In which Chaz is vexed. Again.

[desperance]

Hmmph. The new Interzone has an interview with Christopher Priest, which I read straight off, having so much enjoyed the movie of "The Prestige". And he said, on the essential difference between SF and fantasy:

SF is in the end about human responsibility: actions lead to consequences, and the fiction describes, discusses and evaluates those consequences. Those actions can be couched in reality, or they can be speculative in nature. Thus it is a moral fiction, and the highest forms of it can be accepted as literature. Fantasy is the opposite: it is about the intrusion of irrational and uncontrollable events, over which man has no control, or only nominal control. Once fantasy attempts to grapple with reality it ceases to be fantasy, so the generalisation holds.

So what are we to take from this: that fantasy is not a moral fiction, because it does not address human responsibility? Actions do not lead to consequences, in even the highest forms of the genre? 'Scuse me, but both parts of that seem to me to be large and pendulous bollocks, only waiting for the snip.

Also, that last sentence is a weasel. It's the squids-in-space argument: "I do not write [genre of your choice], because it is without merit; where it has merit - or indeed where I write it - then it is not [genre of your choice]."

Bah, I say. Also, humbug.

Snip.

Comments

[fjm.livejournal.com]

This is the man who declared for a decade that he didn't write sf and then got miffed when he was omitted from the CUP book.

It's nonsense. Quite a lot of fantasy is precisely about control of the irrational or the creation of rational paradigms for the fantastical.

Mendlesohn's corollary to Clarke's third law: "An sufficiently immersive fantasy is indistinguishable from science fiction."

[(Anonymous)]

As I recall it, Chris was more amused than "miffed" by the cock-up at Cambridge.

Jose

[fjm.livejournal.com]

It wasn't a cock up. He is the only omission that will be corrected, but I again point out that having spent a lot of time insisting he wasn't an sf author, he can't complain if the authors and editors took him at his word.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Oh, and as I was the one he was "miffed" to, I stand by my description.

[(Anonymous)]

He didn't complain. He found it funny.

Jose