative fiction has become a bubble populated by spiteful insiders swapping cynical, self-referential tales that no longer resonate with anyone outside their echo chamber.

I can’t agree here. Before the elites and activists took over and ruined Star Trek and Star Wars, both franchises had huge fanbases, from casual to hardcore and spots in-between. Not all of them went after the comics, games, novels, or audiobooks, but they were not just part of geek culture but pop culture and the wider culture. People know what you mean when you say “beam me up” or spin something around like a lightsaber or pretend to use the Force. I wouldn’t even call Star Wars science fiction. It was promoted as science fantasy, “the greatest science fantasy of all” on some merchandise like comics. It’s a blending of the two…you know what, maybe “genre” isn’t even the write term. Commentor D.J. Schreffler said it best so I’ll zoom ahead and quote him:

Now, Science Fiction and Fantasy are labels for the flavor of ‘romance’ (aliens and tech vs fae and magic), because you can’t do any search without tripping over what Fiannawolf calls ‘naked ab covers’.

Would it be better (less wrong, if not more correct) to describe these as settings rather than genres? Should genre focus primarily on the plot?

A mystery is a mystery no matter the setting. Ditto a romance, or adventure.

There are certain genres that imply settings, of course–Regency, Noir, Sword & Sandal, Sword & Planet–but on the whole, general plot and conventions are setting-agostic.

One of the things I love about science fiction (and watching playthroughs of Final Fantasy XVI shows that fantasy can do this as well) is mimicking other genres. You can have an action story, a mystery, a noir style tale (that one sounds tougher in fantasy even in parody…because you haven’t seen Hildibrand Helidor Maximilian Manderville in action–and your life is worse for it), romance, war stories (my dad wants a 24/7 war movie channel or more streaming services to have a “war” category), and so on, just in a science fiction setting. That Star Wars: Droids arc I used for Saturday Night Showcase is essentially a sports story involving racers versus a two-bit mobster brat that happened to use racing landspeeders and had two robots in it. Perhaps it is better to call them settings instead of genres. Those settings can even be combined. Star Wars, Masters Of The Universe, and a bunch of others contain elements of both fantasy and science fiction settings, plus you have hard science versus a more “fantastic” science. Another commenter, Rudolph Harrier, had something interesting to say as well

For a while people obsessed about the distinction between “Real Robot” and “Super Robot.” Now the mecha genre is barely alive, so no one really cares anymore.

The only place where the distinction made any sense was as a way to distinguish “weak but fast robots with boring but reliable attacks” from “bit tough robots with special moves they charge up” in the Super Robot Wars video games. But when people talked about the categories as genres, it more or less worked out to “sci-fi” vs. “fantasy.” For example, Real Robot is supposed to involve at least semi-plausible technologies in a reasonable military setting that uses mass produced smaller (but still giant) robots, while Super Robot uses magic and other BS with individual gargantuan robots. But the attempts to apply these ideas always failed when it came to classifying actual shows.

For example I’ve seen people say that shows must be “super robot” because they involve psychic powers and overpowered prototypes. But by that reasoning even the original Gundam franchise is a super robot series, so what can count as “real robot.” (Before you say Patlabor, remember that there were episodes that featured kaiju and one with actual ghosts.) Even if you resolve that difficulty, how do classify something like Gaogaigar? The robot itself hits the super robot cliches, but the show puts huge emphasis on scientific development and the logistical support necessary for such things. What about Dunbine? The robots are “real robot” for gameplay purposes in SRW, but they are literally powered by magic (albeit in a way crafted by a roboticist who was transported to a “fantasy” setting.) Similarly it’s hard to draw the line with shows like Dancougar, Ideon, Evangelion, Nadesico, etc., etc., etc. But there was a time when people insisted on trying.

The sci-fi/fantasy divide strikes me as what would have happened if this had continued on for decades, with one side trying to erase the other for political points.

Funny, I thought “super robot” was saved for something like Gigantor or Voltron/GoLion, a superhero style of robot or mecha, versus something like the Macross or Gundam franchises, which were more mecha war stories. Seriously, read the comments if you haven’t. There’s some fascinating discussions, including trivia on the origin of the term “science fiction”. I wish my comments sections were as interesting. Even Cowan, the guy mentioned earlier in Niemeyer’s article, posted in there.

For an example, one of the biggest successes in the current biggest sector of the industry has this as a description:

“Momo Ayase is a high school girl who believes in ghosts but not aliens, while her fellow high schooler, Ken Takakura, whom Momo nicknames “Okarun”, believes in aliens but not ghosts. In a bet to determine who is correct, the two decide to separately visit locations associated with both the extraterrestrial and the occult—Momo visiting the former, and Okarun the latter. Momo is abducted by a group of aliens who accidentally unblock her chakras, enabling latent psychic abilities. Meanwhile, Okarun is possessed by a spirit who takes over his body. By using Momo’s abilities and Okarun’s possessed form, they defeat the aliens together.”

If that isn’t the clearest example of what readers want, I don’t know what is.

He’s referring to new anime hotness Dandadan, which I would also classify as science fantasy since it involves aliens, spirits, and psychic powers. Psychic powers are a great link because both sci-fi and fantasy settings use them. The difference is how the power is explained. Momo’s abilities are explained in something that sounds more scientific than spiritual but the ghosts bring in a fantasy, or at least supernatural, element, including the one Okarun (his real name is shared with a famous actor whose characters Momo uses as a standard for men) gets his powers from. As Old Mouse notes, it’s hard to maintain a conversation this way.

Read the full article and comments when you get a chance. It’s all really interesting and you may agree or disagree with one or both of us. My point is I don’t want these terms to go away or get lost in non sci-fi/fantasy settings. I like those settings. Maybe they should have settings for other time periods, and sometimes they do. Then again, that would make time travel stories confusing, but your average Jane Austen reader isn’t going to be interested in a Doctor Who story because it’s set in a similar time period.  I really enjoy the episode “Black Orchid” and the only thing sci-fi about that story is the four time travellers. (I don’t know Austen that well, so I don’t know that it’s the same exact period in a different country.) It’s one of my favorite episodes because it stands out like that, but I wouldn’t want the whole series to be that. It may be wrong to call them genres just because of how much other genres bleed into it, especially science fiction. However, regardless of where the terms come from, fixing how we use it is better than throwing away terms we use so much. It shouldn’t keep other people out, but the space alien night elves are going to send some people away anyway and draw others. It would be nice to have a warning so we can find or avoid them at our leisure.