Dragons, elves and wizards have little to do with starships, cyberspace, and time travel, but somehow, whether it’s on book store and library shelves — or at the upcoming International Festival of Authors — these characters in science fiction and fantasy books end up classified under the same genre: SF&F, leaving aliens who might easily be envisioned squaring off in Predator, moving in the same circles as hobbits.

They not only occupy the same shelf space at the bookstore, stories appear in leading publications like The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and are collected in hybrid anthologies of the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year. The premier literary prizes, the Hugo and Nebula Awards, are presented to "the best science fiction or fantasy works" of the previous year, with no distinguishing between the two genres. Even the authors' professional organization does double duty as the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

And then there's the way "SF&F" just seems to roll off the tongue.

Of course it may be that the differences are a matter of perspective. SF legend Arthur C. Clarke famously explained that imagined futures can take forms so weird and introduce technologies so bizarre that they are indistinguishable from magic. So why couldn't another planet, or an alternate past (or future), look like Tolkien's Middle Earth? Perhaps the ends of a continuum that has fantasy at one end and science at the other actually bend around in a circle and meet at their extremes.

Which leads to what promises to be one of the most interesting roundtable discussions – at this year’s IFOA when Lorna Toolis, whose title as the collection head of the Toronto Public Library's Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy hosts a panel "From Science to Fiction" that will address the question of what happens when science blurs with fiction and fantasy, tossing genre boundaries up for grabs.

With a little help from Festival authors (and others), here's some background on the current landscape and what's up for debate.

Among authors and readers alike there are contrasting points of view on the nature of the genre divide. On one side are border guards like editors David Hartwell and Katherine Cramer, who introduce their Year's Best SF anthologies with the following declaration: "This is a book full of science fiction — every story in the book is clearly that and not something else. It is our opinion that it is a good thing to have genre boundaries."

The assumption that a story can be one thing "clearly . . . and not something else" draws a line in the sand. And Canada's current dean of SF, the multiple-award-winning author Robert J. Sawyer, who will speak at the IFOA Oct. 25 and 28, is all in favour of maintaining those genre boundaries. Asked about the merging of SF and fantasy he responds "I think of science fiction and fantasy not as allied, but rather diametrically opposed, literatures: science fiction tells of things that plausibly might happen; fantasy is about things that never could happen. I get angry whenever someone dismisses something impossible as 'just science fiction;' what they mean is it's fantasy."

On the other side of the debate are the big-tent, blurry-boundary people, a group that can be identified by their use of labels like "science fantasy" and the increasingly prevalent catch-all "speculative fiction." Margaret Atwood is one of the more prominent voices, having forsworn the use of the term science fiction to describe her own "speculative" novels, despite the fact her 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale won an Arthur C. Clarke award for science fiction. More recently she has debated the labeling of the genre after the release of her 2003 and 2005 Oryx and Crake and The Penelopiad novels, considered by many to be in the SF category. "When it comes to genres," she later wrote in an attempt to explain her controversial stance against the term SF, "the borders are increasingly undefended, and things slip back and forth across them with insouciance."

Sandra Kasturi, co-editor of the dark fantasy publisher ChiZine and the anthology Imaginarium 2012: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing is one practitioner who is OK with that: "Personally, I think the blurring of boundaries is always a good thing," she writes. "Shaking things up is how you get new and exciting things to happen."

As it happens, Kasturi has published two of the best SF novels in recent years — Brent Hayward's Filaria and Robert Boyczuk's Nexus: Ascension — both written by authors who have crossed genre borders. When asked for their take on the divide Hayward and Boyczuk describe the labels as serving mainly as a way of reaching fans, and when it comes to judging the science in science fiction they tend to find it more curious than a source of concern. Be it fantasy or SF, they see the author's essential obligation to be maintaining the internal consistency that "a book needs to have in order to be taken seriously."

Given their success, perhaps the squabbling over what Atwood dismissed as "nomenclatural allegiances" doesn't really matter, and the maintenance and obliteration of genre borders are both "good things."

However squishy things may get on the border of science fiction and fantasy, though, one fact remains: science fiction is defined by its use of science, be it actually existing "normal" science or something entirely new and speculative but still identifiable as the product of theories that are currently available in scientific thinking.

In other words, you can't just make this stuff up.

To take the most obvious example: there's simply no way anyone is going to be leaving Earth on a spaceship anytime soon to visit habitable planets in distant galaxies. Indeed, you'd be perfectly justified in thinking that this is never going to happen. The distances involved are simply too great. But if we cryogenically froze the crew, or found a space-time wormhole to use as a shortcut, or developed technology that allowed ships to travel at warp speed . . . in theory it might be possible.

As with drawing a line between fantasy and science fiction, characterizing the role of science in science fiction involves a struggle between hard and soft positions.

Within the SF community the hardest of the hardliners defending the primacy of science are found among the devotees of what's known (naturally enough) as "hard SF." In hard SF, which is often written by authors with a background in science or who are working scientists themselves, the science is usually front and centre: it has to be right, and it has to work. Indeed, if a "hard SF" author gets called out for making a mistake on some minor technical matter in one of his books (they have those kinds of fans), he may feel an obligation to correct it in subsequent editions.

Other SF practitioners, however, are less stringent in their demands.

