The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (paperback)

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Iliad,
trans. Lattimore

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Erewhon

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The Left Hand
of Darkness

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What does not count as science fiction

Several other literary genres are sometimes lumped in with science fiction, but are not included in the list of The Greatest Science Fiction of All Time. In general they are not included because most science fiction readers would not consider them science fiction—as far as I can tell. But here are a few rationales for their exclusion:

• Horror: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is often considered one of the first science fiction novels as well as a great work of horror, while Bram Stoker's Dracula is usually left in only the latter category. Why the difference? Probably because in Shelley's story the monster was created by science while Stoker's was supernaturally invoked. If we accepted Dracula as SF, then we might also have to accept every ghost story, Greek myth and fairy tale, not to mention many religious texts such as the Bible. Moreover, Frankenstein is often seen as a response to technological advances and a warning about scientific pride.

However, it may be noted that Europeans are more likely than North Americans to count Dracula and other horror tales among sci-fi's progenitors, sometimes citing the supposedly psychological science explored or exploited in that novel.

Also note that Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde could be seen as situated halfway between Frankenstein and Dracula on the science fiction-horror spectrum, as scientific means are adduced for the transformation in that story but those means are somewhat irrelevant to the point of the story—it could have been a magical spell and the essential horror of the tale would remain. A similar point can be made concerning some of Edgar Allen Poe's works. I've included Jekyll and Hyde and at least one Poe story on the Greatest list—to be as inclusive as possible, without being ridiculous.

• Fantasy: This is a genre as difficult to delineate as science fiction. Some publications and book stores put them together as "science fiction and fantasy" (or the other way around). The fact that both names are used however is a hint that they are not identical, although the dividing line is sometimes blurred. The difference is sometimes spelled out along these lines: Science fiction looks at possibilities given our known natural laws, while fantasy looks at possibilities that break our known natural laws. So machines flying to the moon are science fiction, while dragons flying on earth are fantasy. Advanced technology is SF, while magic spells are fantastic.

You might ask: what about SF that has spaceships flying faster than the speed of light or other devices that break known natural laws? Two answers. 1) It may be bad science fiction. 2) The author is supposing that scientific means of circumventing limitations such as the speed of light have been found—this is different from having a wizard mutter a few magic words to whisk people across the universe, which would be the supernatural fantasy approach.

There's always a problem with some hard-to-classify works. On the borderline in this case may be the Dragonflight books of Anne McCaffrey, in which the beasts fly and other psychic phenomena occur, but which are given scientific underpinnings, however flimsy. Somehow though, her books just feel more like fantasy than sci-fi. And then there's the World of Tiers series by Philip José Farmer, which I never have been able to categorize, but is a little closer to SF and so is included on the science fiction list.

• Fabulation and Slipstream: Fabulation is a latter twentieth-century trend in literature in which some elements of the story are clearly fantastic while others are natural. The excitement comes from the juxtaposition of the two. Some critics would put fabulists like Jorge Luis Borges and Thomas Pynchon, and a whole host of Latin American magic realists, in the SF category. For the most part however, this has been considered a separate genre of fiction, or placed in the mainstream literary tradition.

Related is the slipstream, a take-off on "mainstream", that science fiction fans have taken to calling fabulations and other stories that involve some science fiction elements but aren't really about those elements, focusing more on traditional literary issues. It's often considered a derogatory term, implying that the mainstream writers are just throwing in some sci-fi bits to jazz up their otherwise boring stories.

However, many accepted science fiction works, such as by Philip K. Dick and Kurt Vonnegut, might also be considered slipstream by a strict definition. These stories can include science fiction devices such as space flight, time travel or novel social structures, yet concentrate entirely on questions of morality or relationships causally unrelated to those devices. It's a judgment call whether to include them in the science fiction category, but my tendency is to do so for established SF authors.

• Progenitors of SF: Claims have often been made for stories going right back to ancient literature—if not as science fiction, at least as forerunners of science fiction. Thus mythology such as Gilgamesh and the Iliad are claimed as proto-science fiction. Mainly for their fantasy elements.

However, without any connection with science or technology, these don't feel like science fiction, even in the genre's infancy. The earliest works listed in The Greatest Science Fiction of All Time, tend to involve using science or technology to either fly to the moon (a common dream once we became sufficiently astronomically sophisticated) or to build humanlike creatures (a common dread, it seems, once we began to think of the human body as a machine). It seems that a certain materialistic, post-mythological understanding of the world is necessary for a literature we can call call science fiction to emerge.

• Utopian and Dystopia Literature: This is a tough one. Extraordinary voyages have made up a lot of what we call science fiction. And often the voyages have led to discovery of other civilizations which are typically depicted either as ideally organized or as nightmares to be avoided. Often this is the author's point: he is taking us to another land to give himself an opportunity to pontificate upon the best or worst social systems we should or shouldn't adopt ourselves. Or he's using the comparison of the imagined world with our current society to highlight aspects of our own we wouldn't have otherwise noticed.

Generally, the more politically or philosophically inclined of these works, such as Thomas More's Utopia and Samuel Butler's Erewhon, are not considered science fiction. Others in which the science or technology are more central seem to fall better into the science fiction camp. This does not mean however that science fiction cannot be politically or philosophically interesting—works such as Ursula Le Guin's The Left
Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed are both of those, and are solidly SF. Perhaps the difference lies more in the author's approach than the content—is the author delivering a polemic with the amazing voyage only providing the platform or is the amazing voyage part and parcel of what makes the views interesting?

At some point in the early twentieth century, fictional utopias and dystopias stopped being discovered elsewhere on Earth during our own time and moved into the future—or at least into settings that seemed futuristic to us. It's been suggested that this is when fantastic voyages became science fiction. Indeed the two most famous utopian/dystopian novels around that time, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four have futuristic science fiction elements and are included on the list. Meanwhile B.F. Skinner's Walden Two, which was written in that period also and talks a lot about science but takes place contemporarily rather than in the future, is not considered science fiction.

As with most of these border disputes, I am not a hundred percent certain why particular works are considered to fall on either side of the line. The boundary is blurry and the decisions are inconsistent. But I try to follow consensus. Thank goodness I don't have to make up lists of who's in my family.

I'll leave you with one more philosophical quote, this from Ludwig Feuerbach:

We people the other planets, not that we may place there different beings from ourselves, but more beings of our own or of a similar nature.

This was written in 1841 before the term "science fiction" was known and Feuerbach's target was not literature but religion. But the insight still stands today in regard to SF. Whatever our definition—whether we think it's about science, about the future or about other realities—science fiction is, as all art, about us here and now.

As always, if you wish to dispute these views, or to propose a work to include in any category or time period, or if you wish to correct an existing entry, send me an email with your ideas.

— Eric