THERE ARE DOZENS OF DEFINITIONS of what “science fiction” is; few are useful and none is definitive. Variations on the term, such as “speculative fiction,” complicate the discussion more than they clarify it.
Nobody—for good reason—has ever been able to say exactly where “fantasy” begins and ends. It is immensely larger than the current commercial category of books labelled Fantasy. It cannot be limited to “the impossible,” or “magic,” or “the supernatural.” The origins of fantastic literature are lost to sight, because it is worldwide, and if myth and legend are included in it, it long predates history and literacy. It’s permanent, it thrives, because it’s infinitely adaptable. Magic realism was a brilliant modern use of fantasy to record a reality not accessible to the techniques of realism. Science fiction can be seen as a brilliant modern development of fantasy to use the imagination within the parameters of the rationally possible, or at least the plausible.
Genre, a concept which could have served as a useful distinction of various kinds of fiction, has been degraded into a disguise for mere value-judgment. The various “genres” are now mainly commercial product-labels to make life easy for lazy readers, lazy critics, and the Sales Departments of publishers.
It’s not my job as a writer to make life easy for anybody. Including myself.
Three stories from my 1996 story collection Unlocking the Air are in the first volume of this collection. On my web site you can find a table of contents for that book. You want genre? I’ll give you genre. I described each story, not in such crude, vague terms as “realism” or “fantasy,” but accurately: Miniaturized Realism, Geriatric Realism, Californian Realism, Oregonian Realism, and Uncompromising Realism; Surrealism; Mythological Fantasy, Temporal Fantasy, Vegetable Fantasy, Visionary Fantasy, Revisionary Fantasy, Real Fantasy. . . . You won’t find any of the various subgenres of Science Fiction (Hard, Soft, Crunchy, Peanut-Free, Social, Slipstream, etc.), however, because Unlocking the Air doesn’t include any science fiction at all.
FOR A WRITER, THERE IS a genuine difference between fantasy and science fiction, which has nothing to do with the commercial branding of books as “genre” or the categorical imperatives of critics. The difference is in how you write it—what you are doing as a writer. In fantasy you get to make it all up, even the rules of how things work, and then follow your rules absolutely. In science fiction you get to make it up, but you have to follow most of the rules of science, or at least not ignore them.
Nine of the stories in this second volume are what I’d call science fiction, partly because they use familiar tropes—imaginary other planets reached by human beings in space ships, or imaginary other planets inhabited by human-like species, or Space Aliens visiting Earth—and also because they make some effort not to violate physical possibility, though stretching scientific ideas much farther than a scientist would.
“Semley’s Necklace” has a good many elements of myth (Norse) and fantasy mixed into the space-ship-alien-planet business. I think this mixture is now called science fantasy, but I only did it because I didn’t know any better yet. By the time I wrote “Nine Lives” I had a clearer idea of what I wanted to do with science fiction and how to do it.
“Mazes” does something I find myself doing fairly often: it speaks from the point of view of someone who has traditionally not been allowed a point of view at all.
As a matter of fact, so does “The First Contact with the Gorgonids,” a story that Harlan Ellison asked me to write, but then he didn’t like it, so I sold it to somebody else for a whole lot more money, but he and I have long since forgiven each other; we always do.
“The Shobies’ Story” is part of a semi-suite of stories in the collection A Fisherman of the Inland Sea. It’s essentially a story about what stories do, or can do. Bringing people together on a space ship from several of my “Hainish” worlds of earlier books and stories gave me a good deal of pleasure.
“Betrayals” is from the book Four Ways to Forgiveness, which (with a later, fifth story, “Old Music and the Slave Women”) is about a great slave uprising on the planets Werel and O. Sometimes a character comes into my mind with a story to tell. I learned that if I listen, carefully, with some patience, and write what I’m told, the story will come to be. As I grew older, more and more stories have been given me in that way, as gifts.
But not all. “The Matter of Seggri” started very differently, with my own questions. A scientific question, not yet fully and satisfactorily answered: When a few males would serve to procreate a species, why are there so many? And a social question, not yet answered adequately at all: Why, in almost all societies, do men dominate women? What’s the Darwinian profit in having equal numbers of the two genders but making them unequal in power? What if the situation were reversed? . . . A lot of science fiction starts out that way.
“Solitude” was written because I wanted to write about an introvert who finds a good place for introverts to live. Clearly it had to be on another world, because the World As We Know It is filled almost solid with extraverts, who refuse to learn how to spell “extravert” because they’re too busy rushing around in crowds shouting and cellphoning and texting and friending and joining groups and being outgoing and sociable to pay any attention to stuff like Latin prefixes, or silence, or introverts.
“The Wild Girls” is science fiction in that the caste system it depicts is modelled on historical observations of certain societies of the Mississippi Valley peoples. It’s one of the last stories I wrote, and a dark one.
“The Fliers of Gy” and “The Silence of the Asonu” come from Changing Planes, in which travel to other worlds is accomplished not on space ships, but by sitting too long in airports. Does space travel fueled by enforced misery and boredom rate as science fiction? Anyhow, the stories are less science-fictional or fantastic than satirical in intent.
If you’re getting bored with this classifying, I’m sorry—I’m doing it to show that the whole vocabulary—“realism” “science fiction,” “genre fiction,” and the rest of it—doesn’t give even a remotely adequate description of what I write. Or of what many other serious writers are writing. We need a whole new discourse on fiction.
Fantasy is still a valid term, if used carefully. “The Poacher” is pure fantasy: a riff on the folk tale of The Sleeping Beauty. “The Rule of Names” is also a fantasy, an early voyage to Earthsea. (I excluded stories closely associated with novels, but this one’s here because my editors wanted it, and how could I say no to Ursula’s mother and father?) “Small Change” and “The Wife’s Story” belong, I suppose, to the subgenres of ghost story, sort of, and werewolf story, sort of, only backwards.
“Omelas” (which is pronounced OH-meh-lahss) is a fable, I think. Its premise was stolen from the philosopher William James. You can find it also in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, being told by the Grand Inquisitor, with a somewhat different purpose. My version of it has had a long and happy career of being used by teachers to upset students and make them argue fiercely about morality.
The first draft of “She Unnames Them” was written down on a cocktail napkin during a bourbon on the rocks on an airplane flying home alone from New York to Oregon after getting an award. I was feeling good. I was feeling like rewriting the Bible. That story and “Sur” are probably my favorites in this volume, which is why I put them last.
I LEAVE IT ENTIRELY UP you, O Reader, to decide which volume of these two is the Real and which is the Unreal. I believe the science of deciding such questions is called Ontology, but I never learned it. I am strictly an amateur. I don’t know anything about reality, but I know what I like.