Abstract, Acknowledgements and Contents

1. Introduction

I have always been aware that something very significant can be gained from human engagement with fiction. Undoubtedly there is good and bad fiction, as there is good and bad in every artistic field. We all have our preferences – in fiction between genres such as Adventure, Crime and Mystery, Fantasy, Horror, Human Relations, Historical Fiction, Romance and Science Fiction. Unavoidably, where there is fiction, there is literary criticism. In his article “It’s Only A Paper Moon: Fantasy and the Professors”, Frank McConnell points out the curious culture of the literary criticism with which we engage. He makes explicit the incongruous fact that ‘we congratulate ourselves on what we do not like more strenuously than we prize what we appreciate’. This culture of taking pride in devaluing work we do not like, of devoting time to negative criticism rather than to explicating the positive elements of work we appreciate, is a culture that has had severe effects not only on particular pieces of fiction but also on whole genres. My concern lies with the genres of Science Fiction and Fantasy, which reside in a marginalized position within the literary field. In recent years, after learning more about the Philosophy of Literature and looking into the reasons for our supposing literature (and fiction in general) to hold some necessary significance for our lives, the fact that some genres are held in both public and academic esteem to be somehow ‘lesser’ began to puzzle me. What is it about Science Fiction and Fantasy that disallows their being held in high esteem? Perhaps there is a sociological reason: maybe readers of Science Fiction or Fantasy gain from their reading some identifiable character traits which make them less successful or effective in their everyday lives? Or perhaps there is something about these genres that does not conform to the most well-established theories about what good fiction is or should be?

Our exploration will begin by presenting some of the most well-established theories of the value of literature. We will then go on to attempt to loosely define the parameters of both Science Fiction and Fantasy as literary genres, before looking in greater detail at the arguments (and, surprisingly, the lack of arguments) waged against them. Once we have established the main arguments against each we will be able to go on to decide whether the arguments, against whole genres, are strong enough to deny individual works of Science Fiction or Fantasy the status usually accorded to great works of fiction in other genres.

2. The Value of Literature

Philosophers as early as Aristotle proposed arguments for the value of literature . What Aristotle said was:

[T]he poet’s[ ] function is to describe, not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen, i.e. what is possible as being probable or necessary. The distinction […] consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophical and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

[T]he novelist must decline the favours of gods from machines; his plot must work itself out by means of the natural interaction of the characters, the plausible and inevitable sequence of cause and effect.

However, this narrow criterion for the novel was soon to dissolve with the emergence on the literary scene of Laurence Sterne, expressly concerned with the ‘possible’, and five years later Horace Walpole, predominantly concerned with the ‘miraculous’. In spite of these developments, some forty or so years later Georges-Louis Buffon was to encourage a shift back toward verisimilitude in fiction:

Buffon serves as the mirror reverse of Walpole’s attempt to free a space for fancy by hewing to strict probability of action, characters, and psychology within initially fantastic fictional premises. […] Fantasy opens space for circumstantial and psychological realism in Walpole’s novel – the space within which he develops techniques for the first sustained third-person (impartial) narration of consciousness in English. ‘Fact’ opens a space for speculative thought-experiment in Buffon’s Natural History.

Perhaps the most well-known modern theory of the value of literature comes from Martha Nussbaum, who argues that good literature is morally improving. In Poetic Justice, she maintains that literature and the literary imagination can aid us greatly in our lives, from individual morality through to state governed issues of justice. She explains that a work of literature can typically invite its readers to ‘put themselves in the place of people of many different kinds and take on their experiences’. What Nussbaum is advocating here is something slightly different to Aristotle. Instead of gaining valuable insight into situations of the kind we might one day find ourselves in (and therefore being enabled to enter those situations better equipped), we are gaining insight into new situations in order to build on our empathy for others. We understand what it would be like to be somebody else, we are taking part in John Rawls’ ‘putting ourselves into other people’s shoes’. This is a recurring theme throughout Poetic Justice; our literary imagination, ‘informed and tethered’ by technical mastery of social law, is necessary for our being empathetic creatures and avoiding the kind of cold calculating ethic imagined toward the end of Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness, where qualitative analysis overrules the problematic nature of today’s morality. In Poetic Justice she argues that the foundations for building moral knowledge are present in every person:

What we see in […] human refusals is not a defect in the type of ‘fancy’ I shall be defending here, but a defect in human beings who do not exercise that type of fancy well, who cultivate their human sympathies unequally and narrowly.

As humans, we have a predisposition to this kind of ability to sympathize, but we must cultivate it. Nussbaum supposes literature to be morally improving in that it allows us to build upon our empathy for others. We must ask whether it is possible that Science Fiction or Fantasy work against this supposition, denying us insight into another life, disallowing an improvement in our morality through an increase in empathy.

Even at this early stage, we should make a concession to Science Fiction and Fantasy in acknowledging that much of the literature advocated by Aristotle and Nussbaum in their respective theories has content that is largely fantastical. Just consider the content of much of the work of the writers of Ancient Greece - giants, centaurs, gods and non-human intelligences etc. - some of which (Aristophanes, Homer, for instance) is still held to be some of the best literature of all time.

A final theorist of interest is Richard Posner. He often sets himself against Nussbaum, in that he considers many of her views about the ‘morally redemptive’ value of literature to be somewhat overblown. Posner investigates the relation of literature to law. He correlates literature and judicial opinion by showing that they are both intended to make the reader believe (as opposed to just enjoy) the writer. It is worth quoting him at length:

When science was not very advanced there were poets of science, such as Democritus, Lucretius, the metaphysical poets, and Erasmus Darwin - a point both consistent with the fact that poetry and other forms of literature usually deal with subjects not yet annexed by mathematics and science, and suggestive of an informing as well as an emotive function for literature. We can still learn something about ambition from Macbeth, about justice, revenge, maturity, conflict and individualism from the works discussed in Part 1 of this book,[ ] about social class from the Victorian novelists, about religion from Dante, Milton and Dostoevsky, about terrorism from The Possessed, about despair from the early poetry of T.S Eliot, and about guilt and obsession from Kafka. […] The creative writer can hold his own with the sociologist, the anthropologist, the political – or the legal – philosopher, the historian, and the psychologist, in broad areas of their fields. […] Thus I disagree with the idea that literature is concerned not with knowledge or belief but only with emotion. […] Creating emotion is an important thing that literature does, but it also persuades, though obliquely.

The cognitive, informing, or persuading part of literature operates by presenting the reader with a dramatic scene that stirs imagination and emotion and leaves a residue of insight (into love, ambition, revenge, the human condition, or whatever).

It is worth noting just briefly here that in presenting these particular theories of the value of literature I am taking something of a ‘standard line’. There are other qualities which we can value in literature, some of which we will begin to uncover and discuss in more detail as this paper progresses.

3. Defining the Genres

Some people think there is very little difference between Science Fiction and Fantasy. One such person is Albert Wenland, author of Science, Myth, and the Fictional Creation of Alien Worlds, who says that ‘Science Fiction is Fantasy posing as realism because of an apparently scientific frame’. Carl Malmgren comments on Wendland’s definition that it ‘ignores a wide spectrum of critical consensus’, critical consensus which says that Fantasy ‘intentionally violates or contradicts the conventional norms of possibility’ while Science Fiction ‘adheres to them’. Let us look first at an approximate definition of Science Fiction.

3.1. Science Fiction

Science Fiction is a form of speculative fiction, which deals primarily with the impact of imagined science and technology upon both whole societies and individual persons. There are, of course, many variables of this within the context of imaginative fiction, such as: the effect of imagined science, the imagined effect of actual science, imagined technology based on actual science, imagined technology based upon imagined science, the effect of science and/or technology upon imagined societies, the effect of science and/or technology upon imagined individuals, etc. Above all, ‘Science Fiction always has been concerned with the great hopes people place in science, but also with their fears concerning the negative side of technological development’. Usually, science is used as the demarcation point to differentiate between Science Fiction and Fantasy, but:

It can also be argued that Science Fiction is simply a modern form of fantasy, which developed alongside of the rise of science and technology as driving factors in modern society. In this view, the elements that would previously have been presented as Fantasy (magic, transformations, divination, mind-reading, fabulous beasts, new civilizations, higher beings, etc.) are rationalized or supported through scientific or quasi-scientific rationales (psychic abilities such as telekinesis and precognition, aliens and their civilizations etc.).

In an article called “On Science Fiction”, C.S. Lewis defines six different sub-species of Science Fiction, which are ‘Displaced Persons’, ‘Engineers’, ‘Thought Experiment’, ‘Eschatological’, ‘Imaginative Impulse’, and ‘Marvellous’.

‘Displaced Persons’ is the most trivial kind, identified by an unnecessary ‘leap into the future’, where the author proceeds to use this impressive backcloth to tell an ordinary story. Lewis argues that such a leap is only necessary if the story cannot be told economically in any other way. Robert Silverberg’s Lord Valentine’s Castle is one example of ‘Displaced Persons’ Science Fiction, while Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four are two examples of the leap into the future being necessary. These latter works are satiric or prophetic: ‘the author criticizes tendencies in the present by imagining them carried out […] to their logical limit’.

‘Engineers’ refers to a group of writers who regard space-travel or other technologies as real possibilities. Lewis states that their work is an imaginative guess as to how things might be done.

The third sub-species he identifies is the speculative, or ‘Thought-Experiment’. This differs from ‘Engineers’ in that the emphasis lies not in how the novel setting was arrived at but what it is like. He does, however, acknowledge that such a category is only of limited use: ‘It is only the first visit to the Moon or to Mars that is, for this purpose, any good […] it becomes difficult to suspend our disbelief in favour of subsequent stories. However good they were they would kill each other by becoming numerous’.

The ‘Eschatological’ sub-species ‘gives an imaginative vehicle to speculations about the ultimate destiny of our species’. Lewis thinks it healthy to entertain such speculations: ‘it is sobering and cathartic to remember, now and then, our collective smallness, our apparent isolation, the apparent indifference of nature, the slow biographical, geological, and astronomical processes which may, in the long run, make many of our hopes (possibly some of our fears) ridiculous.’ It is a sub-species which is sometimes less novelistic and more pseudo-historical. He provides an analogy of passengers on a ship involved in a heated conflict in the saloon, and likens Eschatological Science Fiction to taking a breather on deck. He says: ‘stories of the sort I am describing are like that visit to the deck. They cool us. […] Hence the uneasiness which they arouse in those who, for whatever reason, wish to keep us wholly imprisoned in the immediate conflict. That perhaps is why people are so ready with the charge of ‘escape’. I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, ‘What class of men would you expect to be the most preoccupied with, and most hostile to, the idea of escape?’ and gave the obvious answer: ‘jailers’.’ (Tolkien’s simple question will become of crucial importance when we come later to discuss the charge of ‘escapism’ against both Science Fiction and Fantasy).

