My Love of Science Fantasy

I’ve consumed a wealth of sci-fi and fantasy fiction across all mediums, and across all of their subgenres such as dark fantasy, high fantasy, urban fantasy, space opera, mecha, tech-noir, etc. Naturally, my enthrallment with these genres began in my childhood as a geeky boy who thought robots, elves, magic, and spaceships were the epitome of cool. However, it wasn’t until I got older and exercised my intellectual side that I truly began to appreciate why these genres are timeless. I was fascinated by how authors were able to craft worlds that reflected our own, suffusing their stories with characters and themes that critiqued aspects of ourselves and our cultures in bold ways while also contemplating the future.

I read primarily high fantasy, which is distinct from low fantasy in that the latter takes place on Earth, often the same as our own but with fantastical elements like magic, whereas the former’s setting is one the author has crafted from scratch, dissimilar to our own world in most if not all areas. It should be noted that low fantasy is also distinct from science fiction, as science fiction has plausible explanations for how its world functions while low fantasy relies more heavily on suspension of disbelief and engagement with the reader’s imagination.

Given that fantasy is imaginative and sci-fi is speculative, both are typically viewed with distinct aesthetics, the former resembling a glamourized medieval Europe filled with alternate sapient species, and the latter focusing on the rapid—and often detrimental—rise of technology either facilitating the dissolution of the human identity or leading to human colonization of outer space. Inevitably, both genres rely on creative thinking, but sci-fi is more grounded in the possible (technology) while fantasy concerns itself with the impossible (magic). However, to quote Arthur C. Clarke, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Thus, magic and technology can (and should) become one. In fact, blending the two is quite common, resulting in a hybrid genre called science fantasy, which is one of the primary genres I work within.

Science fantasy offers room from bold innovative ideas and out-of-the-box thinking that make their settings and characters feel so much more engaging compared to the conventional versions of either fantasy or sci-fi. All that being said, I am aware that “over-overlapping,” if you will, can be a risky artistic maneuver, and not necessarily in the clever way. Too much blending and mixing of genres can cause readers to lose sight of what the work actually is and make it difficult to pinpoint where the work situates itself with the rest of our literary canon. In my view, art that does everything is art that does nothing. I’d rather not run into that problem in my own work.

Even still, the authors that inspired me were able to weave elements of science fiction into their works to craft unique settings with equally interesting characters. As a child, I lost myself in the density of Tolkien, who, in his writings of Frodo and the One Ring, challenged his readers to never buckle or yield in the face of insurmountable odds, to continue to push forward and strive for a better world when it’d be so much easier, and more comfortable, to surrender oneself to the corruption of the world around them. As I matured, I came upon the works of R.A. Salvatore, G.R.R Martin, and Andrej Sapkowski who built upon what Tolkien created. They resisted the black and white moralities of conventional storytelling in favor of engaging with more complex and nuanced ideas about the nature of the human condition. Characters like Salvatore’s Drizzt Do’Urden, Sapkowski’s Geralt of Rivia, and Martin’s Jon Snow, encouraged angsty young adult readers such as myself to never accept that you are too small to change an imperfect world. Instead, embrace change. Resist. Revolt. Hold onto your dreams of a better world and endeavor to make those dreams a reality.

Evan Winters (The Rage of Dragons), in his introduction to R.A. Salvatore’s The Dao of Drizzt, posited that literary fiction, lauded for its realistic explication of human nature, sees its characters achieve success through conforming to forces larger than them. They accept their place in a world gone wrong and find comfort in grasping merely at what’s within reach. By contrast, the heroes of genre fiction, notably fantasy, “though they have been reared, cultured, and suffused by inequity, refuse to accept or thrive in it. And, journeying alongside them, we may begin to wonder how we could ever have been expected to do so either." In the myths we tell of dragons setting farmland ablaze, armies of the dead crawling from their graves to twist the world into decay, galactic empires oppressing the innocent, or rogue AIs instating supremacy over chaotic human beings, we aren’t meant to mature by learning to live with their cruelty. No, we’re meant to dream that we can defeat them, and that is why I do what I do. Through my work, I dream out loud, hoping that those with similar dreams can enjoy it all the same.