Whose Sci(fi)?
This disaster-novel (affectionate) I’m querying now doesn’t fit terribly tidily into standard genre molds. I began querying it as contemporary fantasy (because I thought I had to) and now declare it SCIENCE FANTASY. I was reluctant to classify it as contemporary fantasy because it’s, well, not. And I don’t just mean in an Anne McCaffrey “These dragons are in SPACE and space is SCIENCE this is not FANTASY it is SCIENCE FICTION!” sort of way. Well, maybe I do. I wonder if that book were being queried today what genre would be slapped onto it? Science Fantasy, maybe? Space Opera? Dragons in Space? Is that a genre yet? Why not? Seriously, can Space Dragons be a genre right now, please?
What was I talking about? Right. Genre. My book. Being in one.
I really feel Anne’s struggle there. Because at its core, I see this work as far more sci-fi than fantasy. That fact isn’t readily apparent from just book one (of don’t tell anybody but six), but it is. This world is built on science and speculation on science spewing speculative sciencey … stuff. Sciencely.
But ghosts!
Ghosts are fantasy. Like DRAGONS.
Ergo, Fantasy.
Q.E.D.
Except… that’s not always true. It’s not even true that “ghosts” were always considered outside the purview of science in these parts (you can’t see it, but I’m waving vaguely at the USA, but not toward Tennessee—I’m not allowed). And I don’t just mean History-Channel type *wavy hands* woo-woo science. I mean, ghosts were once considered a serious object of scientific inquiry. The ghost and afterlife question was very much up for debate in scientific circles in the 19th-century academe. But it wasn’t only a scientific question. It was a question of Spiritualism, of religion, of philosophy, of existential fear and dread and Oh God, will it all really just end? Is she really just gone? Will I be just gone, too?
That, maybe, is edging us more into Fantasy.
The label Science Fantasy seems promising, then… maybe. Because disaster-novel (still affectionate) takes elements traditionally construed as fantasy (e.g., ghosts) and ones (these days) less traditionally construed as science, sticks them all in a Vitamix with some dad-joke ice and feels juice, and hits frappé.
Except, that’s not why I feel science fantasy is the best fit for this series—or this other series rattling around my queer little coffee-guzzling head. I’m not drawn to the genre label “science fantasy” because I’ve melded elements of science and fantasy. I’m drawn to “science fantasy” because, on a far more fundamental level, I am operating without the sci-fi/fantasy distinction in the first place—and thematically critiquing that distinction between science and fantasy while I'm at it.
What constitutes the “sci” in sci-fi is most often a Western/Global North sort of science. The science of Newton! Darwin! Einstein! Things like “rocket ship” and “tachyons” and “nuclear waste.” But science, construed as a dedicated and objective form of knowledge-seeking, isn’t limited to these things.
Not for everybody.
Say one’s speculative world-building is heavily inspired by Hawai’ian culture and its ways of knowing and relating to the ʻāina (land). A dominant *cough* colonizing Western perspective would look at this and say, “Yup. That there is some mythological religious feely-weely sorta stuff and is, therefore, fantasy fodder!” Then they’d hand you a nice “FANTASY” label to stick on that submission. But it’s not fantasy. Because it’s not just religious or mythical or spiritual. It is science. It’s philosophy, cosmology, scientific inquiry, religion, ethics, and ecological praxis all at once. This way of knowing operates with a different notion of objectivity but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have one. The spiritual can be objective, too. I mean, not according to the stuffy old white dudes classically deciding this crap, but when are they ever right about anything?
Exactly! So this hypothetical speculative work is science fiction. More crucially, what makes it science fiction doesn’t distinguish it from fantasy. Because, in a Hawai’ian context, there is no binary bifurcation between those ways of knowing—the scientific and the spiritual—in the first place how there is in, say, Elon Musk’s tiny phallic imaginarium.
Science fantasy isn’t (I don’t think) usually meant as a way of questioning the divide between science and fantasy as a politico-epistemological statement on the segregation of “Objective Science(TM)” from marginalized ways of knowing (though I expect somebodies far more knowledgeable than me have written on this). But that is how I mean science fantasy.
It’s in that spirit that I label this novel/series I’m querying now as a work of science fantasy. The science may not be recognizable as the “sci” of sci-fi for many, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t science. It doesn’t go pew-pew or launch into space or launch in the general trajectory of space and then explode or involve aliens or cloning gone wrong—well, it has got fancy guns, actually. And they could go pew-pew if that’s what it takes to get me published, I guess. I’m too broke to be proud. Send me an R&R, agents and editors! “Make fancy guns go more pew-pew,” and I’ll do it!
You know…
For science.
R.I.P. (Read In Peace)
Elijah