Works in the category of ‘Imaginative Impulse’ take an impossibility as their starting postulate, and are as much concerned with science and technology as with myth and legend, ‘not only stories about space-travel but stories about gods, ghosts, ghouls, demons, fairies, monsters, etc.’ Of these, Lewis says ‘it is their wonder, or beauty, or suggestiveness that matter’. He points out that as we gain greater knowledge of our world we must to go further to find imaginative settings.

The last category is the ‘Marvellous’. These Lewis defines by their quality. He says that such stories are ‘actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience’. We should keep these distinctions in mind, as it will become quite evident that a lot of criticism directed toward Science Fiction seems to be actually directed toward just one of these sub-species, Displaced Persons, and that thus much of the criticism can be refuted by providing examples of the benefit to be gained through engagement with the other sub-species.

3.2. Fantasy

In contradistinction to Science Fiction, which usually exhibits an overwhelming concern with science and technology, Fantasy is primarily concerned with Nature and the natural. It is a broad category, but best defined by the fact of its going against the laws of nature or currently accepted general states of affairs occurring in this world:

The natural world has its laws, [which] themselves may suggest laws of other kinds, and man may, if he pleases, invent a little world of his own, with its own laws.

Modern Fantasy [provides] the natural venue for the self-coherent impossible tale, i.e. an internally coherent impossible world in which that tale is possible. Almost all post-Tolkien Fantasy inhabits this region.

The characters of Fantasy are often human or elevated humans such as sorceresses and sorcerers, witches and wizards, but amongst such characters we find also centaurs, druids, dragons, dwarves, elementals, elves, gnomes, gods, griffins, higher beings, hobbits, ogres, phoenixes, spirits, the supernatural, trolls, and a whole host of anthropomorphized creatures. (This list is nowhere near exhaustive). Fantasy literature seems to exhibit a kind of reductio approach to living, aligning the genre with the pastoral novel or play, with clothing, equipment and housing all rustic and basic, and a life lived close to the land. The genre shies away from technology in favour of magic, concerning itself with presenting and describing nature and the natural. Yet even this needs qualification, in that there is a certainamount of genre-blending in more modern Fantasy (Ann Rice, Laurel K. Hamilton, etc.) where a combination like Fantasy/Detective/Film Noir occurs. In these types of works, fantastical characters might live in a completely modern environment and utilize the technology available, as well as bringing skills or special abilities of their own to the mix. There are ‘pure Fantasy’ examples which both do and do not conform to this ‘resistance to technology’ definition. J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter series, set temporally somewhere near the present, is a good example of conforming to it (the magical community utilize little if any of the technology of the Muggle community). An example of an author who resists the definition is Neil Gaiman in Neverwhere, in which a social separation between magic and non-magic people occurs similar to that of the Rowling series, with the primary difference that the magic-folk do engage with the technology of the non-magic folk, to their own greater advantage. Resistance to technology in Fantasy seems less something essential to the genre and more a hangover from Tolkienesque genre conventions.

The essential element of the Fantasy novel is its world. In Raymond E. Feist’s Magician, the worlds of Midkemia and Kelewan are what invite and sustain our interest in the novel. And in many works of Fantasy there is some kind of quest, which almost every example culminates in an epic scale battle between good and evil in which good eventually triumphs.

There are, of course, works of fiction which resist easy categorization. One example is a writer like Larry Nivens, who provides a borderline case because while he deals with magic, an element typical to Fantasy, he does so in a scientific or lawful way. In this case, we might say that the content of the work is closer to Fantasy, while the method or form approaches Science Fiction.

4. The arguments

It seemed to me that the negative attitude toward both Science Fiction and Fantasy was a general one, and as such would have to have been articulated somewhere. So it became my intention to locate the arguments and consider their soundness. If the arguments were sound, I would have made a discovery to satisfy my own curiosity that would perhaps also be of interest to other people. If the arguments were not sound, then my role would be somewhat more important. In the latter case, I would need to consider whether the conclusion alone (that Science Fiction and Fantasy really are bad) was true. If it was, then the major work of this paper would be in finding out whether it was possible to reconstruct the arguments to make them sound; if it was not, then the major work would reside in seeing where the arguments went wrong, and perhaps constructing my own arguments in favour of both genres. I began my research, intent on locating the ‘opponents’ of the two genres.

There was a seemingly unlimited amount of ‘defense’ of Science Fiction and Fantasy around, published in various journals, in books, and scattered about the Internet. The bibliography of any discussion of Fantasy I came across would invariably include Tzvetan Todorov, Roland Barthes, and more recently Rosemary Jackson; while discussions of Science Fiction would refer to pioneering works by George Slusser and Eric Rabkin, Robert Scholes, and Brian Aldiss. Unfortunately, the discovery of these ‘big names’ behind literary theory in Science Fiction and Fantasy constituted no great advance in my research. All of these writers were already engaging with Science Fiction and Fantasy as literature; debate raged over the various critical approaches to the texts, not over whether they deserved (or did not) their place within the literary canon.

My concern was not to become entwined with literary criticism, but rather to look specifically for cases of writers, critics or public figures speaking out against either genre. This was to become an immediate problem, in that the most accessible critical material (apart from the work mentioned above) appeared to centre on answering the charge of the genres being considered less valuable than others. Although some such articles provided very good counter-objections to the attacks on the genres, none of the defenses actually mentioned who they were answering, and what the initial arguments were. Consider the following, appearing in a Contemporary Review article:

Eighty percent of science fiction may be rubbish, but this is little justification for ignoring the worthwhile twenty percent… It is, in fact, time that science fiction was released from the “novelty corner” and included in that class of writing known simply as “fiction” where it would receive the attention and respect that any serious and competent novel deserves.

I repeat Sturgeon’s Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of Science Fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of [it] is crud.

The Revelation: Ninety percent of everything is crud.

Corollary 1: The existence of immense quantities of trash in Science Fiction is admitted and it is regrettable; but it is no more unnatural that the existence of trash anywhere.

Corollary 2: The best Science Fiction is as good as the best fiction in any field.

In 1960, at the end of Science Fiction’s Golden Age, a student named Michael Padlipsky submitted a thesis on Science Fiction - considering whether it was more than just a ‘pulp’ genre - to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the first section of his thesis, he discussed some of the criticism he had been able to locate in his research. He mentioned a few critical articles that sounded promising, which I went on to read in an attempt to extract a few distinct and logically coherent arguments. I found three different critics whose articles went at least some length toward articulating valid reasons for the marginalization of the genre.

I also emailed Orson Scott Card – the Science Fiction author whose work was the original inspiration for this project, who apart from being a best-selling author holds a Masters degree in Literature and also writes a serious amount of literary criticism – and asked whether he knew of any key opponents of the genre. He replied with the following:

The problem is that the genre is not under published attack. The attack consists of dismissal and a sneer. Sci-fi is constantly abused orally in literature classes, and there are dismissive comments everywhere. But the only people who take the time to attack the genre are usually sci-fi writers who have decided they are now “above” the rest of us.

I don’t have exact references, but… Thomas Disch had one such attack in Harpers or Atlantic within the last ten years […] One estimation of the worthlessness of sci-fi in the eyes of the literati is the fact that sci-fi is invariable discussed as “popular culture” and almost never as “literature”…

In order to set about achieving this, I plan to do two things. The first is to read and consider the cases against Science Fiction put forward in the articles by J. B Priestley, Arthur Koestler and Thomas McDonnell (mentioned briefly in Padlipsky’s thesis), and Thomas Disch (recommended by Orson Scott Card). These are predominantly in the form of literary criticism and opinion pieces, rather than serious philosophical investigations. Thus I will extrapolate what arguments I am able to from the respective articles, before going on to synthesize these basic claims with some of my own speculations on plausible reasons for why Fantasy and Science Fiction might be marginalized in public and academic opinion. I will not provide any counter-objections to these arguments until a later section, whereupon I will discuss ways of destabilizing the arguments, and will show that in fact the various arguments against each of the two genres stem from two main objections, and thus can be collapsed into two central arguments.

4.1. Arguments against Science Fiction

4.1.1. Science Fiction as Scientistic

McDonnell and Priestley both attack Science Fiction on the grounds of its content, in two different ways. McDonnell writes from a theological position, accusing Science Fiction of promoting Scientism and being philosophical in nature. His objection is that Science Fiction is nothing more than a vehicle for pushing an agenda. Priestley charges Science Fiction with being escapist and, converse to McDonnell, finds it lacking in philosophical ideas. We will go on to look in greater detail at both these charges, beginning with McDonnell.

McDonnell, writing in Catholic World, differentiates Science Fiction from other literary genres by explaining that Science Fiction is the genre of ideas:

For the basic distinction of Science Fiction is a philosophical one. To a greater degree than any other type of fiction, it deals with ideas rather than with plot and/or character.

The proper place for philosophy as such is, of course, in books that specialize on the subject of philosophy.

Science Fiction indeed has opened new worlds to the imagination. Let the creations of that imagination spring from the minds of free men in the image of God. For much more than literature will be lost when men begin to write and think in the image of the Robot.

4.1.2. Science Fiction’s Focus on Externalization

Converse to the arguments put forward by McDonnell come the arguments put forward by J. B Priestley, which say, far from supposing Science Fiction to be a vehicle for philosophical ideas, that it in fact lacks philosophy, which is its downfall. In addition to this, Priestley charges the genre with being escapist. This latter charge aligns Priestley with an argument extrapolated from an article by Germaine Greer. But because the ‘escapist’ argument is perhaps the most fundamental attack, and equally applicable to both Science Fiction and Fantasy, we will leave it for the time being so as to be able to discuss it in greater detail when we come to arguments against Fantasy. Let us go on, then, to look at Priestley’s lack of philosophy claim.

