Science fiction (SF) and the fairy tale both deal with situations that are contrary to fact, a quality Samuel R. Delany calls ‘subjunctivity’. Although the term ‘science fiction’ might seem automatically to exclude any meaningful contact with the fairy tale, both are subsets of the mode called fantastic. Rosemary Jackson defines mode as a set of general rules not limited to a particular literary type (genre) or time period, and the critics Brian Aldiss and Damien Broderick have found it more useful to speak of SF as a mode than as a genre or story type, since one can then focus on what SF does instead of on what elements—space travel or aliens—it includes. At the same time, SF is marketed as a genre separate from fantasy in recognition of the distinctive formulaic elements of each type.
SF is the most recent addition to the fantastic mode. It began in the 19th century as narrative response to scientific enquiry and the increasing application in society of the results of experimentation. SF came into its own in the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, and addresses the anxieties not only of the destabilizing effects of industrialization but also those of evolutionary theory. Even if the dominant cultural attitude was hopeful belief in the progressive amelioration of the human condition, serious consideration of the implications of Darwin's theories, for example, that the devolution depicted in The Time Machine (1895) was a possibility, served only to heighten the tension between hope and fear. If Jules Verne produced exuberant fantastic voyages, the writings of Wells, even if he called them ‘scientific romances’, presented a darker vision. The apparent changes of fortune in fairy tales bring the world back to a (possibly better) sameness, whereas SF moves its worlds into an uncertainty and difference. Darko Suvin speaks of SF as a literature dependent on an ‘imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment’ based on a creative departure he calls a ‘novum’ that both generates and grants an inner logic to the plot; its value rests not in sheer novelty but in its genuine alternatives to what we know and to the social structures we now inhabit.
The boundaries between SF and fantasy are the subject of numerous debates because SF does not always achieve the level of purity from the purely fantastic desired by its most rigorous proponents. For example, the practice most often associated with SF narratives is extrapolation from our current state of science. Problems in disentangling SF from fairy tale arise, however, when a futuristic device is employed as a substitute for a magic wand, as it tends to be in the variety of SF known as ‘space opera’. The resulting narrative becomes a fairy tale with futuristic hardware.
One basic constraint separates the SF mode from the fairy tale: both fairy tales and SF are rule‐based, but the rules of SF either replicate or are modelled upon the empirical physical principles of our everyday world. One will not find witches, mages, elves, or dragons in those pseudo‐medieval aspects they present in traditional fairy tales; nor will one find the supernatural or magical agencies that dominate the fairy‐tale mode of writing. George MacDonald describes the fantastic environment as an ‘inverted world, with laws of other kinds’. MacDonald's own fantasies occasionally touched upon elements of science, as in the arrangement of mirrors used in Lilith, which was praised for its ingenuity by H. G. Wells, but the ‘laws’ of the narrative world are not the central focus. MacDonald called his fantasies ‘fairy stories’, and even the scientific romantic tales of Hawthorne such as ‘Rappacini's Daughter’ or ‘The Birthmark’ have the individual soul, so to speak, at their narrative centre. In ‘Do‐It‐Yourself Cosmology’, Ursula K. Le Guin describes fantasy as ‘introverted’, lending itself to private fantasizing, and SF as a modern, extraverted variety of fantasy more suited to address issues of technology in society.
The fairy tale has two primary functions in SF: it offers a structural formula, following to a greater or lesser degree the motif patterns of quest and initiation (departure–test–return) described by Vladimir Propp, and it provides the reader with appealing compensatory fantasies. In his essay ‘Fairy Tales and Science Fiction’, Eric Rabkin discusses the psychoanalytical and developmental concepts shared by fairy tales and science fiction: wish fulfilment, the illusion of centrality, and omnipotence of thought. In fairy tales, the ‘happy ending’ is the most common element of wish‐fulfilment, but the triumph of the downtrodden, the possession of extraordinary or preternatural talents or a talisman, or the victory against incredible odds—Rabkin cites ‘The Brave Little Tailor’—make up the plots that culminate in such endings.
