You can’t truly call yourself a nerd unless you’re into sci-fi, and I certainly am, and was from a very early age. I can’t quite recall what first piqued my interest, though I would probably have to point to the re-runs of shows like
Star Trek and
Doctor Who on telly, as well as the far-ahead-of-its-time comic
2000 AD as influences. The whole idea of faraway worlds, alien beings, adventurers boldly going where not very many had gone before always appealed to me. Planets with strange names, sleek and deadly spaceships, futuristic settings and sexy alien girls (the latter of which I would have become more interested in as I grew a little older), to say nothing of a small interest in actual science and astronomy, all helped to push me towards that particular genre.
And then, perhaps inevitably, I got into fantasy fiction. I’m fairly sure my first experience of this was the grand-daddy of them all, that classic
The Lord of the Rings, but it may have been slightly pre-empted by one of Michael Moorcock’s books,
Stormbringer. If not, I read the two of them very close to one another. It was probably a good time to be, or getting into, science-fiction, as the seventies (which was when I grew up) was a time when sci-fi was finally beginning to break out of the restricted audience it had been forced into by adults (strictly for kids) with the likes of
Flash Gordon and later
Lost in Space, as shows like
Star Trek, The Tomorrow People, Planet of the Apes, Logan’s Run and of course
Dr. Who all showed that science-fiction could be enjoyed by adults.
Yeah, that’s nowhere near true. Most of them were still considered kid’s shows, and few if any were watched by adults.
Star Trek was the one to break the mould, attracting not only adult viewers but educated ones - scientists, philosophers, lecturers and engineers among them - who watched the show and then praised it for its realism, its attention to detail, its tackling of real-world issues. Certainly,
Star Trek was, if not the first sci-fi show aimed at an adult audience, the first really successful one. Anthology shows like
The Twilight Zone and
The Outer Limits had of course interested people of all ages, some of the stories better than others, and whole families might sit down to watch either show, but while these shows did tend to present moral arguments through their stories (one off-the-cuff example being the superb “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” episode of
The Twilight Zone, which not only highlighted the paranoia about communism in America at the time, but also showed how we are all just one step away from reverting to barbarians and turning on each other) they didn’t quite build up the sort of fanatic following that
Star Trek did, leading to campaigns for it to be reinstated when it was cancelled after three seasons.
But sci-fi is not just on the screen, large or small. Now a multi-billion dollar industry, it began of course with the written word and then progressed with the invention of the wireless to the radio waves, in time making its way onto the silver screen and thence to televisions and into the homes of millions of people, accepted by the masses to the point now where science fiction films can be blockbusters just the same as an action, drama or comedy. Sci-fi did not come of age in the twenty-first century, but it’s certainly well established now, and few would regard it any longer as being “just for kids.”
Much of this change in attitude is owed to huge movies such as the original
Star Wars (now called
A New Hope, but I’ll always know it as Star Wars, and god help anyone who calls it
Star Wars I!) and, close on its heels, the more “mature” and earth-bound
Close Encounters of the Third Kind. As movies like these broke all box-office records it was clear that science fiction as a genre was something people wanted, and not just the kids. Though completely different, the two films mentioned above do hold one common characteristic, prevalent in just about any sci-fi movie or series: they take us away, out of ourselves, away from the everyday and the mundane, to worlds that we can only dream of, that may exist, now or in the future, and where the problems we face in our humdrum lives either don’t matter, are tackled with new insights, or have been eliminated in a perfect society.
It’s escapism, and one thing people share is a love of being able to escape the cares and worries of their lives, whether it’s losing themselves in a book, filing into a cinema to watch the latest movie or just vegging out in front of the TV. And nothing helps one escape more than science fiction.
Though sci-fi does demand a small amount of thought or logic on the part of the reader, viewer or listener, fantasy, on the other hand, really doesn’t. The clue is in the name: in science fiction everything has to be rooted, at least in part, in workable science. So writers have to work to assure and show us that what they propose could work - doesn’t
have to work, but it could. Ships can’t generally just fly through space powered by love, for example, and if a planet’s atmosphere is not breathable by humans, then taking off one’s helmet is going to result in a nasty experience. Weapons need to follow the laws of physics, as do most things, unless you’re going through a black hole, in which case all bets are off. Even so, black holes are said to obey certain characteristics of gravity, and must be seen to do so in any story involving them.
Fantasy doesn’t suffer from this restriction. In fantasy, literally anything can happen, and there’s no need for explanations. Logic does not have to apply. Science is usually either completely absent or replaced by one, ahem, magic word, which makes everything in fantasy work: magic. Magic can do everything. It can lift whole cities into the sky without any need to explain how it’s done. It can allow people to live to hundreds of years, ignoring logic and the physiology of man. It can let someone read your thoughts, grow to giant proportions or become a midget, turn objects into people and people into objects, or have the sky be purple or green, just because it is. Fantasy fiction demands the most strenuous suspension of disbelief; anything you can imagine can happen, and you can’t question it. As Lucy Lawless once said on
The Simpsons, whenever that happens, a wizard did it. It’s the oldest and most overused get-out-of-jail-free card in the business, and it always works.