One of the crucial lacks Priestley identifies in Science Fiction lies in its characterizations:

There they were, squinting at three suns or five moons, always the same glum and laconic technicians, all morons away from their instrument panels, illuminated dials, Double-Reverse-Boojum-Gravity-Feedback-Transformers. Never a poet, a philosopher, a scholar, a wit. Just this gang, so many redundant types from film and TV studios […] If they were all changed to termites, they would hardly notice the difference.

[…] No civilized men are wanted in the great age of space. No art, no philosophy, not wit and humour, no passion and tenderness. None of that silly old earth stuff!

I admit I am beginning to be suspicious of scientists themselves. I don’t like their social irresponsibility, their fanaticism, their hubris. I think too many of them, the physicists especially, have spent too much time in a spectral world abstracted from the real one in which we suffer and hope, live and die. […] They are too anxious to control life before they have discovered what life is about.

[…] We are now in such a hurry to press buttons and get somewhere, we no longer wonder who we are and what we are doing here.

Let us go then […] living if necessary without a button to press anywhere, exploring not empty space but the magical world within ourselves, not raising the speed of our missiles but the level of our understanding and feeling.

4.1.3. Science Fiction as Science, not Fiction

We come now to an argument waged against the genre by Arthur Koestler. In order to deny Science Fiction literary merit, he simply denies it the status of ‘art’. There is a strong base of support for his argument, not necessarily explicitly stated but able to be extrapolated from various articles, in particular one that uses the same argument to defend the genre. This comes from Hanor Webb, a Professor of Science Education. To allow the clearest understanding of the implications of an argument which denies Science Fiction the status of art, we will employ some theory from an article on aesthetics written by David Ward. This will occur in a later section, in which we discuss counter-objections to the arguments presented here.

Koestler sees Science Fiction as a product of the atomic age, a result of ‘new vistas and new nightmares which art and literature have not yet assimilated’. He thinks that humanity has some kind of apocalyptic intuition, which manifests itself in our ‘sudden hunger for other ages and other worlds’, the ‘sudden interest in life on other stars’. He points to Science Fiction’s accuracy and authenticity, which is a result of its employing physicists, doctors and biologists. But accuracy and authenticity is no guarantee for artistic quality, a point crystallized in the following statement:

I believe that science fiction is good entertainment, and that it will never become good art. It is reasonably certain that within the next hundred years we shall have space-travel, but at that stage the description of a trip to the moon will be simple reportage. It will be fact not fantasy, and the science fiction of that time will have to go even further to startle the reader. [My italics].

Our imagination is limited; we cannot project ourselves into the distant future any more than into the distant past. This is the reason why the historical novel is practically dead today.[ ] The life of an Egyptian civil servant under the Eighteenth Dynasty, or even of a soldier in Cromwell’s army, is only imaginable to us in a dim outline: we are unable to identify ourselves with the strange figure moving in a strange world. And without this identification or intimate understanding, there is no art – only a thrill of curiosity which soon yields to boredom. [My italics].

[F]or every culture is an island. It communicates with other islands but it is only familiar with itself. And art means seeing the familiar in a new light, seeing tragedy in the trivial event: it means in the last resort to broaden and deepen our understanding of ourselves.

Before we go on to discuss the support for this idea from another critic, we should just briefly consider one last point. For it is Koestler’s assertion that one ‘lesson’ does emerge from our engagement with Science Fiction, which is that humanity is made aware of its limitations:

The paradoxical lesson of science fiction is to teach us modesty. When we reach out for the stars, our limitations become grotesquely apparent. The heroes of science fiction have unlimited power and possibilities[ ], but their feelings and reactions in even the most fantastic situation are limited within the narrow human range. […] The Milky Way has become an extension of Main Street.

The title “Science Fiction Writers: Prophets of the Future” should be enough to give us a clear indication of the kind of defense (as opposed to attack) Hanor Webb provides. It is his belief that Science Fiction is prophetic:

No science fiction writer expects to live to see the day when his ideas will be accepted by society. He hopes, therefore, that the seedlings he plants in society’s ground will be nurtured by the next generation of writers and readers and, if his ideas grow and have vigor, by generation after generation until they bear fruit. Such has been the history of every established social principle, although centuries may have been required for a harvest to appear.

Patrick Parrinder, in Science Fiction: Its Criticism and Teaching, also argues for the more sociological interpretation, citing Alvin Toffler, who had said ‘S[cience] F[iction] is held in low regard as a branch of literature, and perhaps it deserves this critical contempt. But if we view it as a kind of sociology of the future, rather than as literature, [S]cience [F]iction has immense value as a mind-stretching force for the creation of the habit of anticipation’. Parrinder wants to argue that the critical contempt Science Fiction faces is not deserved, give that is a ‘mind-stretching force’ more than it is literature.

Webb and Parrinder provide enthusiastic defenses of the genre, but unfortunately in both cases the defense aligns itself with one of the attacks from the opposition. In claiming that Science Fiction is prophetic and that it describes the social impacts of science - two crucial elements ‘pegged’ upon a novel, imaginative, or fantastic setting - Webb, like Koestler, is reducing Science Fiction to its ‘use’. As is Parrinder, who does not even pretend to argue for it being literature. Koestler explicitly denies that Science Fiction is literature by asserting that it is mere entertainment, from which we cannot understand or learn anything about ourselves, and furthermore will probably in the future become fact. Webb denies that Science Fiction is literature by showing it to be merely a vehicle to present ideas for social change. As we will come to see (in Section 5.1), being able to reduce a work of fiction toonly its idea or argument has serious repercussions for the status of that work.

4.1.4. Compensation and Embarrassment

Orson Scott Card’s recommendation of trying to locate the Thomas Disch article paid off when I finally managed to track down “Big Ideas and Dead-End Thrills”, an attack on Science Fiction published in The Atlantic Monthly. In the article, Disch states that Science Fiction is best understood as a branch of children’s literature, for reasons of its various ‘embarrassments’. He has two main arguments, the first of which concerns what he calls the ‘impulse to compensate’, the second of which concerns ‘big ideas’.

Disch identifies a tendency in Science Fiction to ‘compensate’ for ignorance or inexperience using a kind of speculation. One of his examples is ‘suburban teenagers writ[ing] sad tales of the deaths of inner-city hookers’, which he attributes to ‘naiveté combine[d] with rashness’. He identifies this same impulse, which he later calls a ‘compensatory mechanism’, as manifesting itself in the fantasy of rags-to-riches, and ill-informed speculations of other social classes, lifestyles, genders and sexualities. Disch says that ‘the impulse to compensate for the indignities of poverty by fantasizing about the life-styles of the rich and famous is a universal trait’. He recognizes the compensatory mechanism in some of his own work, describing a story he wrote at age twenty-three as ‘a tragic romance of a sort that only young men of pristine inexperience and perfected amour proper[ ] have ever imagined’. Disch seems to view such attempts in the same vein as some of the more cringe-worthy events of youth: when we look back on them from the position of experience we are embarrassed by what we had imagined. If we take his idea through to its widest logical extension, we see that it comes to encompass a wider argument which calls Fantasy the literature of desire, or wish-fulfillment (being as it is primarily concerned with utopias and the triumph of good over evil) and calls Science-Fiction nothing more than a ‘thought-experiment’. The only difference between Disch’s claim and the latter arguments occurs in terms of magnitude. For in each case the writer comes from a position of ignorance or inexperience, using imagination, speculation and simulation to consider something of which he has no knowledge. The only difference is that in Disch’s example we can look back and cringe at our inexperience; but it will be some time before we will be able to cringe at how misinformed our projected future worlds might be. In any case, the compensatory mechanism may be ‘embarrassing’, but such a charge is not nearly enough to convince us that either Fantasy or Science Fiction deserve their lesser status. We will look soon in more detail at some of the theory surrounding Thought-Experiments, but we must first examine the second of Disch’s criticisms, which states that Science Fiction is preoccupied with ‘Big Ideas’.

The final and most excruciating callowness of youth is what SF readers particularly prize: Big Ideas. Now, there are some ideas that genuinely are big, which is to say, full of implication and repercussion. Copernicus’s remodeled universe is such an idea. […] There is nothing that so militates against the sense of one’s own vast ignorance as adopting some such Big Idea, and the young, whose ignorance is largest and rawest and most exasperating, have a natural predilection for Big Ideas. […] To a certain degree SF provides a natural playground for the harmless exercise of Big Ideas, even those that are radically unsound. Utopias that could never be implemented in the real world are fun to explore in simulation. […] However, not all writers approach Big Ideas in a spirit of intellectual playfulness. Some come to believe in their privileged wisdom and become intolerant of contradiction, and this can happen at various levels of sophistication. […] Ideological silliness is an affliction more tolerable in the young, and, for reasons I’ve tried to lay out, exactly the same may be said of a taste for science fiction. […] The genre as a whole […] has become, as a publishing phenomenon, one of the major symptoms of, if not a causal agent in, the dumbing-down of the younger generation and the lowering of the lowest common denominator.

4.2. The Argument against Fantasy

4.2.1. Fantasy as Escapism

As the search for opponents went on, I continued to read defenses of the two genres, in the hope that some of them at least would mention exactly what they were answering. I found several articles on J.R.R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings -probably the perennial example of a work of Fantasy and as such representative of the genre - which mentioned Germaine Greer as a key opponent. Each article quoted Greer’s “The Book of the Century”, an article she had written in response to a poll run by Waterstone Publishers. Finally, it seemed that an opponent had emerged from which I could extract a concrete argument against Fantasy. In her article Greer wrote:

[…] it has been my nightmare that Tolkien would turn out to be the most influential writer of the twentieth century. The bad dream has materialized. At the head of the list, in pride of place as the book of the century, stands The Lord of the Rings. Novels don’t come more fictional than that. Most novels are set in a recognizable place at a recognizable time; Tolkien invents the era, the place, and a race of fictitious beings to inhabit it. The books that come in Tolkien’s train are more or less what you would expect; flight from reality is their dominating characteristic.

[T]he late twentieth century reader has a penchant for any kind of fantasy, infantile, macabre, sadistic, pornographic, pseudoscientific, supernatural or tortuous.

I did not myself start prattling about hobbits because in 1964 I was simply too old to succumb to the prevailing enthusiasm for Tolkien. The books that shape us are the books that we read at a crucial period in our development, a period that usually, but not always, coincides with the early teens. […] If we were to ask respondents to tell us how old they were when they read their favourite books, there would be a strange uniformity in their answers. They might also say that they re-read these books often, as you might expect when the very atmosphere of the book recalls the most passionate and optimistic time of one’s life.

