And I will call Plato “two-dollar sci-fi”.

Which leads to your second point. That’s very common. One of my roommates not only engages in that, but he admits to it. Most of the SF (and fantasy) he enjoys he also considers not typical of the genre — like the Lord of the Rings. O_o He also doesn’t believe The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, is SF, because he likes it, and because McCarthy is considered a literary writer.

If you don’t already know, The Road is a post-apocalypse novel.

A professor of mine, who is far more rational, feels the same — and went so far as to say he thinks the Mad Max movies aren’t SF. I think it comes from a belief that all SF is spaceships and ray guns. The post-apocalypse, like the alternate history, features neither of those, and so they’re both often included in “good” literature by prissy literati, who get offended when the SF fan mentions that they’re par for the course for fifteen-year-olds (the perceived fanbase of SF, according to them).

In fact, Philip Roth wrote an alternate history some ten or twenty years after Dick’s Man in the High Castle, and believed he had invented a new genre of fiction. Oops.

It’s a matter of interpretation, of course. : D

I think Wolfe is in a sense spot on though about “sci-fi” being a made up term; really, the only reason many books are classified as “science fiction” is just for the convenience of marketing and shelving (which brings to mind some examples such as Margaret Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale” or “Oryx and Crake”. She’s a famous and well-respected author, so heaven-forbid that her books would be consigned to so ghastly a fate as being shelved in the science fiction section).

Though I would claim that literature is *more* abstracted, even than anime, because you’re experiencing at least one thing — seeing the characters — in the same way you would in real life. But in literature you don’t even see them, you read descriptions.

@ghostlightning: It’s personal, but I loathe the concept of “suspension of disbelief.” Yes, Coleridge, great, all that, but I fall in line more with Tolkien’s conception of a “secondary world,” within which all the stuff is simply true. Because we never actually suspend our disbelief, or else we would think the Ancient Mariner really did kill an albatross and speak to Chance and Death.

I play DnD and you have no idea how much that wounds me. : D I suppose if you wanted a list of heavy hitters in the genre, I would say Tolkien, Lewis, Howard, Leiber, Dunsany, and Moorcock. Of course, at this point, most contemporary fantasy fans have no idea who those people are, but they did more to shape the genre than any others (maybe not Lewis).

@TheKittymeister: Sounds neat.

Also, YES.

& I don’t particularly agree either, but escapism in a narrow sense actually sounds like the perfect term for what Wolfe deems as the ‘wonder’ of fantasy. His emphasis on it as “desire and longing arising out of the promise of other worlds or states of being” almost sounds like it would fit right into an episode of ‘Illegal Drugs & How They Got That Way.’ A bit flippant, but it seems that to him, fantasy’s wonder is all about wishing & promises, with no comment on achieving _some_ kind of satisfaction.

I wonder about this when reading manga, where most of the time the images are black and white. Strange hair colors are ‘short cuts’ in characterizations at the most superficial level, but don’t take that as a pejorative, at least from me.

While I am aware of the stricter distinctions of fantasy, practically I still end up using Dungeons and Dragons as my touchstone; only taking into account the stricter definition when I find myself already in a fantasy experience of a text that I did not consciously expect to be so.

Similarly, Sci-Fi = Star Wars is the case for me, only discovering SF when I took an elective on Science Fiction back at uni. SF now = Asimov, Herbert, Heinlein, Le Guin LOL.

What I’m trying to share is that I am intellectual about my business in consuming these kinds of texts, and yet I am largely illiterate of the great expanse of texts within these genres. Not to put myself as a complete layman, but I think I’m close ergo, elucidations from posts like this are, or should be of service to people like me.

”Sci-fi” was just a short version of “science fiction” for me, growing up; I’ve never experienced it as pejorative at all.

Same. In fact, growing up, I never heard “SF” at all, and though it may be more “proper,” or indicate a more proper kind of narrative, it now seems a little unusual to me, or antiquated at least. Granted, I was always (and am still, I guess) more a fan of fantasy, and I’d be lying if I said I was immersed in the dialogue of science fiction from an early age.

In fantasy, the term need not imply awe and terror in the face of the natural world, but rather suggests the desire and longing arising out of the promise of other worlds or states of being.

So, escapism? Or, well, that’s more narrow than what I’m going for. Is this suggesting that “wonder” in fantasy comes from the contrast between the fantasy world and ours? If so, those are the grounds on which I’d be inclined to disagree. In my experience, fantasy (like all kinds of stories, really) is pretty self-contained, and if the fantasy world in question includes frequent giant magical explosions and, I don’t know, flying asexual unicorns, those things aren’t going to invoke in me what I’d call wonder, at least not for very long. I’d think that fantastical wonder has more to do with execution. I wonder at how characters in fantasy stories deal with situations the likes of which 1. realistically could never be, but 2. strike me as startlingly familiar and human, possibly because I’m drawn to stories whose fantasy elements stem from the exploration of humanity anyway. Or, rather, I express wonder in the face of the situations themselves. Hell, for all I know, fantasy itself has its roots in the desire to bend, twist, and otherwise test human beings in ways realistic fiction (and nonfiction, for that matter) could never manage, due to those meddling laws of the natural universe, but I’m not prepared to commit to that position. Not today, at any rate.

What I’m getting at is that wonder in fantasy comes not directly from things like magic, but from how those things shape and affect the characters who are privy to them. So I’m with you in saying that “awe and terror in the face of the natural world” would be a part of it. “Desire and longing arising out of the promise of other worlds or states of being” sounds almost like religion; I strongly doubt that fantasy makes such a promise.

Wolfe deals with “cognitive estrangement,” lifted from the writings of Darko Suvin and defined, here, as “estranged from the naturalistic world but cognitively connected to it” (15). Now, what I wonder about this, in relation to anime, is how liberally this could be applied.

If I’m understanding it correctly, I think I apply it pretty liberally. I doubt that something like literary realism could be accomplished by anime simply because the medium of animation itself represents such a remove from reality. Not that literature or any medium reproduces the real world exactly, as that’s impossible, but literature (and I suppose live-action film) can offer a view of reality that’s less…abstracted, maybe, than animation. Maybe this is a separate concern from cognitive estrangement, though.