The Editing Klingdom

When we talk about sci-fi and fantasy in the publishing industry, it can be a little hard to know where the line is.

You have a character that has a breakthrough in scientific knowledge and figures out how to move to another dimension where all of his scientific knowledge is looked at as magic and the people in the new world are talking cats who have hobbit-like creatures for pets. The people in the new world have a dragon problem and ask him to go deal with it for them, seeing as he has so much more skill in magic than any of them have ever seen.

Okay. So there are science AND fantasy elements. But the local people call the things he does magic, and there are dragons. So it must be fantasy.

But really when you break it down, the point-of-view that we have here is that of a science fiction novel. The main character is a man of science. He is going to look at everything he does from a scientific viewpoint. He will analyze the new people that he has found with a scientific framework. He will most likely be hypothesizing and ruminating over the fact that these people think it is magic, but they are just not advanced enough to recognize the scientific principles. It might turn out that when he goes to find the dragons, he realizes they are not dragons at all, but rather dinosaurs. Somehow on this world, dinosaurs survived.

Now, let’s think about if the viewpoint of the story were reversed.

In this version of the story, the main character would be one of the cat people. Perhaps a young girl who has befriended a dragon and is trying to convince everyone else in her town that they are friendly. All of a sudden a mage from an unknown land appears. He looks like a large hobbit, but he seems to have understanding of magic that no one from their world has ever seen. The elders of her world ask him to rid the world of the dragons, and he pulls out beakers of unknown liquid and strange equipment and starts off on the task. She follows him and watches as he does all kind of strange study on the dragons. She listens as he proclaims that they are not dragons at all (but she knows they really are).

Well, now we have a fantasy story. The characters are all the same. The world is the same. The story is the same. But the point-of-view has made all the difference.

Of course, sometimes things are cut and dry. Star Trek is science fiction. Lord of the Rings is fantasy. There is no question.

Let me pose these final questions to leave you with something to think on:

Is Star Wars science fiction or fantasy? Can a story be both? And really, does it matter whether or not it is dinosaurs or dragons as long as the story is captivating and poignant?