Let us return, then, to the arguments which J. B Priestley raised against Science Fiction. In these, he raises one of the most enduring and damaging arguments against both Science Fiction and Fantasy. This is the charge of escapism. Greer’s initial comments do make reference to the type of criticism escapism represents – her phrases ‘novels don’t come more fictional than that’, ‘flight from reality’ and ‘penchant for fantasy’; and her speaking disparagingly about Tolkien ‘inventing’ The Lord of The Rings’ era, place and inhabitants. Her comments privilege Realism as the desirable attribute of literature. If it is true that literature closest to reality is more valuable, which seems to be in line with an Aristotelian conception of the value of literature, then Greer’s criticism is justified. But if we can successfully show that there is value in the contra-real or quasi-real (which we will attempt to do) then the foundation of such criticism will be undermined.

Rather than contending (or seeming to contend, in Greer’s case) that all escapism is a bad thing, Priestley distinguishes at least two levels of escapism:

When I was in my teens and we looked to fiction to satisfy our secret desires, we found ourselves doing something jolly dashing in Ruritania or something even more dashing (though we were never sure about all the details) with an Elinor Glyn character on a tiger skin. An element of escape there, no doubt. But we were not running away from this planet altogether, leaving it in the lurch, only to spread our stupidity and violence as far as they could go. Glum hooliganism traveling at the speed of light was never one of our dreams. Even when we have made every allowance for the travel part of it – representing man’s proud delight in this new conquest of space – what remains looks and smells nasty, like a teenage gang in a basement planning to beat up somebody [My italics].

Priestley asserts that we can use fiction to ‘satisfy our secret desires’. He identifies such satisfaction as a kind of escapism, yet not to the degree of that which Science Fiction invites. Science Fiction he charges with ‘glum hooliganism travelling at the speed of light’, accusing its readers of ‘running away from this planet altogether’. So we can categorize the two levels of escapism as follows: lower-level escapism, which fulfils a human need; and higher-level escapism, which seems (at least according to Priestley), to represent something ‘nasty’. We are taking Priestley’s comments, aimed specifically at Science Fiction, and using them as a base from which to crystallise what seems most likely to be the main objection to Fantasy literature.

The analogue ‘flight from reality’ would seem to contend that any reader of Fantasy or Science Fiction is attempting to escape the real world. On one level we can imagine that the escape into Science Fiction or Fantasy literature actually deflects people from real life. This may be a good thing or a bad thing depending on the real life circumstances being escaped from. Where an individual is avoiding responsibility and refusing to meet challenges head on, we can understand that such escape is aiding the pathological response of distraction and avoidance, and as such cannot be viewed positively. Perhaps we might invoke the analogy of severe alcoholism, drug addiction, or psychological withdrawal. In many such cases, people withdraw from reality by choice, or because of an initial bad choice that leads to dependency and consequent disintegration of character. In such instances we blame the person for allowing their own disintegration, we blame their self-control for not avoiding such a decline in the first place. Such considerations as duty and personal responsibility come into play.

On another level, converse to the first, an individual may be escaping a real life which is stressful, dangerous, confusing, damaging. In this case, escapism certainly is not a bad thing. Consider the following passage from Wally Lamb’s novel I know This Much is True, based on the child psychology of Bruno Bettleheim:

“Do you have children, Dominick?”

We lost eye contact. The little girl in the yellow leotard flashed before me. “Nope.” “Well, if you did,” she said, “you would most likely read them not only Curious George but also

fables and fairy tales. Stories where humans outsmart witches, where giants and ogres are felled and good triumphs over evil. Your parents read them to you and your brother. Did they not?”

“My mother did,” I said.

“Of course she did. It is the way we teach our children to cope with a world too large and chaotic for them to comprehend. A world that seems, at times, too random. Too indifferent.”

Tolkien supports this notion that escapism does not have to be a bad thing in his The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, saying ‘the world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it’. He says that critics seem to confuse the ‘escape of the prisoner’ with the ‘flight of a deserter’. These are in fact two very different things, and it is on the supposition that they are the same that such criticism arises. We can align the ‘flight of a deserter’ with the first level of escapism we considered, and ‘escape of the prisoner’ with the second level. We can make the most use of this second example if we understand it to refer to someone wrongfully imprisoned. In this case we might admire or respect the individual for temporarily freeing themselves of their constraints.

There is a third level to the escapism argument, which applies to the escape proposed in the first two levels, and comes from considering one of our initial reasons for supposing literature valuable. Literature is valuable because it allows us to transcend our experience and further our knowledge of people and place and circumstances we might someday or might never encounter. It can teach us about universals rather than particulars. It can allow us to build upon our empathy for others and therefore increase our personal morality. But the literary genres of Science Fiction and Fantasy present circumstances which are in many cases highly romanticised and unrealistic. In such cases we are accessing a distorted perception of real life, which cannot hope to satisfy the requisites of valuable literature. In addition to this, works of Fantasy feature a particularly high occurrence of deus ex machina, of which there is no such occurrence in real life. (If the circumstances presented in the literature, and / or the characters having experiences in those circumstances differ too greatly from real life we stand to lose the ability to learn anything from them in terms of life experience, because we can never hope to experience anything similar). The emotion and empathy is of little use, being a product of circumstances we will never find ourselves in and characters we can never identify with. Even escapism which endorses distraction and avoidance can be justified on some level if the escape is into a world with similar problems and contingencies, because at least the reader stands to learn something from the way the characters of the fiction meet their own difficulties under similar conditions. But this last level of the escapism argument presents Science Fiction and Fantasy with a serious difficulty, as it illustrates a way in which both genres seem to fail to satisfy the conditions under which literature is held to be valuable.

4.3. Summary of arguments against Science Fiction

Before we go on to present and discuss counter-objections to the arguments of the previous sections, we should briefly summarise the arguments so that they are fresh in our minds. Science Fiction has been charged with being a vehicle used to promote the cult of Scientism, with being not art but future-fact, with being prophecy, with lacking in philosophical ideas and conversely with being overly preoccupied with them, with speaking with a false authority about ‘big ideas’, with being nothing more than a thought-experiment, with being escapist. In presenting the arguments in such condensed form, we are able to see what is similar to the majority of them, which is the fact that while the escapism argument supposes the genre unrealistic, most of the arguments in fact go in the opposite direction and suppose Science Fiction too realistic. This is to say that these critics (and defenders) argue that Science Fiction is just an arbitrary form in which a person might choose to present their political or sociological arguments or ideas. If this were true it would legitimize our reconceptualizing Science Fiction as a branch of social science, rather than a literary genre, an art form. I will (in Section 5.1) answer this criticism under the heading of ‘Science Fiction as Argument’.

4.4. Summary of the argument against Fantasy

Using comments made by Germaine Greer and Joseph Priestley as our foundation, we were able to construct one main argument against Fantasy literature, which was that it is escapist in nature. The argument of escapism has three levels, which show that the escape provided by Fantasy literature can be conceptualized in more than one way. These ways are the ‘escape of the prisoner’, the ‘flight of the deserter’, and the more fundamental issue of escape in either of these two cases being nonetheless an escape into an unrealistic world which cannot satisfy the conditions under which fictional worlds are usually supposed to be valuable under theories of the value of literature.

5. Counter-Objections and Defence

Although we will deal with each of the arguments presented in previous sections, we are primarily concerned with defending Science Fiction and Fantasy from the two arguments which have emerged as the most enduring and plausible reasons for supposing the genres deserving of their lesser status within the wider field of literature. These are the argument of the Thought-Experiment, and the argument of Escapism. Let us go on to discuss counter-objections to the arguments against Science Fiction, in the order in which they were presented in the previous sections.

5.1. Defending Science Fiction

We looked at about eight arguments against Science Fiction. Of these, four can be collapsed into the greater argument which sees the genre as reducible to certain non-literary (or not specifically literary) elements. These are the arguments that Science Fiction promotes the cult of Scientism (i.e. is a vehicle for an argument, namely the argument for privileging science over religion), that it is not art but future-fact (the narrative is being taken literally), that it is prophecy (as before), and that it is overly preoccupied with philosophical ideas (i.e. it is a vehicle for the presentation of philosophical ideas). These will be discussed under the heading of ‘Science Fiction as Argument’, the last charge to be discussed in this section. Before we move on to this discussion, however, we must consider the three arguments which do not fall under this heading. Of these remaining three arguments, the first is that the genre is lacking in philosophical ideas, and the second is that it claims a false authority on ‘big ideas’. These two arguments are almost polar opposites; regarding ‘ideas’, one is claiming a lack and one is claiming an over-concern. The final argument we will look at before discussing the main objection to Science Fiction is the charge of escapism. This is a charge discussed under the headings of both Science Fiction and Fantasy, for the reason that it must be answered in two quite separate ways. Let us go on to consider these arguments, and if and how they can be defeated.

5.1.1. But First, a Concession to the Critics

One curious phenomenon which my research uncovered is the fact that those critics and writers prepared to speak out against Science Fiction seemed all to do so circa 1950. There appears to have been nothing in the way of a formal published attack on Science Fiction or Fantasy since then, yet much of the attitude which caused and legitimized that initial criticism persists today. One concomitant of this discrepancy between published attack and public opinion is that we must be careful not to use examples of post-1950’s Science Fiction and / or Fantasy to refute arguments coming out of a 1950’s context, unless it can be reasonably established that those arguments would still stand in light of what work exists today.

Known as the Golden Age of Science Fiction, the (roughly) twenty year period between the forties and the sixties saw the Science Fiction genre gain a much wider public attention than it had previously held. The ‘big names’ were A.E van Vogt, Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov; but other names were to leave their mark: Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, L. Sprague de Camp, Philip K. Dick, Robert Silverberg, Clifford D. Simak, Theodore Sturgeon and Jack Vance. What I will do is try to be fair in terms of historical context in my defense of Science Fiction; some of the criticism leveled at Science Fiction does reflect some of the shortcomings of work from that period. But other of the criticisms I believe to be plainly misinformed, and it is these which will be our primary concern. I have been fortunate enough to stumble across an article entitled “Contemporary Science Fiction”, published in 1952, which provides a useful and informed scholarly commentary on the strengths and weaknesses of Golden Age Science Fiction. This should assist us in making more informed evaluations in the coming section.

