GRR Martin said....
"And for that matter, my favorite science fiction film of all time is not 2001: A Space Odyssey or Alien, or Star Wars, or Bladerunner, or (ugh) The Matrix, but rather Forbidden Planet, better known to us cognoscenti as The Tempest on Altair-4, and starring Leslie Nielsen, Anne Francis, Walter Pidgeon, and Bat Durston.
But how could this be? How could critics and theatre-goers and Shakespeareans possibly applaud these Bat Durston productions, ripp’d untimely as they are from their natural and proper settings?
The answer is simple. Motor cars or horses, tricorns or togas, ray-guns or six-shooters, none of it matters, so long as the people remain. Sometimes we get so busy drawing boundaries and making labels that we lose track of that truth.
Casablanca put it most succinctly. ‘It’s still the same old story, a fight for love and glory, a case of do or die.’
William Faulkner said much the same thing while accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, when he spoke of ‘the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.’ The ‘human heart in conflict with itself,’ Faulkner said, ‘alone can make good writing, because only that is worth writing about.’
We can make up all the definitions of science fiction and fantasy and horror that we want. We can draw our boundaries and make our labels, but in the end it’s still the same old story, the one about the human heart in conflict with itself.
The rest, my friends, is furniture.
The House of Fantasy is built of stone and wood and furnished in High Medieval. Its people travel by horse and galley, fight with sword and spell and battleaxe, communicate by palantir or raven, and break bread with elves and dragons.
The House of Science Fiction is built of duralloy and plastic and furnished in Faux Future. Its people travel by starship and aircar, fight with nukes and tailored germs, communicate by ansible and laser, and break protein bars with aliens.
The House of Horror is built of bone and cobwebs and furnished in Ghastly Gothick. Its people travel only by night, fight with anything that will kill messily, communicate in screams and shrieks and gibbers, and sip blood with vampires and werewolves.
The Furniture Rule, I call it.
Forget the definitions. Furniture Rules.
Ask Phyllis Eisenstein, who has written a series of fine stories about a minstrel named Alaric, traveling through a medieval realm she never names.. . but if you corner her at a con she may whisper the name of this far kingdom. ‘Germany.’ The only fantastic element in the Alaric stories is teleportation, a psi ability generally classed as a trope of SF. Ah, but Alaric carries a lute, and sleeps in castles, and around him are lords with swords, so ninety-nine readers out of every hundred, and most publishers as well, see the scries as fantasy. The Furniture Rules.
Ask Walter Jon Williams. In Metropolitan and City on Fire he gives us a secondary world as fully imagined as Tolkien’s Middle Earth, a world powered entirely by magic, which Walter calls ‘plasm.’ But because the world is a single huge decaying city, rife with corrupt politics and racial tensions, and the plasm is piped and metered by the plasm authority, and the sorcerers live in high rises instead of castles, critics and reviewers and readers alike keep calling the books science fiction. The Furniture Rules.
Peter Nicholls writes, ‘... SF and fantasy, if genres at all, are impure genres . . . their fruit may be SF, but the roots are fantasy, and the flowers and leaves perhaps something else again.’ If anything, Nicholls does not go far enough, for westerns and mysteries and romances and historicals and all the rest are impure as well. What we really have, when we get right down to the nitty gritty, are stories. Just stories.
Fantasy? Science fiction? Horror?
I say it’s a story, and I say the hell with it.
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