Many attempts to define science fiction miss the point by latching onto something much too concrete as the core defining principle. This approach leads to unproductive debates about the difference between science fiction and fantasy, because it overlooks a unity of purpose that transcends both variations of the genre.

Take, for example, the idea that science fiction must proceed from a plausible extrapolation of known science: the favored definition of the optimistic, golden age of science fiction. This idea is rooted in a period, following World War II, when science was both feared for the evidence of its destructive power and worshipped as the means to solve mankind?s ills. One way or the other, it was mightily empowering, and we hadn?t figured out, yet, that greater power was only going to bump the problems intrinsic to human nature up a level in terms of impact, not smooth out the challenges.

The current popularity of fantasy over science fiction, often raised by panelists at cons, is a by-product of our collective disillusionment.

Todorov defined the literature of the fantastic in an equally narrow way, in the 1970s, when he identified the key element as a state of ambiguity with regard to whether or not the supernatural accounts for events, or they can be explained in naturalistic terms. This definition, while useful as a tool for analysis, is likewise much too narrow to be useful in getting at what it is that causes science fiction and fantasy to occupy the same intellectual terrain so frequently, despite attempts to draw boundaries between them.

Science Fiction and fantasy, taken as one genre, is the literature that conjectures about ?what if? questions, and uses the outcome as a thought experiment in which human nature is the test subject. When fantasy asks: ?What if individuals had magic powers?, it often reaches the same conclusions or explores the same issues that hard science fiction does when it substitutes: ?What if science empowered us to something we cannot do now.?

Looked at from the ?What if? perspective, the difference between science fiction and fantasy is merely instrumental: some authors use science to construct their ?what if? scenarios and some prefer magic or the supernatural. This approach does not prevent someone from finding one or the other choice of instrument more meaningful. But it does have the virtue of stressing that what really matters, in both cases, is how characters behave.

Bibliography

• 
  John W. Campbell, Jr. Introduction, Analog 6, Garden City, New York, 1966.


• 
  Todorov 1973 : Todorov, T., The fantastic; a structural approach to a literary genre, (translated from the French by Richard Howard). Cleveland, Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1973.