5.1.2. A Narrow Reading?

J. B Priestley, remember, had argued against both the writers of Science Fiction and the characters within it. His issue was with the high level of abstraction from the real world: ‘no civilized men are wanted in the great age of space. No art, no philosophy, not wit and humour, no passion and tenderness. None of that silly old earth stuff!’ His main contention seemed to be that the degree of remove from this world apparent in Science Fiction constituted a move toward externalization rather than human internalization. It was his fear that such a change in focus from inner to outer yielded the depressing and dangerous fact that ‘we no longer wonder who we are and what we are doing here’. (The reason I summarize his argument as being that Science Fiction is lacking in philosophy is because this last statement concerns the biggest of the metaphysical questions with which the enterprise of philosophy is concerned).

The 1950’s saw a decline in interest in the realistic novel, which is precisely the kind of novel Priestley wrote. To examine ‘who we are’ right now and ‘what we are doing here’ right now might well be the central concern of the realistic novel – but to wonder what we might have been or might become is something which speculative fiction like Science Fiction and Fantasy can certainly achieve: what is it to be human, under any circumstances? What are we doing here, as opposed to somewhere else? And would anything change if we came to be somewhere else, or had found ourselves somewhere else to begin with? You can begin to see how speculative fiction and the more abstract concerns of philosophy and theology begin to merge.

Yet even in his arguing against this new genre of novel, Priestley provides a loophole, in that he calls for work which assists us in ‘raising the level of our understanding and feeling’. All that remains for his argument against the genre to be defeated is for us to provide examples of Science Fiction which clearly do raise the level of our understanding and feeling. There is evidence that at least one of the ‘big names’ of the fifties wrote Science Fiction that would refute Priestley’s charges. In his article “Contemporary Science Fiction”, August Derleth lends support to my refusal of Isaac Asimov’s work as ‘literature’, remarking that he has ‘a woefully pedestrian prose style’ . He also appears to support my intuition about Heinlein’s characterizations (I talk more about Asimov and Heinlein later in this section), saying that Heinlein is ‘appreciably less stylistically remarkable’. Derleth identifies Ray Bradbury, however, as one writer in whose work ‘stylistic quality and the development of character are first considerations’, a writer who is ‘the most literate and original of writers in the genre’, with exceptional ‘imaginative power’. After reading his article, I searched out four or five of Bradbury’s short stories, appearing in various Science Fiction collections and anthologies. It was a refreshing experience, with prose style and thematic concerns in league with Le Guin (especially her short stories Paradises Lost [2002] and Walking Away from Omelas [1973]), Scott Card (especially his series beginning with Ender’s Game [1986-2005]), and Terry Bisson (in particular his short story They’re Made Out of Meat? [1991]). One story, Mars is Heaven, is particularly good. The protagonists of the story are the crew of a spaceship recently landed on Mars. The crew find on Mars a landscape and houses the same as those of the small towns they grew up in, and they find their long-dead relatives alive and well. It is not until the conclusion of the story, when each of the crew members are safe in bed in the houses of their families, that one character begins to question the best defense by Martians of Earthman invasion, asking what the best weapons a Martian could use against an Earthman would be, given that Earthmen had atomic weapons. ‘The answer was interesting. Telepathy, hypnosis, memory and imagination’.

[H]ere we all are, tonight, in various houses, in various beds, with no weapons to protect us, and the rocket lies in the moonlight, empty. And wouldn’t it be horrible and terrifying to discover that all this was part of some great clever plan by the Martians to divide and conquer us, and kill us.

[…] His hands were shaking under the covers. His body was cold. Suddenly it was not a theory.

It is worth establishing two further considerations with regard to characterizations in Science Fiction. Oftentimes the nature of the typical Science Fiction story structure (the ‘slow revelation’ of an astonishing fact) necessitates an average protagonist. If the protagonist were too intellectually sophisticated, the story would be compromised. This fact often leads to the pairing of the story’s protagonist with a more intelligent companion (in Card’s Ender’s Game, Ender has Bean; in Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Harry has Hermione; in Hobb’s Assassin’s Apprentice Fitz has Burrich, Chade and The Fool. The list goes on.)

The second consideration stems from my personal observation that some of the worst characterizations I have ever encountered in fiction appear in Asimov’s I, Robot (in plasticity they are comparable to Dan Brown’s characterizations in The Da Vinci Code); and while the central character in Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land is constructed well enough to satisfy the reader, this only lasts until we read other of Heinlein’s work and find that exact same character appear again and again with a different name. Yet it seems fair to say that literary genres can be concerned with different things, and as such we cannot rule that to fail in characterization is to fail as a work of literature. It is my contention that characters may serve as ‘pegs to hang the story on’, so long as the story itself, the world, the aesthetic style and other elements, are strong enough to compensate for this apparent shortcoming.

One final consideration worth making is that Priestley’s criticism contradicts directly with a defense I will provide in Section 5.1.4. Priestley bewails the reactions of the characters in Science Fiction as ‘limited to the narrow human range’, which, although he phrases it pejoratively, is the feature which most redeems Science Fiction from the charge of escapism. So in an odd way, we can understand his argument as actually lending support to the proposals I will make in that section.

5.1.3. Science Fiction as Fiction, not Science

Although Thomas Disch makes a good point in showing the concern Science Fiction seems to exhibit with ‘big ideas’, he in fact answers his own argument when he calls for better writers and better work, which he himself has attempted to produce. It is not the fact of engaging with big ideas that concerns Disch, it is the fact that sometimes writers begin to take themselves too seriously, that the work comes to speak with false authority about issues that should remain in the domain of ideas, rather than being taken seriously in some kind of politically applicable sense. So long as ideas remain ideas and Science Fiction remains the playground for the harmless exercise of certain notions, utopias, and thought-experiments, there is no real problem.

The problem of writers and readers taking the work too seriously is a problem we have already encountered in our examination of arguments against, and defenses of, the genre. In many cases readers and critics have been found to be engaging with the work on a literal level. Disch urges us not to take the play of ideas out of proportion. He encourages a ‘spirit of intellectual playfulness’. This is of immense significance in answering the arguments of both Koestler and Webb. The play of ideas is neither future-fact nor prophecy.

Under Disch’s ideal conception, Science Fiction is not social science but art. Thus Disch’s article, which he wrote as an attack on the genre, actually operates in favour of Science Fiction, as it rescues it from being taken too seriously in a social science capacity and restores to it its status as a literary art. It is a genre which concerns itself with ideas, but in such a way as to provide an outlet for imagination and exploration, not for ‘privileged wisdom’ or ‘ideological silliness’.

5.1.4. Science Fiction and the Human Condition

Some criticism of Science Fiction considers it to be similar to Fantasy, in that regardless of the kind of difference in the worlds from this one (i.e. logical-future vs. contra-real) both genres feature worlds, characters, and situations too abstracted from the ‘real’ to serve any purpose beyond mere entertainment. We have already discovered in considering the distinction made by J.R.R Tolkien that escape can be both a healthy and useful thing, and an unhealthy and distracting thing. Something of a defense of the escape provided by literature comes from his analogy to the escape of the prisoner. The notion of escape, whether we see it as a good thing, a bad thing, or either depending on the circumstances, applies nonetheless to all literature regardless of the genre.

The argument of escapism is more easily defeated in its application to Science Fiction than in its application to Fantasy. The reason for this comes from the fact that Science Fiction, while sometimes quite abstracted from the world as it is now, is nonetheless the logical extension of certain states of affairs as we have or might actually find them. Thus there is no problem in applying to Science Fiction all the usual reasons for supposing that literature is valuable. The characters are human, or some greatly evolved variety of human:

[…] People whose society differs from ours, even whose physiology may differ from ours, but who feel the way we do. First to create difference – to establish strangeness – then to let the fiery arc of human emotion leap and close the gap: this acrobatics of the imagination fascinates and satisfies me as almost no other.

One useful way of framing the senselessness of the escape argument against Science Fiction is to consider historical fiction. Historical fiction comes under the broader heading of Realism. It is an imaginative reconstruction of the past; constructed out of real information about circumstances and speculation about what it was like to live under those given circumstances. Does the escapism argument apply to historical fiction? In engaging with it, are we abandoning our current reality for a past which no longer exists? To answer these questions, we merely need to consider whether we stand to learn anything from considering who we used to be, what we have become, and the differences between the two. If we can learn something from this, and it seems unquestionably obvious to me that we can, then it stands to reason that we can learn just as much in speculating about what we might become, so long as the speculation is rational and logical. The only difference between the past and the future is that we have no power to change the past.

Thus we see that Science Fiction fulfills an important societal role: it can speculate and inform, and it can provoke us to consider the wider implications of some of our current actions and technologies. I am going to take this argument one step further and argue that Realism in fact lacks many of the benefits of Science Fiction in that it can never transcend contingencies. This is an answer which applies to both Science Fiction and Fantasy. Realism is good at dealing with the way things are right now, or historically; it can showcase the particular worries and tensions of our time. Science Fiction, and Fantasy where any of its characters are human, provides us with the necessary scope to consider what it means to be human. Let us consider an example.

It is hard to meet a stranger. Even the greatest extravert meeting even the meekest stranger knows a certain dread, though he may not know he knows it. Will he make a fool of me wreck my image of myself invade me destroy me change me? Will he be different from me? Yes, that he will. There’s the terrible thing: the strangeness of the stranger.

‘Self-possessed’, Owen Pugh murmured to his friend, ‘that’s it’. Think of it, to be oneself ten times over. Nine seconds for every motion, nine ayes on every vote. It would be glorious!’

But Pugh could not tell him. ‘I don’t know’, he said, ‘it’s practice, partly. I don’t know. We’re each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?’

I use this one example (but there are many more) to show how in Science Fiction we are often able to escape contingency and access the essential features of humanity, the parts of our nature which are necessary across any space or time we might have come to exist in. In this way, as I said before, Science Fiction and some works of Fantasy are actually more real that Realist literature, in their ability to transcend contingency. C.S Lewis supports this idea in his defense of Eschatological Science Fiction when he provides the ship analogy (discussed in section 3.1).