In terms of setting, the world of the fairy tale tends to be positively oriented towards the protagonist, providing helpers as needed, a detail noted both by Northrop Frye and somewhat differently by Stanislaw Lem; the world of an SF tale tends to be neutrally oriented, it is a place and nothing more, even if populated by beings inimical to the protagonist. The SF tale does not demand the ‘happy ending’ as an absolute criterion, and the most empirically‐oriented tales do not provide it. At best, the more utopian SF will be open‐ended, with future positive results contingent on continued struggle for social change.
In traditional fairy tales the utopian content is attenuated to an improvement in the social condition of the protagonist (most often an unmarried female) within the existing social structure, a situation quite different from the more obvious utopianism of traditional folk tales which advocates the destabilizing of social hierarchies. Fairy‐tale individualism persists in a great deal of SF, although the hero takes on the enemies of an oppressed or beleaguered world as often as not, and the SF monster‐slayer encounters ever more exotic opponents and uses the most up‐to‐date weaponry. Such tales, the ‘galactic empire’ stories, show SF at its most conservative; victory means the restoration of the existing social order by destroying the invading or disruptive element.
SF contains a strong and essential admixture of the fantastic; time travel and propulsion beyond the speed of light, both patently impossible, are SF commonplaces. Brian Aldiss designates Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as arguably the first work of SF, but one must deal with the novel's notable lack of rigour in the ‘science’ surrounding the fabrication of Victor Frankenstein's creature. At the same time, Shelley's manipulation of Gothic fiction's dread of the Other effectively uses the fantastic to highlight the anxieties provoked by technological advances. Aldiss's definition of SF insists on its Gothic content: ‘Science fiction is the search for a definition of mankind and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post‐Gothic mode.’ This definition serves to underscore SF's continuity with an older narrative tradition while taking account of the demands of empiricism. Fairy tales do not offer explanations of their magic; it is simply part of the narrative world of the stories. SF arises in an interrogative context, so to speak, and its departures from accepted ‘reality’ are more evident, since its narrative universe shares its basic principles with our own.
The issues of probability, possibility, and plausibility focus on the reader's expectations of and responses to SF. We read a fantasy/fairy story with a different set of protocols from those active when we read SF; the ‘enabling devices’ of SF are different from those of the fairy tale; the distinguishing features—multi‐sun solar systems or silicon‐based physiology—are not at all trivial; rather, they signal to the reader SF's narrative universe and its attendant rules. For instance, in a much‐quoted example, Samuel R. Delany notes that the phrase ‘her world exploded’ means one thing in a mainstream novel and something entirely different in SF. SF has made strategic use of fairy‐tale conventions since they are older, more widely available, and more a part of the experience of the general reader; hence, fairy‐tale elements have served to make arcane content more accessible to its readers. Mainstream fiction abandoned fantasy in the name of ‘realism’, but for a long time the isolation of American SF within a community of ‘fans’ kept a large proportion of its narratives closer to the conventions of fairy tales than might be evident to casual readers put off by too‐evident hardware; these are the narratives known as ‘space operas’.
The ‘space opera’ was canonized in the pulp magazines begun in the 1920s by Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories, and brought to its fullest development in John W. Campbell's magazines of the 1930s, most notably Astounding Science‐Fiction. Gernsback's novel Ralph 124 C41+ (1925) set the pattern for many to follow: the super‐scientist with a device for every situation and the wits and courage to conquer foes of any size and anatomical configuration, who defends a heroine predictably attractive to the opposite sex—Martian or human.
The space opera, aptly named since it is an elaborately costumed spectacle—Aldiss calls it ‘power fantasy’—features the radically polarized conflict of good vs. evil of the fairy tale; imperilled worlds and maidens are rescued by clean‐cut heroes. In the earlier stories, for every device that was a rigorous extrapolation from known principles—the then hypothetical radar was described with uncanny accuracy in Gernsback's Ralph—many were carried over from medieval romance. For example, in E. E. Smith's 1930s ‘Lensman’ series, his warriors wear ‘space armour’ and wield ‘space axes’ as well as their blasters. A more up‐to‐date version of medievalism, heroics, and SF hardware is Frank Herbert's Dune (1965), the first and most successful in a series that combined creative extrapolation—the desert world of Arrakis—with a solid story of initiation.
