Fantasy, SF and the Mushroom Planet Books

Abstract

Fantasy, SF and the Mushroom Planet Books Eleanor Cameron Click for larger view View full resolution Illustration from The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, © 1954 by Robert Hennenberger. Little, Brown and Company. Having been asked to put those three names up there in the title together and say something about them, I remember what an innocent I was about science fiction when I began The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet for a boy aged eight who was absolutely devoted to the idea of Doctor Dolittle going to the moon. I was an innocent who would have agreed heartily that fantasy was one thing and one thing only: a fanciful work dealing with supernatural events or characters, and science fiction quite another: a kind of story that draws imaginatively on scientific knowledge and speculation. I knew nothing then of the [End Page 1] [Begin Page 5] great differings and philosophizings, the setting up and tearing down of fine lines technically and aesthetically between the two that had been going on among the devotees of each (in anthologies, science fiction has been much more apt to raid the fantasy collection than the other way round). and of the heat of those differings. Fantasy was my love. Science fiction extrapolated (I'd at least learned that word) from the facts of science, and it was not for me. What I was doing was playing with the fancies my conception called up, wanting only to tell a story, and having no notion in the world of "attacking scientific rationalism"1 or of attacking anything, come to that. Or so I believed then. And there, as to definitions, if I must think of them, is where I still am, no doubt, when asked to consider these two genres as separate categories, while realizing very well that the line between them (if there is a line) is blurred. Yes, you know it's blurred, says my reasoning. And, yes, I've read Robert Scholes' Structural Fabulation and have to admit that he has something there. This book, by his own admission on science fiction, seems to me - much of it - to be in defense of SF. And is it for this reason that he brings in The Earthsea Trilogy as SF, explicating about A Wizard of Earthsea for almost half a chapter in a book of four chapters, and giving no other novel aside from The Left Hand of Darkness as much consideration? Surely anyone will admit who has read it, Wizard works through magic in revealing Le Guin's philosophy of how a man shall live, rather than through scientific knowledge and speculation. And yet Scholes very acutely, I must confess, asks if Ged's explanation of the sources of power in the universe, "syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars,"2 is magic, religion, or science. And he replies to his own question that it is Le Guin's gift "to offer us a perspective in which these all merge, in which realism and fantasy are not opposed, because the supernatural is naturalized - not merely postulated but regulated, systematized, made part, of the Great Equilibrium itself."3 Yes, I see how simplistic it is to try to push a single category into an airtight compartment, when Scholes can draw science fiction and fantasy together under the name of structural fabulation, saying that it "is fiction that offers us a world clearly and radically discontinuous from the one we know, yet returns us to confront that known world in some cognitive way."4 But why structural, I ask. Because, says Scholes, he is differentiating between tales in which plot is an end in itself, as in so much science fiction, so that what one gets is space opera, and the aesthetically structured work in which the whole organization is meaningful to a degree that gives the reader far more than an exciting read. All right, then. This is a very useful and fruitful determination, this drawing of science fiction and fantasy together under the term fabulation, enabling Scholes to discuss either and ignoring the old narrow definition of SF. All of Le Guin's...