5.1.5. Arguments and Thought-Experiments, Science and Fiction

Now we arrive at the final and most significant charge against Science Fiction, a charge which embodies many of the arguments discussed previously. This is the charge that Science-Fiction represents nothing more than an argument, that the two are mutually identifiable. McDonnell accuses Science Fiction of pushing the cult of scientism. He is simply wrong if he intends his charge to apply to all Science Fiction writers. Some writers are indeed scientistic (Isaac Asimov, for example, who openly admits an agenda of recruiting young people to science), but others are not (Ursula Le Guin, Ray Bradbury, Orson Scott Card, for example). Furthermore, in saying that Science Fiction writers lack the talent to fictionalize profound problems (he says not that it is impossible, but that it is not - in his opinion - being achieved at the time he writes) McDonnell’s criticism has effectively already been answered by Sturgeon, who said that ninety percent of everything is ‘crud’ (see Section 4.). Sturgeon argues that the best Science Fiction is as good as the best writing in any other field. Setting McDonnell aside, then, we can proceed with the arguments of some of the other critics, which we have reduced to the charge of Science Fiction as Argument. In order to get a clear understanding of exactly what the repercussions are of calling Science Fiction merely ‘argument’, let us go on to consider part of David Ward’s theory of aesthetic transactions.

In his article “A Basic Schema for Understanding Aesthetic Transactions”, Ward explains that the first requirement of a work of art is that it be recognized as such. Such recognition means that the work must be somehow distinguishable from the standard ontological framework, for reasons as simple as it being hung on a wall or put on a pedestal, or by virtue of the medium. Consider the deliberate movement of a dancer that differs from the way people usually move, or the authorial presence in a work of literature that can give us non-standard insight into the inner life of a character. Only after we recognize something as art can we go on to engage with and attempt to understand the work.

What both Koestler and Webb are doing, albeit from different motivations, is failing to recognize works of Science Fiction as art. As a result their respective attacks and defenses engage with the works on a literal level – Koestler saying ‘it will be fact not fantasy’, Webb saying that Science Fiction is ‘prophetic’ and ‘descriptive of the social impacts of science’. Their literal engagement limits their response to finding the work either useful or harmful in some sort of social science capacity.

Denying Science Fiction the status of art generates some major problems. It was one of my initial assumptions that attacks on the genre would be attempting to prove that Science Fiction is not good fiction or good art, and that defenses of the genre would provide counter-objections to show that it is. But here we have found a defense which claims that it is not art at all. Can such a defense possibly be beneficial to the genre? For there are many things in the world which are useful and defensible but not art; what we are here concerned with is that the genres of Fantasy and Science Fiction are not taken seriously as good fiction, which is to say, good literary art. Simply showing how useful something is (in some sort of social science capacity) does not go any distance in solving our original problem.

The ‘Science Fiction as Argument’ charge poses two distinct questions. It is popularly understood that the method of Science Fiction is thought-experiment. Willard van Orman Quine assumes this mutual identification in saying ‘the method of science fiction has its uses in philosophy, but… I wonder whether the limits of the method are properly heeded’. He is discussing the problematic nature of the thought-experiment in philosophic method, but taking for granted that thought-experiment is the method of Science Fiction. Ursula Le Guin instead views thought-experiment as the foundation of a particular story:

The germ of the story was in an article I read […] out of irrational and insatiable curiosity, in a thought-experiment that became a story […] the experiment was not a happy one.

The first issue is whether or not it can be successfully shown that all Science Fiction takes the form of a thought-experiment. The most popular definitions of the genre of Science Fiction say that it takes existing states of affairs through to their logical extension. Consider Orwell’s 1984 as the logical extension of communism. Some might say that works like this possess more of an agenda, are more persuasive, than work which just explores the likely outcomes of a certain set of given starting conditions. Consider John Wyndham’s The Trouble with Lichen. In this novel, lichen with anti-ageing properties is discovered. The novel examines some of the likely social and political ramifications of such a discovery. In this way we can see that we might categorize a work like 1984 as an ‘argument’ (able to be reconstructed as a statement like ‘if you take this action, then these undesirable consequences will follow; therefore do not take this action’), while we would categorize The Trouble with Lichen as a ‘thought-experiment’ (‘what if x?’). If all that is required for something to be a thought-experiment is for us to ‘make a judgement about what would happen if the particular state of affairs described in some imaginary scenario were actually to obtain’, then we can conclude that the majority of fiction and literature is a thought-experiment, and certainly all Science Fiction. Under this definition, even Science Fiction which features a strong and persuasive argument takes the overall form of a thought-experiment. So we will answer the first of our questions in the affirmative. The issue is, then, whether or not thought-experiments and arguments are the same thing.

There is a vast amount of literature on thought-experiments. The thought-experiment is a tool often employed in philosophy and science, to gain results from an experiment we are unable to physically perform. Perhaps the most famous thought-experiment in science was Galileo’s, regarding the speed of falling bodies, which he used to refute the well-entrenched Aristotelian conception. Examples of famous thought-experiments in philosophy are Descartes’ ‘Evil Demon’, popularly reconceived as the ‘brain-in-a-vat’ of Skepticism, Frank Jackson’s ‘Mary’s Room’ and John Searle’s ‘Chinese Room’ in the Philosophy of Mind, and many others. Thomas Kuhn (in the Philosophy of Science) believed that a well-conceived thought-experiment is able to bring about crisis, crisis being the primary contributor to paradigm-shift. In this way ‘thought experiments can teach us something new about the world, even though we have no new data, by helping us to reconceptualize the world in a better way’.

The greatest charge against thought-experiments is that they are merely arguments in disguise, ‘sound arguments dressed up in heuristically appealing clothing’. The idea that thought-experiments are always arguments is a view advanced by John Forge, Andrew Irvine, John Norton and Nicholas Rescher. Perhaps the most concise of these (according to Michael Bishop and Tamar Szabó Gendler, at least) comes from Norton. In her article “Galileo and the Indispensability of Scientific Thought Experiment”, Gendler discusses and attempts to refute Norton’s Elimination Thesis. The Elimination Thesis argues that ‘any conclusion reached by a (successful) scientific thought experiment will also be demonstrable by a non-thought-experimental argument’. Gendler identifies two branches of Norton’s claim: the Dispensability Thesis and the Derivativity Thesis. The former of these says that a thought-experiment can be replaced by an argument without losing any of its demonstrative force, while the latter says that the justificatory force of the thought-experiment only comes from the fact that it can be replaced by an argument. Gendler makes explicit her own idea of the distinction between thought-experiments and arguments:

To draw a conclusion on the basis of a thought experiment is to make a judgement about what would happen if the particular state of affairs described in some imaginary scenario were actually to obtain.

[…] By contrast, to draw a conclusion on the basis of a non-thought-experimental argument is to be lead by a process of inductive or deductive reasoning from a set of explicit premises which make no reference to particular hypothetical or counterfactual states of affairs to a correspondingly general conclusion.

[…] So thought experiments differ from non-thought-experimental arguments in two crucial respects: first, they are not presented as arguments, but rather as invitations to contemplate a way that the world might (have) be(en); and second, they make essential reference to particular hypothetical and counterfactual states of affairs.

The thought experiment that Galileo presents leads the Aristotelian to a reconfiguration of his conceptual commitments of a kind that lets him see familiar phenomena in a novel way.

[…] One way of thinking about how the thought experiment works is this: it brings the Aristotelian to recognize the inadequacy of his conceptual framework for dealing with phenomena which – through the contemplation of this imaginary case – he comes to recognize as always having been part of his world.

We have stores of unarticulated knowledge of the world which is not organized under any theoretical framework. Argument will not give us access to that knowledge, because the knowledge is not propositionally available. Framed properly, however, a thought experiment can tap into it, and – much like an ordinary experiment – allow us to make use of information about the world which was, in some sense, there all along, if only we had known how to systematize it into patterns of which we are able to make sense.

Gendler’s assertion that thought-experiments and arguments are two different things is supported by Michael Bishop. Bishop uses the Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr ‘Clock-in-the-Box’ thought-experiment to show that one thought-experiment can yield more than one corresponding t-argument. He shows that both Einstein and Bohr followed the same thought-experiment but constructed different arguments from them, which he uses as proof that a thought-experiment is not, and cannot be, an argument.

What, then, are the implications of this outcome for our conception of Science Fiction? As we discussed earlier, if Gendler and Bishop had been unable to prove that thought-experiments and arguments were distinct entities, we would have been forced to admit that if it is true that Science Fiction takes the form of a thought-experiment, and thought-experiments are always arguments, then it is true that Science Fiction is always an argument. Thus we would face the problem of defending Science Fiction from being merely a vehicle for presenting arguments. This would result in arguing over whether an argument can ever take on narrative form and constitute good fiction. We are not forced into this predicament, however, because Gendler and Bishop have strong enough arguments to allow us to admit that thought-experiments are something quite different to arguments. Rather than ‘follow[ing] the path of a recognized argument form’, the reader has ‘performed an act of introspection that brings to light heretofore inarticulated and (because he lacked a theoretical framework in which to make sense of them) heretofore implausible tacit beliefs’.

We should note here that denying fiction the status of ‘argument’ does not deny it the power to bring about change. As Koestler said, good literary art means ‘seeing the familiar in a new light, seeing tragedy in the trivial event: it means in the last resort to broaden and deepen our understanding of ourselves’.

When we say of art that its specific function is to bring about change, we are saying too much, for then we get into the kind of trouble resulting from Webb’s argument. Because it is not the task of this paper to discuss the requirements of art, it will suffice for our purposes to draw the loose conclusion that any agenda in a work of art ought to be secondary to the art form.

In order to make this suggestion more convincing, I would draw an analogy to the discussion of the previous section. What was at stake between thought-experiments and arguments was whether or not the former could be reduced to the latter. In the same way, I argue that if a work of fiction or literature can be reduced to an argument, or a plot, or an agenda; if it loses no demonstrative or emotive force in the re-telling (or reduction); then it is of sub-standard literary merit. It is, in such a case, either not fiction at all, or very bad fiction. In either case, it is certainly not literature. Under such a conception, Asimov’s I, Robot would fail as literature. The bad characterizations and worse-than-bad prose style are lifted up only by the good ideas; all of which unfortunately entail that I, Robot is better in the re-telling, or in reduction to those foundational ideas.

As a brief aside, one very interesting question has been put to me in discussing this fiction-as-thought-experiment view, which is the question of how we can know when to take an argument or thought-experiment made via fiction seriously. Kathleen Wilkes is one philosopher who has written against thought-experiments, from the area of personal identity theory, saying in fact that thought-experiments are fine in fiction because the purpose of fiction is different to the purpose of philosophy or science; fiction’s purpose is to entertain. She is saying in effect that the kinds of thought-experiments used in fiction, which she aligns with those employed in identity theory, are never philosophically useful. She contrasts these with a few very useful thought experiments from science such as Stevin’s frictionless planes and Einstein’s oscillating light fields.

