What the Fantasy Genres Tell Us
This past week I've been thinking a lot about genres. Now I know that's a broad topic, so I'll narrow it down a bit to the two particular genres that have puzzled me lately.
Fairy tales and science fiction are genre-benders. That's right. On their grounds romance, action, mystery and philosophical tracts play out. When we read these types of stories, we see humans (and often non-humans) falling in love, battling, solving puzzles, and generally ducking behind reality's limitations to test the important immaterial stuff.
But fairy tales typically rely on magic and spells, sunshine and shadows. Mysterious powers stay near the surface of the action. The dichotomy between light and dark is often so strong that the heroes and villains could be anyone, really, except that good and evil depends on what type of power a character has chosen. And the characters usually stay in their category, accordingly becoming more good or more evil. In traditional tales, moral good wins out over moral evil. In new-age works set on a fantastical frame, the protagonist can be an antihero, which Merriam-Webster defines as a main character who lacks traditional heroic virtues, yet -- it is implied -- is nevertheless a hero. The last Hollywood take of the Sleeping Beauty story focused on an antihero Angelina Jolie in the title role.
Science fiction tells stories about the future or an alternate present. It relies less on nature and more on robotics, computers, and travels to/on/about/around various planets. However, alien energies and technologies are also common features. Sci-fi seems to love giving long explanations of how and why, or hinting that there's more to know. Scott Westerfeld's Uglies series and Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy are examples of the fascination with science and technology driving authors within the past fifty years. Before that, sci-fi was pretty much Jules Verne's kingdom.
Forces out of our control play out in these genres. Is it scary? Yes. Maybe it's the books I'm reading, but evil witches and magicians seem to be getting stronger. They take longer to die, anyway -- several books. Wired even posted about some of the concerns about the recent trends in science fiction, specifically. I was even asking myself: "Are there any sci-fi stories that aren't dystopian?"
And then Leonard Nimoy died. I watched a memorial episode of "Star Trek"; I read the article from Wired and was reminded of the joy of discovering nature in a journey spanning twenty-thousand leagues under the sea. I ran my fingers over the spines of books I had grown up with, books in which good always triumphs.
Of course I'm not a child anymore. Nature is also a terrifying force. Technology increasingly becomes a necessity for anyone trying to get or keep a job. We race to keep up with the material things, the urgent, our hungers. Writers are writing in patterns they intuit from their experience. They pretty much have the same experiences as other people do -- they just notice and write about it. They document the patterns.
But we can choose what to do. Our choices are both easy and difficult, but they are a type of freedom. We also learn from what our choices bring. So we can choose how we learn.
A writer can also choose what kind of an influence they will be, like the characters in the old fairy tales. In a world becoming increasingly ambiguous, giving into "fifty shades" and bowing to subjective morals I, as a writer, have the power to tell the stories of the future how I see them, about changing nature, about progress in technology, but most of all about those intangibles that are most important: faith, hope, and agape love.
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