Keeping Fantasy Fresh – The Sands of Time

You can read Part One of this series here.

As long as the genres have been divided, fantasy has always stood in opposition to science fiction. A sweeping glance across the bookshelves will show knights in shining armour beside space marines in power armour. This brings to life one of the most primordial conceptions of this divide: the temporal situation that each genre represents. In other words, science fiction looks to the future, whereas fantasy looks to the past.

This, of course, is totally wrong. Fantasy can extend its tendrils into the distant future: the Spelljammer Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting imagined a universe where adventurers sailed through space on starships powered by wizardry. Conversely, Robert J. Sawyer won the Hugo Award for Hominids, a science fiction story that bases itself on the archaeological past, and wrote an entire series (The Quintaglio Ascension) about sentient dinosaurs. Obviously, we can’t divide the genres – or figure out what keeps fantasy fresh and exciting – by arbitrarily splitting time periods.

Indeed, there are many fantasies that depict highly evolved, “modern” societies that still use magic in one form or another. China Miéville’s Bas-Lag universe has “biothaumaturges,” the terrors of industrial revolution that “remake” men and women in the shapes that suit their function as workers, by mixing magic with pistons, pumps and wheels. On the other hand, urban fantasy – from the loved and loathed Twilight to Catherynne Valente’s Palimpsest – brings magic into our everyday, contemporary worlds. Nowhere – or no time, rather – is safe from fantasy.

But it still seems like the vast majority of fantasy falls into the “medieval” or “renaissance” time periods. When you say “fantasy” to someone who doesn’t actively involve themselves in the genre, they’ll be thinking about swords and sorcery, not cannons and curses; and definitely not F-18s and fire elementals. Fantasy – even the more “modern” kind – is dominated by anachronistic institutions and beliefs: powerful and consolidated despotisms; geographical empires; active and expansive theistic pantheons. Some readers might roll their eyes and argue that these institutions aren’t anachronistic at all, but endemic even today. If they are, they have none of the overtness – and none of the glory – that fantasy bestows on them.

Possibly the greatest counterpoint to the “medieval” fallacy in the fantasy genre is the advent of steampunk. Steampunk is possibly the only legitimately new genre to appear in decades: “cyberpunk,” “urban fantasy,” and the “new weird” are all easily slipped back under the F&SF mantle, whereas steampunk defies re-assimilation because it is truly a “science fantasy.” And yet steampunk is much closer kin to fantasy than science fiction: just like how fantasy worldbuilding relies on magic, the technological basis for steampunk worldbuilding – steam, and sometimes clockwork – is just not something in which you would ever actually believe. Neither steampunk nor fantasy tell you what might be, only what could or could’ve been. As opposed to science fiction, these genres stand outside of the “real” timeline.

It is not time, therefore, that defines fantasy, because as a genre it is beyond time. And yet it still stands in opposition to science fiction, because fantasy is the fiction of the impossible. It is the fiction of magic; it is a world where readers can encounter, not “probable futures” or “speculative scenarios,” but rather, anything the writer dreams – whether they dream in the past, present, or future.

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