[W]e cannot extract philosophically interesting conclusions from fantastical thought experiments. We cannot do this because we have the following choice: either (a) we picture them against the world as we know it, or (b) we picture them against some quite different background. If we choose the first, then we picture them against a background that deems them impossible – that insists that hemisphere transplants (for instance) violate fundamental biological and physical laws. If we choose (b), then we have the realm of fantasy, and fantasy is fine to read, but it does not allow for philosophical conclusions to be drawn, because in a world indeterminately different we do not know what we would want to say about anything (pp. 46).

So in response to the question of when we should take the thought-experiment in the Science Fiction or Fantasy novel seriously, my answer is: only when the thought-experiment enacted by the work of fiction is of the same kind as the successful thought-experiments of science, when, as Wilkes would say, the background is adequately described, the experiment is rigorous and controlled, and the results, therefore, are able to be conclusive. This ‘taking the thought-experiment seriously’ would also have to be a separate issue to the success of the fiction as literature, which would be based upon other criterion such as the successful execution of the thought-experiment in narrative form, and other aesthetic criterion.

5.2. Defending Fantasy

In the previous section, we discussed the nature of the escapism argument, and its application to Science Fiction. We noted that it was easier to answer in relation to Science Fiction than in relation to Fantasy, for the reason that Science Fiction is often a logical projection of the future of this world. The point at which the escapism argument becomes a critical problem for the Fantasy genre comes when we consider that any engagement with ‘realist’ literature is at least an engagement with situations and circumstances that readers might actually find themselves in, an engagement with characters similar to themselves, or at least only dissimilar to a certain degree.

The problems faced by characters in realist genres are problems which might logically be faced by the reader, and thus any engagement is useful in that it stands to broaden our understanding, allow us to transcend the limits of our own physical experience, build on our empathy for others, aspire to emulate certain characters or given characteristics or modes of behaviour that we recognise as desirable or ‘right’. These are some of the basic reasons provided by theorists in the Philosophy of Literature for supposing literature valuable; in some views essential rather than merely useful or enjoyable.

This poses a serious threat to our finding any value in the genre of Fantasy, for the following reason. Fantasy is the domain of the contra-real. Fantasy worlds are worlds that specifically do not exist, containing states of affairs that have not and will never come to pass. The events which occur in a Fantasy world are in accord with the laws of nature established for that world, not our own. Thus the characters of a Fantasy world exhibit behaviour particular to the pressures and circumstances of the world they find themselves in. But we as readers will never find ourselves in a similar situation because we will never find ourselves in any universe but this one.

Obviously when we take these things into consideration, we find that Fantasy literature can not be defended on any of the usual grounds on which we usually find literature valuable. We need to consider, then, other reasons for it being valuable. In order to do this, we will look at two separate arguments. The first comes from Joseph Priestly, and involves what I call the Iceberg Theory, looking at the fact that the secondary worlds of Fantasy still come from the minds of men (and women) of this world. The second is what I will call Comparison Theory, which simply asks whether or not there is something to be gained from comparing what is with what is not.

5.2.1. Priestley’s Iceberg

In his article “Thoughts in the Wilderness”, Joseph Priestly makes a point which I think is crucial to our understanding of Fantasy literature and might easily, without explication, escape our consideration. For it is easy, when considering the proliferation of secondary worlds brought into being in the space of the human imagination through literature, to fall into the trap of imagining the false dichotomy of ‘this’ (real) world and ‘those’ (imaginary) worlds. What we must not forget is that ‘those’ worlds are a product of this one. This is a fact which cannot be avoided. However different the worlds of the artistic imagination, we must not forget that they come out of the minds of the men of ‘this’ world, and thus are a product of these circumstances, this time. Without getting too far into psychoanalytic theory and theories of the unconscious, we can just briefly say that there is support for this notion of the importance of ‘what is really happening in men’s minds’ in Jungian theory in his idea of the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious, and also in Rosemary Jackson’s work Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, which frames Fantasy as the literature of desire, of fulfilling our deep-seated desires for the triumph of good over evil, as providing us with the utopias we unconsciously yearn for. What Priestly specifically says is:

Science Fiction and Flying Saucer legends seem to me important because they show us what is really happening in men’s minds. Like the sexually sadistic thrillers now so popular, they are the myths and characteristic dreams of our age, and are psychologically far more important than our more rational accounts of ourselves. They take the lid off. They allow us a glimpse of what is boiling down below. They may be the first rumblings of the volcano that will overwhelm us. Of course our political leaders, solemn experts, pundits of platform and Press, do not concern themselves with such trivialities, for they still imagine, against all the evidence, that men are as rational as they like to think they are, are moved by a limited set of obvious motives, and consciously direct their affairs. And to imagine this [is] as sensible and safe as it is to assume that what we can be seen of an iceberg is all there is of it. If we are all in the same boat, then its name is Titanic.

One concession does need to be made to Priestley here though, and it concerns his frustration with the ‘externalization’ of Science Fiction which appears to be distracting people from internal (or self) exploration. It is one of my more controversial assertions that one of the elements that makes Fantasy ‘good’ is the level at which we can identify with it, what it illuminates about the human condition. We are often interested in alien species, but I would argue that this interest only comes via negation; we are not interested per se in this strange and distant creature, but rather our interest comes from being provoked to thought - via this device of the ‘other’ - about the kinds of things we lack, what we are not, and how these sorts of considerations change or reveal our understanding of ourselves.

One of my lecturers explained to me recently that in running a philosophy workshop he had students consider what it means to be human. The first thing the class did was imagine things that were specifically not-human, and consider the difference. Sometimes the best way of gaining greater understanding is through the consideration of difference; we can learn a lot in considering all the things that we are not. Thus on this issue of externalization versus internalization, I would be inclined to side with Priestley and Koestler and say that literary art ‘means in the last resort to broaden and deepen our understanding of ourselves’.

5.2.2. Fantasy (and Science Fiction) and the Other

This section works to elaborate upon the point made in the previous section (5.2.1.) and also presents a contrasting view to that which is elaborated in Section 5.1.4. In that section, I argued that Science Fiction was illuminative (often by negation) of the human condition. The success of this argument depends on the application of a mode of reading. There are two ways a reader could understand Le Guin’s Nine Lives (see pp. 52-53). One is in the way I explained earlier, which is to say that the reader gains insight into the human condition by considering the differences between humanity and the Other of the story (in that case, the clone). By this reading, a story is either explicitly about being human, or it is implicitly about being human, precisely because it is about not being human. One particular difficulty of this view is that it is all-encompassing.

The other mode of reading we might adopt is to say that these works really are about the Other. In this case, rather than reading Nine Lives as a commentary (by negation) on being human, we would say that it is about being a clone. We can apply this kind of reading to Orson Scott Card’s Ender series, in particular the later books where four different species are in communication; Ender (a human), Jane (a super-computer), the Formics (ant-like workers, connected psychically to their Hive Queen), and the Pequeninos (pig-like creatures with third-lives as sentient trees). This second kind of ‘about-ness’ is more open to debate within Science Fiction, because it can always be argued that maybe, just maybe, the world might go the way the author imagines. But what happens when we look at an example from Fantasy?

Many of the human characters of Robin Hobb’s Assassin series are endowed with two additional senses, the Wit and the Skill. The Wit is a psychic bond to one particular animal; the Skill is a kind of telepathy which allows its users to enter other people’s minds and relay information, lend strength, or conversely cloud judgement, present illusion, mislead, drain of strength, damage and destroy. The Wit is a sense both loathed and feared. Hobb uses the Wit and the Skill as useful devices for greater psychological insight into the minds of her various characters, but more than this, they allow the reader a familiarity with three ‘kinds’ of Other – the human psychic, the human telepathic, and the animal (in this case, a wolf). Perhaps we could allow that this insight into the inner life of a wolf is valuable in that wolves really do exist in the world. But what of the Witted, the Skilled? It is at this point that my first argument looks more intuitively appealing. One element essential to being human is that we are inescapably mentally alone: we do not share our consciousness. This work of Fantasy illuminates several interesting and thought-provoking elements of the human condition through its engagement with characters who surpass our abilities in communication and understanding. Thus I would like to conclude that it is what we can learn about ourselves, and furthermore what we can be provoked to consider about ourselves that Realist genres lack the ability to address, rather than any intrinsic interest in the Other (where the other does not really exist) that creates and sustains our interest in Science Fiction and Fantasy.

In his article “Against Genre/Theory: The State of Science Fiction Criticism”, Carl Malmgren makes a similar point, outlining two basic ‘concerns’ of Science Fiction: the relationship between self and other, and the relationship between self and society. He says of the first kind that ‘the reader recuperates this type of fiction by comparing human and nonhuman entities, typically exploring what it means to be human. The cognitive thrust involves a better understanding of self and other’, and of the second kind that ‘the reader is invited to draw comparisons between the fictional society and originary [sic] one and to establish normative frameworks’. So while (disappointingly) I am not the first person to make this observation about Science Fiction, Fantasy and the Other, at least (happily) there exists support for the idea.

5.2.3. Fantasy Gone Stale?

It is quite possible that one of the main motivations for the attitude of the public and those within academia toward Science Fiction and Fantasy is the historical progress of the genre forms. To a certain extent, especially pre-1980, both genres saw a high proportion of ‘formula writers’. This is to say, writers were achieving commercial success by writing to a formula (Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, Terry Brooks’ Shannara series, Raymond E. Feist’s post-Magician series, to name a few) rather than writing anything fresh or new. The familiarity of such works appealed to a certain audience, but this audience was a minority, and many readers who might have embraced either genre when they first emerged, and were doing new and exciting things with new and exciting material, probably abandoned them at this point.

The ‘staleness’ of Fantasy, and about twenty years earlier, Science Fiction, was remedied to some degree with the emergence of Fantasy authors like Robin Hobb and Terry Pratchett (and J.K Rowling, dare I say it), and Science Fiction authors like Orson Scott Card and Ursula Le Guin (among others, in both cases).

This raises an interesting point about fiction in general. According to Kant’s account of genius in The Critique of Judgement, an artist is inspired by something in the world, some idea. The artist then attempts to express this idea, this ‘something’, in their chosen medium. It does not fit with this account of artistic genius at all that a writer should write according to a formula, or recipe. Someone like Terry Pratchett has been able to attain considerable success in satirizing the obvious conventions of the Fantasy genre form at its worst.

