Random Musing
I’ve been doing a fair bit of thinking over the past few weeks. I know, I know, I should be careful with that. Don’t want to strain myself. I’ve gotten nowhere with it either. My mind is excellent at dragging me around in circles. Funny that, the rest of me has a stellar sense of direction.
I’m going to make a confession. I’m a fantasy nut. I love fantasy. I love it because it’s in a different world. When something doesn’t sound right, it doesn’t matter to me. It’s not supposed to be right. It’s a brave new world, baby. I don’t get the urge to run to my computer and google anything just to see whether it is right or not. I kind of like science fiction as well, as long as it’s well done. I loved (and I mean loved) Joss Whedon’s series Firefly and the associated movie, Serenity. It was magnificent. It was entertaining. It didn’t revolve around matter / anti-matter fluctuations in the warp drive. Best of all, I have no idea how the ship worked, or how fast it could take them from A to B. Do you know what I do know? I know the characters and the story.
I suppose part of my issue is my current dilemma regarding genres. You don’t really expect a person who enjoys horror to equally like a book about fluffy bunnies. Unless the fluffy bunnies were actually a demon army cleverly disguised as fluffy bunnies who took their true form at night and ravaged a small town isolated by a freak blizzard. Demon bunnies aside, though, you don’t expect people to go from zombie hordes to lolcats.
Funny thought: Milla Jovovich stars in Resident Evil: Cheezburger. The zombie kittens r in ur secret underground facility plotting ur demise.
It interests me, then, to note the science fiction and fantasy are lumped together under “speculative fiction” more and more these days. They are two entirely different creatures for the most part, as alike as erotica (my stats are about to soar) and children’s fiction. They just don’t seem to have a great deal in common. The only thing I can think of is that both, if badly done, are equally lamentable. That can be said of any genre though. Especially “romance novels”.
I think I managed to figure out exactly what it is I fail to appreciate about the majority of (badly handled) science fiction. The two things I value most in a book are the characters and the plot. To me, setting is backdrop. It’s the set in a play. It’s there to give a little context. Fantasy novels rarely mention the fact that the horses our noble heroes are riding consume grass and digest it in order to absorb the energy and nutrients required to power the muscles they need to carry our heroes from point A to point B. It’s irrelevant. Just like how warp fields can be manipulated to get our heroes from point A to point B in the barest fraction of the time it would take at sub-light speeds.
Perhaps part of the reason for the lumping-together is that both genres are, in theory, purely imagination driven. But isn’t that true of all fiction? In theory, of course. But here’s where the issue lies for me. They’re not the same thing. The vast majority of people in a science fiction / fantasy section at the local bookshop are there for either one or the other. Sure, some people dabble in the other from time to time, but then few people truly read exclusively within their genre.
It’s possible the lumping together comes from stereotypes. Go ahead and picture what you expect a science fiction reader to look like. Chubby maybe? Or ridiculously scrawny. Glasses, probably. Almost certainly very pallid (from hours spent staring lovingly at the still-in-the-original-packaging Star Wars collectible action figures). Now superimpose that with your stereotypical fantasy reader. Chubby maybe? Or ridiculously scrawny. Glasses probably. Almost certainly very pallid (from hours spent playing Dungeons and Dragons with similarly chubby (or scrawny), bespectacled and pallid friends). Yes, it’s hard to guess by looking at a person whether they’re in the spec fic section for sci-fi or fantasy. Seriously, though, it’s like expecting all black people to be gangsta rappers, all Asians to be grocers, or all Arabs to be terrorists.
Looking the part does not mean one fits the part.
Tagged: Entertainment, Writing.