22 | The Writer • October 2019Perhaps a science fiction expert could give us a defini-
tive answer.
“One answer, per science fiction scholar James Gunn, is
that science fiction is about things that could happen or could
have happened, and that fantasy could not happen, at least in
our consensual understanding of what is possible,” Johnson
says. But this definition is somewhat problematic, she states,
since “this disregards a lot of things,” one being that “our
understanding of what is possible changes regularly.”
Silverberg puts a different spin on the relation between
these two genres. He sees science fiction as a subgenre of
fantasy: “Though much of it involves so-called ‘hard science’
speculation impinging on physics and chemistry, most of its
most common themes – time travel, for example, or faster-
than-light interstellar journeys – are in the present schemeof things scientifically unattainable and perhaps impossible,
so ultimately they must be considered to be a kind of fan-
tasy, though different in tone from the kind of fantasy that
deals in magic spells and rings of power.” His conclusion?
“In the final analysis, most science fiction relies on magic
concealed behind a screen of scientific jargon.”
Bujold is with Silverberg in not seeing sci-fi and fantasy
as two distinct genres, but she doesn’t view one as a sub-
genre of the other; instead, she sees them “as a continuum.”
“For me, a tale is on the fantasy end of the spectrum if,
within the world of the story, the supernatural is real – magic,
gods, demons, monsters, and so on,” Bujold says. “It’s on the
SF end, even if it contains contrafactual elements such as
faster-than-light travel or (a good example of a boundary
case) telepathy, if the rationale for it within the story calls on
purely material explanations.”
Nagata also endorses the continuum idea. “I see the genres
as blending into each other, a blurry spectrum without a strict
dividing line,” she says. “Some works are clearly science fic-
tion – set more or less in the world or the galaxy as we know
it, with events treated as explainable phenomena, even if we
don’t know how to explain them – while the supernatural
haunts the other end.”
Works not easily classified find themselves somewhere in
between the two ends of this spectrum, and it may not even
be up to the author to decide what to call it. Nagata says it’s
“often a marketing decision” that determines whether a work
gets categorized as science fiction or fantasy.Adult versus young adult
speculative fiction
Though they’re not exactly “genres,” adult specu-
lative fiction and YA speculative fiction are cer-
tainly different categories in which age and
maturity matter. But where is the line between
them? As a writer of either, how can you be sure
you’re following the various genre conventions or
reader expectations?
According to Bujold, the critical dividing line
between the two is the age of the protagonist:
“Two works otherwise nearly identical in style
and tone might, for example, be sorted into sepa-
rate markets depending on whether the focus
character was 15 or 30.”
For Adrianne Finlay, whose book Your One &
Only was named one of the best YA science fiction
novels of 2018 by Kirkus Reviews, there are two
critical dividing lines between the YA and the adult
form. Like Bujold, she rules out the writer’s han-
dling of particular fictional elements: “The tone,
content, premise, vocabulary, and character devel-
opment within young adult books varies as much
in YA as it does in adult fiction, and the category is
usually not defined by these considerations.
“What makes a book YA,” she continues, “is
partly the assumed age of the audience (around
12-18), and the age of the main character (also
around 12-18, though probably toward the older
end).” The operative word here is “partly.” The
themes taken up in the YA work constitute the
second dividing line: “Certainly there are plenty
of adult books that feature teenaged protagonists,
so what makes a book truly YA are the general
themes explored in the story.” These themes relate
to “issues surrounding the transition from child-
hood to adulthood – the formation of identity
and self-discovery, searching for one’s place in the
world, first love, first loss, and coming of age, to
name only a few.”
Older states it succinctly: “Every book is about
a crisis at the heart of the book. In YA fiction, it’s
about shedding the mythology of childhood.”
Or, as Hardy puts it: “YA is about making mis-
takes and figuring out who you are as a person,
and that’s at the core of any YA story no matter
what the genre. With speculative fiction, the
stakes are typically higher, and the price of failure
much more costly, so a large percentage of YA
speculative fiction is about ‘saving the world’ in
some way.”
From a historical perspective, says Silverberg,
there’s a notable difference between today’s YA
speculative fiction and that of 50 years ago.“A fantasy or science fiction writer
has to convince the reader that
the story she is telling is set in a
world as real as our own.”