Genre classifications should be, at the most, marketing tools; useful ways of grouping certain kinds of things together. Perhaps instead of the arbitrary classification system we currently employ, which is based entirely on content, we should instead group novels together under atmosphere headings like ‘Heavy-Going but Thought-Provoking’, or ‘A Bit of Mindless Nonsense’. What would be really useful is a system which tells us what works are actually good within any given atmosphere.

But that would be to begin an entirely different project. For the purposes of this paper, we need only take into account that the ‘staleness’ of the genres over a certain period in the not-too-distant past as one of the probable motivations for the marginalized position of Science Fiction and Fantasy.

5.3. A Final Defence of Both Science Fiction and Fantasy

There is one final argument which I wish to raise in defence of the genres. This is the argument that Science Fiction and Fantasy are the closest of the literary genres to the discipline of Philosophy. This is to take McDonnell’s original criticism and turn it on its head: he said that Science Fiction was nothing but disguised Philosophy and as such not ‘real’ literature. Here I wholeheartedly agree that both of the genres and Philosophy are similar to a degree; and I can agree without risk because we have shown in our previous discussions that the content and subject of a work of literature has little to do with whether it is art and whether it is good. What I do wish to argue is that it is precisely in its identification with philosophical enquiry and its ability to communicate some of the more complex philosophical dilemmas and issues that we find the most value, the most ‘use’, in both Science Fiction and Fantasy. As we learned from Aristotle, the value of a work of literature comes not from its presentation of particulars but from its presentation of universals. Rather than rehashing the same set of everyday and extraordinary (but not fantastical) emotions and circumstances in love stories and crime thrillers (for example), Science Fiction and Fantasy fiction take a more imaginative stance and look at more fundamental human issues. Their epic scale, and remove from scientifically-defined current ‘reality’, allow the raising of profound and interesting questions about human nature, good and evil, complex ethical situations, our past, and the future of the human race. Two tools integral to the discipline of Philosophy are ‘implication’ and ‘repercussion’ – the consideration of these in light of some argument we have made or are making. This ability to consider implications into the distant future is a key feature of the rationality of human beings and is a tool or thought process mirrored in Fantasy and Science Fiction, perhaps by virtue of something as simple as their epic scale. These genres ask us to open our minds and consider issues and possibilities which concern far more than our mere hundred or so years of life, at this particular time, in this particular location.

To provide an example of a work of Science Fiction which exemplifies some of these criteria, let me briefly list some of the philosophical issues which come up throughout Card’s Ender series. The Ender series (beginning with Ender’s Game and concluding with Shadow Puppets) is a fresh take on the Science Fiction genre, steeped in religious, historical, philosophical and military detail. Some of the philosophical issues which come up in the series are: utilitarianism, self-sacrifice for the greater good, power and use (might vs. right), the Napoleon Idea or Nietzsche’s ubermensch, historical detail – Lenin / Stalin / Alexander / Napoleon / Eisenhower, organic ethical theory (individuals as part of greater organic whole), theology (God as God of humans, or all sentient species?), respect (automatically accorded or earned?), moral issues like responsibility and blame in the case of lack of knowledge, love and friendship, bullying and pre-emptive strikes, language (good and evil as contingent upon language and understanding – the case of a great honour being misconstrued as sickening violence). This list is nowhere near exhaustive of the issues and discussion points which come out of such a series, but should go at least some distance toward illustrating my point.

One of the greatest benefits of Science Fiction and Fantasy fiction is that they prompt a consideration of philosophical and religious issues. Because the kinds of questions and dilemmas raised by philosophy are often unanswered (and in some cases probably unanswerable), and yet because we often use their supposed answers as defining grounds for the way we live and behave, they should be brought from the specific field of Philosophy into the public domain – and what better way than by means of literature, giving the dual benefit of involving more people with more great literature and so not only fostering an interest in wider reading but also lending the other benefits supposed by theories of the value of literature.

We can use the rise of the Philosophy for Children movement in Australasia as evidence for this shift of philosophy into mainstream education and thus public life. In a secular nation like New Zealand where we teach neither philosophy nor religion in primary or secondary schools, there is a lot to be said for people being provoked to consider issues relevant to both. People need fantasy, creativity, and imagination to escape the sometime-drudgery of everyday life; for who would choose to live in a work-eat-sleep world?

Without the fantastic imagination we could not achieve technological progress. Without it we could not achieve what we have as a nation and a species in art, music, poetry - any artistic endeavour. The conclusion we took from McDonnell’s criticism (in Section 4.1) was that what we should aspire to in Science Fiction is a non-dogmatic stance on thinking and reasoning (to imagine and consider rather than to be persuaded), a quality which can be built upon using the critical thinking developed within the discipline of philosophy.

This link between the genres and the discipline of philosophy is further strengthened by the consonance between thought-experiments and literature. I would like to venture the suggestion that the criterion by which we judge thought-experiments could in fact be a universal criterion by which we judge works of literature. We can distinguish good thought-experiments from bad thought-experiments in the same way we can distinguish good fiction from bad fiction. Good literature expands our ability to reflect on ourselves and our lives; thought-experiments are more than arguments because they can elicit intuitions, engage us, mobilize our emotions, all of which both Science Fiction and Fantasy can do more or less adequately. So perhaps what can be bad about works of Science Fiction and Fantasy is what can be bad about thought-experiments: when they are bad, they can produce significant distortion, and deflect us from reflecting on things in any important way.

In Structural Fabulation, Robert Scholes talks about this kind of distortion with reference to fiction of the more ‘realistic’ kind, which he sees as more dangerous than the so-called escapism of Science Fiction and / or Fantasy:

It features a strong narrative line, characters with whom readers identify, and a comforting “realism” that purports to explain how things really work in contemporary society […] This sort of fiction has one important thing – readers. But it pays a high price for its readership, and they pay a high price for their pleasure, for they are led to believe in a “reality” which is irrelevant to our actual situation in many respects. And precisely because they believe in this reality, they are dangerously uninformed as citizens and human beings who must face real problems.

Kathleen Wilkes shows us in Real People: Personal Identity Without Thought Experiments that certain good thought experiments have allowed us to go beyond current limits, citing examples from Heisenburg, Galileo, Einstein and Stevin. There is no reason we could not add to this list the names of a few very good authors. I would argue for an exactly parallel dimension of evaluation between successful thought-experiments and successful works of fiction.

It is with these final thoughts that I conclude that we should treat the best of Science Fiction and Fantasy as much more than good entertainment, we should treat it as a tool to open our minds and provoke intelligent, logical and critical thought. I hope the necessarily brief quotations, from some of the best Science Fiction and Fantasy I have encountered in reading for this paper (scattered wherever possible throughout this work) provide enough of an example of the high quality of some of the best works in each genre.

6. An Empirical Application: Science Fiction and Fantasy in Education

Philosophy for Children (or P4C) and Philosophy in Secondary Schools (or PSS) are two education movements gaining increasing momentum throughout Australasia, aiming to introduce the ‘thinking skills’ of Philosophy into mainstream education. It occurs to me that although my main task in this paper has been to drag Science Fiction and Fantasy ‘out of the corner’ and over to ‘play with the big kids’ (as it were), there is a further application which comes out of considering some of the strengths of the genres. So while we have discovered that there is nothing about genre-classifications that permits a value-judgement about any individual piece of work, we have found that there are certain characteristics about works of Science Fiction and Fantasy (such as scale and content) that distinguish them from other genres.

What I would like to argue in this section is that we can take a piece of empirical research, in this case research regarding the enduring nature of religious ideas, and apply it to Science Fiction and Fantasy to support the claim that both genres are highly defensible in terms of use in Education. So let us go on immediately, then, to look at the research of Pascal Boyer and Justin Barrett, and its immediate application to the genres we are concerned with here.

In Religion Explained, Boyer explains that as humans, we have a few ontological categories which we use as templates: ‘animal’, ‘plant’, ‘tool’, ‘person’, ‘number’, ‘natural object’. Boyer and Barrett show that the quality which makes a story or myth memorable and transmissible is the fact of its containing a violation of an ontological category. Boyer provides the example of a ‘table made of chocolate’ contrasted with a ‘table that feels sad when you leave the room’. The first is unusual but does not constitute a violation, while the second is surprising and does constitute a violation. Without going into too much detail here, we can see how such an idea is immediately applicable to Science Fiction and Fantasy. Literature that is realistic does not violate natural categories; this is just true by virtue of the label ‘realistic’. In Science Fiction and Fantasy we suddenly encounter violations en masse: sentient trees, strange mixtures of animal and person, inanimate objects endowed with some magical property, people who can see the future, aliens and ghosts. Where most of the arguments against Science Fiction and Fantasy saw such combinations as escapist and useless, we can now see that the very fact of their making the story more transmissible and more memorable goes a great distance toward making them defensible for their use in education. There is no reason to suppose that violation of ontological categories affects literary merit, so we easily avoid previous problems. Empirical tests show us that when it comes to stories, realism is less memorable.

Boyer’s research attempts to explain religion. But religion is conditional upon truth, faith and belief. What is interesting for us is that when we apply his research to Science Fiction and Fantasy there is no such condition. We willingly suspend disbelief and immerse ourselves if the work is good enough to hold our attention. We approach fiction in an entirely different spirit to religion; we pretend and we play. This is why fiction is entirely more enjoyable than other modes of thinking: we are not working to solve some problem. We are simply being provoked to consider and imagine.

7. Conclusion

We have arrived at the rather commonsense conclusion that there is no justification whatsoever for judging works of literature according to their genre rather than on their individual merits. Form and content are necessary conditions to a work of literature. There are many examples of fiction in which the ideas or arguments (content) are good while the form is not, and vice versa; there are examples of fiction where both form and content are lacking; and, finally, there are examples of work where the form and the content are both very good, in which case we might judge the work to be ‘literature’. We have seen that none of the existing arguments against Science Fiction or Fantasy are sufficient to warrant marginalizing entire genres, and none of the extrapolated or constructed arguments remain undefeated. Although ‘form’ and ‘content’ remain as categories in need of some fleshing out in terms of specific detail, suffice for this paper to say that we have shown the majority view against Science Fiction and Fantasy to be unsupported by any philosophical argument.

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