Ted Chiang on the distinction between fantasy and SF

[Kotze]

Interviewer: You have very specific views on the difference between magic and science. Can you talk about that?

Ted Chiang: Sure. Science fiction and fantasy are very closely related genres, and a lot of people say that the genres are so close that there's actually no meaningful distinction to be made between the two. But I think that there does exist an useful distinction to be made between magic and science. One way to look at it is in terms of whether a given phenomenon can be mass-produced. If you posit some impossibility in a story, like turning lead into gold, I think it makes sense to ask how many people in the world of the story are able to do this. Is it just a few people or is it something available to everybody? If it's just a handful of special people who can turn lead into gold, that implies different things than a story in which there are giant factories churning out gold from lead, in which gold is so cheap it can be used for fishing weights or radiation shielding. In either case there's the same basic phenomenon, but these two depictions point to different views of the universe. In a story where only a handful of characters are able to turn lead into gold, there's the implication that there's something special about those individuals. The laws of the universe take into account some special property that only certain individuals have. By contrast, if you have a story in which turning lead into gold is an industrial process, something that can be done on a mass scale and can be done cheaply, then you're implying that the laws of the universe apply equally to everybody; they work the same even for machines in unmanned factories. In one case I'd say the phenomenon is magic, while in the other I'd say it's science. Another way to think about these two depictions is to ask whether the universe of the story recognizes the existence of persons. I think magic is an indication that the universe recognizes certain people as individuals, as having special properties as an individual, whereas a story in which turning lead into gold is an industrial process is describing a completely impersonal universe. That type of impersonal universe is how science views the universe; it's how we currently understand our universe to work. The difference between magic and science is at some level a difference between the universe responding to you in a personal way, and the universe being entirely impersonal.

source (http://www.boingboing.net/2010/07/22/ted-chiang-interview.html)

[¿Que?]

Interesting. When I was younger I would sometimes be criticized by my friends because I didn't like fantasy books that much, but I totally loved science fiction. They could never really wrap their heads around that, and I was never really able to explain the appeal, except by saying that scify was more believable in some way. I guess the appeal was that to me, it was more believable, because maybe in a subconscious way, I understood the whole distinction between an impersonal universe and its opposite. My friends, who also tended to be a bit egocentric, may have had difficulty internalizing this basic scientific axiom.

EDIT: BUt please bear in mind that I am not knocking Fantasy stuff or people that enjoy this type of work. Just the people I used to roll with.

[Comrade Trollface]

Except of course, there's plenty of SF tropes that exemplify this 'special individual' archetype. Not all science fiction is social fiction. Though I generally prefer the sort of SF that examines a society where lead is turned into gold on a mass scale, a story about an inventor who discovers the process is no less an SF story. Wells' The Time Machine (though it was still social fiction for other reasons) was not about the social implications of time travel. Asimov's The End of Eternity was. Read End of Eternity by the way. One of Asimov's best.

And just to smash up this dichotomy further, there's Ursula K. Leguin's Earthsea books. Leguin's well constructed world does integrate magic into its economy rather well.
And there's an entire set of tropes in other Fantasy (as exemplified by Diskworld, Ebberon, etc) that treats the subject of the socioeconomic integration of magic as well.

[¿Que?]

Except of course, there's plenty of SF tropes that exemplify this 'special individual' archetype. Not all science fiction is social fiction. Though I generally prefer the sort of SF that examines a society where lead is turned into gold on a mass scale, a story about an inventor who discovers the process is no less an SF story. Wells' The Time Machine (though it was still social fiction for other reasons) was not about the social implications of time travel. Asimov's The End of Eternity was. Read End of Eternity by the way. One of Asimov's best.
I don't know, it's been a while since I read the article, but I think you're getting some ideas mixed up. The special individual that the author was referring to was in reference to a scientific understanding of the natural world (the notion of an impersonal universe). You seem to be conflating this concept with something like a great man theory of history, which while technically not scientific on strictly Marxist terms, is still plausible given a naturalistic world view. It is perfectly conceivable that, to a greater or lesser degree, historical outcomes would change given different historical actors.


And just to smash up this dichotomy further, there's Ursula K. Leguin's Earthsea books. Leguin's well constructed world does integrate magic into its economy rather well.
And there's an entire set of tropes in other Fantasy (as exemplified by Diskworld, Ebberon, etc) that treats the subject of the socioeconomic integration of magic as well.
This I totally agree with. The distinction is strictly conceptual. In reality there is a lot of gray area, and writers' imaginations can never be pigeonholed into neat little categories with rigidly defined boundaries. Star Wars idea of the force comes to mind, at least until the introduction of midi-chlorians in the prequels.