For author and astronomer Stuart Clark, who will be appearing at two IFOA events on Oct. 25th and 26th, "it's just good manners to get the science right. If you break a rule for a dramatic reason, to explore what it would be like to have telepathy say, then fine. But why invent things when nature has done it for you — and much better than you can! If there is any law of the universe, it is that reality is more amazing than anything you can imagine. Our exploration of the Universe proves that on an almost daily basis."

Ned Beauman, however, whose latest novel The Teleportation Accident was longlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Award and who will be part of the " From Science to Fiction" panel, Oct. 28 as well as reading from his latest work on Oct. 27th, sounds a note of caution: "Writing about the latest science is a bit like writing about popular culture — if your spaceship's faster-than-light drive is premised on string theory, then you might as well also have the crew wearing deep V-neck T-shirts, because it's going to feel dated pretty soon."

For Toronto’s Boyczuk the demands of "hard SF" are evidence of a splintering of the SF audience into fans of various sub-genres: "SF should get the science right, if it wants to speak to the audience that demands the science be right." And, he notes, the standards for "getting it right" can vary widely in a field where much of the science is bound to be speculative. When attending an SF writers’ workshop he was instructed "that SF readers demand the science be right — up to a point. Thus you are allowed one speculative/fantastic element that can't really be justified by our current understanding of the universe (faster-than-light drive, telepathy, teleportation, etc), but that if you use two, you are likely to turn off your reader. And a third means you are no longer writing SF."

Lorna Toolis also insists that there are rules, but that they remain pretty basic: "the reader is prepared to be entertained, willing to accept a completely imagined universe — but. . . and it is an important but. . . the imagined universe has to be seamless and not contradict anything the reader knows to be factual, or the illusion shatters and the reader is kicked out of the story."

"The author can make up a brand new technology or extrapolate social consequences of current technologies which have not yet occurred, and the story will flow into the author's universe without consequences; but break the rules of, say physics, and the universe comes apart and so does the story."

Finally, SF boundaries become important when blurring them has the effect, not only of alienating the reader, but of losing something essential to the genre. It's often been observed that SF's visions of the future are really projections of current anxieties. It is this, in combination with the representation of and extrapolations from real science, that gives science fiction, no matter how speculative, contemporary resonance. Whether set on another planet, or billions of years in the future, SF addresses the way we live now and the way we might live tomorrow.

As Sawyer puts it, "the accuracy of the science, and the rigor of the extrapolation, in serious science fiction is what gives the genre the moral authority to comment not just on our here and now but on where we're actually headed, and how to choose the future we might actually want to live in."

Or feel free to debate it at the IFOA, Oct. 18th to 28th at Harbourfront Centre.

Alex Good is a freelance writer who writes a regular column on science fiction for the Star’s book pages.

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Alex Good’s picks of the best science fiction and fantasy events at the IFOA

READING: Andrusyshyn, Clark, Doctorow, Redekop, Sawyer

Thursday, October 25, 8:00pm, 2012, Brigantine Room

Authors Larissa Andrusyshyn, Stuart Clark, Cory Doctorow, Corey Redekop and Robert J. Sawyer read from their latest works. The Walrus’s Kyle Carsten Wyatt hosts. Part of the IFOA’s FANTASTIC focus.

http://www.readings.org/?q=ifoa/round_table_from_science_to_fiction

ROUND TABLE: From Science to Fiction

Sunday, October 28, 5:00 p.m., 2012, Lakeside Terrace

From testable hypothesis to leaps of the fantastic, writers discuss what happens when science blurs with fiction and fantasy.

This round table discussion features authors Ned Beauman, Hiromi Goto and Robert J. Sawyer. Lorna Toolis hosts and moderates. Part of the IFOA’s FANTASTIC focus.

The best science in fiction

Here some of the best SF&F authors and experts on the genre recommend their favourite SF books:

Robert Sawyer: Bowl of Heaven, by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven: “The first-ever collaboration by two of the giants of hard science fiction. A cutting-edge, realistic portrayal of interstellar travel.”

Ned Beauman: Diaspora, by Greg Egan: “Scientists have now simulated brains up to the complexity of a cat, but this novel gives by far the most plausible account I’ve ever read of what it might be like for an entire human society to exist only as computer software.”

Brent Hayward: The Last Legends of Earth, by A. A. Attanasio: “A mind-blowing story about the resurrection of humanity six billion years after extinction. Attanasio sets the bar for ambition, complexity, and style in the genre.”

Stuart Clark: Rendezvous with Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke: “It captures the feeling of the Homeric Odyssey much better for me than his famous 2001. I love that at the end of the novel we still have no idea what this alien spacecraft means. The mystery remains intact. I think that may be exactly the situation if something artificial did drift into our solar system.”

Lorna Toolis: Ringworld, by Larry Niven: “Niven is a mathematician and in Ringworld he shows how the universe really works, and why it is beautiful.

Robert Boyczuk: Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes: “Ultimately, I’m much more interested in the impact advances in science and technology have on people than I am interested in the science itself, so I’ll pick Flowers for Algernon, in which the science is always off-stage and far-fetched (augmenting human intelligence through an operation), but which has on-stage scientists arguing about the scientific principle and the ethics of their research, and explores the harrowing toll their scientific research takes on a very human subject.”

Alex Good