So it stands to reason that fantasy as a genre came first, before such a thing as science, never mind science fiction, was even thought of. It’s so much easier to write a story when you can just say what you want and your audience or readership will accept that on blind faith, believing you know more about it than they do. Pegasus flies? How? What is the science behind - oh yeah. Right. It’s fantasy. Odysseus meets a Cyclops? How can - oh yeah. Right. Well then, where do these orcs come fr - right.
Some fantasy writers, to be fair, do go and have gone to quite some lengths to explain how things occur in their worlds; some refuse to just go for the “a wizard did it” idea, though many do. Some have even merged science with their fantasy worlds - this is usually, though not always, known as science fantasy - and in the likes of steampunk and other speculative fiction, it’s the past, not the future, that’s the setting for the stories. But more of that as we go on. Right now I guess all we can say is that both science-fiction and fantasy are branches of speculative fiction, though always referred to as one or the other. There are, of course, many sub-genres of each, and we’ll be looking at these in due course.
What else will be looking at? Well, the famous timeline will run this journal, as it does most of my history ones, but as in many of them I’ll be veering away from it regularly to check out authors, works, worlds, concepts, movies and TV shows, comic books, anything that takes my fancy and that fits in with either of the two genres. On the timeline, I’ll be looking at the origins of both genres and their development across the centuries - in some cases even longer back - and how each has changed, adapted and managed to keep itself relevant in a world where more and more bright things are sparkling and attracting the short-term attention of this motley collection of atoms we call the human race. We’ll see how sci-fi movies have, in the main, moved away from the deeper, often darker themes favoured by fifties, sixties and seventies examples, where such movies were called cerebral and were pretty much only for the hardcore fan, into a more acceptable, widespread and mainstream area where action, romance and drama - and sometimes even horror - often take precedence over the science, if not the fiction.
Humour, too, seldom in any of the earlier movies or books, has made inroads into sci-fi and fantasy, creating in the case of the latter a new sub-genre - comic fantasy or humorous fantasy - and allowing both genres to stop always taking themselves too seriously, thus opening themselves up to a wider audience. Increased amounts of sex and violence is what the public seem to want, and sci-fi movies and TV shows oblige, constrained as any other media is to provide what is demanded by its audience. Fantasy, to a slightly less degree, though the paintings of Boris Vallejo would suggest otherwise! Fantasy has more embraced the humour aspect than the sexual one, which is not to say both are not in evidence, but as much fantasy is aimed still predominantly at a younger audience -
Buffy, Supernatural, Charmed etc - the sex aspect is not only played down, but really usually not really welcome. An exception of course is the obvious, and
Game of Thrones made its name on the visceral, brutal violence it brought to the small screen, as well as the - mostly gratuitous and in most cases unnecessary - sex. But both sell, and
Game of Thrones pushed both hard, making it one of HBO’s biggest ever moneymakers.
Question: will I be covering horror in this journal? Answer: some. By its very nature, horror can be fantasy. It isn’t always, of course: the stories of Stephen King, Dean Koontz or Peter Straub aren’t always set in a futuristic or fantasy world, and more often than not are rooted in the real world, our world. This isn’t surprising: horror works best when it seems almost normal, everyday, when the guy standing behind us in the supermarket queue could be planning a grisly murder, or be able to see what we’re thinking, or the woman driving the bus is being told by voices in her head to crash it and kill everyone. Fantasy is fantasy, and while we might enjoy it, we don’t believe it can happen. No elves or goblins are going to accost us on the way to Waitrose, no dragon is going to swoop down from the sky over Manchester, and no mysterious bearded old man with a hint of danger about him is going to knock on our door in the dead of the night. These things don’t, generally, happen.
But much of what is written in horror can, or could. We can believe these stories because they
seem real, they
seem possible. That sort of horror I will be avoiding, as it has nothing really to do with science fiction or fantasy, and while it is indeed a third branch of that parent, speculative fiction, it doesn’t really concern us here. But horror crosses over into fantasy a lot - stories about vampires, werewolves, fairies, supernatural beings, or stories set in fantasy lands or times - and also occasionally, though not quite as much, into science-fiction. The movie
Event Horizon is a good example of this: is it a horror science-fiction film or a science-fiction horror film? It’s probably both, and the likes of that will certainly be covered, as will
The Raven, which takes as its subject matter the idea of Edgar Allen Poe being accused of murder.
So anywhere that the lines between horror and fantasy - or, less frequently as I said, sci-fi - blur, those examples will be covered. But in the main we’re exploring fantasy and science-fiction here, and this will be the focus of my efforts.