The use of fairy‐tale motifs ensured SF's success among those readers who craved adventure along with the detailed technical discussions that sometimes halted the progress of the plot, but that very success led to the stagnation of American SF. There were a few twists to the standard imitation heroic epic such as the doctor‐as‐hero stories of Murray Leinster, written in the late 1950s and early 1960s, which featured the human and animal team of Calhoun and the monkey‐like Murgatroyd, companion and bio‐synthesizer in one, or, in the 1940s, stories such as Fritz Leiber's stories of Fafrhd and the Grey Mouser, for which he coined the term ‘sword‐and‐sorcery’. On the whole, however, for every novel by Alfred Bester such as The Stars My Destination (1956) with its space‐warping mode of personal travel, More than Human (1953) by Theodore Sturgeon, which presented the next stage of human evolution as a composite psyche, Homo Gestalt, or the evolution‐as‐apocalypse of Childhood's End (1953) by Arthur C. Clarke, there were scores of writers content simply to provide the fans with more of the formulaic fiction they craved.
The presence of fairy‐tale elements in SF suggests that it might be especially attractive to younger readers. The ‘power fantasies’ of space opera tend to be described, pejoratively, as ‘adolescent’, and the SF reader is caricatured as an alienated young male. The straightforward action‐oriented narratives of SF, as well as its avoidance, especially from the 1930s to the 1960s, of any adult sexuality made SF accessible and appealing to young and older readers alike, with the result that both groups read the same stories. To this day, book club notices tend to place warnings about explicit language, violence, or sexual content after their promotional statements in recognition of this dual audience.
There has been, nevertheless, a relatively small amount of SF directed to pre‐adolescent readers. These stories use space travel and off‐world settings for stories of quests and initiation, with a generous portion of world‐saving heroics. In the 1950s, Isaac Asimov (writing as ‘Paul French’) published the ‘Lucky Starr’ series; Robert Heinlein's Bildungsromane such as Citizen of the Galaxy (1957) or Red Planet (1949) anticipated the revolution‐centred The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966). In the young adult fiction of these two authors, the quality of the prose is strikingly high, in general less hackneyed than classic pulp SF repackaged as novels. On the other hand, novels by Alan E. Nourse, notably Rocket to Limbo (1957), or Lester del Rey's Marooned on Mars and Rocket Jockey (both 1952) replicated the tried and true space opera formulas.
For much younger readers, Eleanor Cameron's ‘Mushroom Planet’ books (the first was written in 1954 for her 9‐year‐old son) followed the ‘boy explorer’ pattern. Although SF is traditionally male‐oriented fiction, it was read by girls, who admittedly found very few females except those waiting to be rescued. Still, they had Heinlei n's Podkayne of Mars: Her Life and Times (1963) with its female protagonist, and Have Spacesuit—Will Travel (1958), in which the girl is a prodigy, surpassing the boy in intellect if not in strength. In the 1970s, James H. Schmitz used the popular pattern established by the ‘Nancy Drew’ stories in his short stories and novels featuring Telzey Amberdon; earlier, in 1965, he published ‘Balanced Ecology’, combining a serious topic with a satisfying story of effectively heroic children.
Today, the fairy‐tale adventure has, to a great extent, been taken over by role‐playing and computer games. The work of Sylvia Louise Engdahl, such as Enchantress from the Stars (1970), the Tripod Trilogy (1980) of John Christopher, or the ‘Torin’ series of Cherry Wilder, which began with The Luck of Brin's Five (1977), continue the tradition of heroic SF adventures for children. Young adult SF in print tends to focus more on utopias and dystopias than on wish‐fulfilment, which is now mostly the province of fantasy fiction, flourishing for this market more than ever before. There are elements of dystopia in Engdahl's later work and in Christopher's trilogy; Lois Lowry's The Giver (1993) is a more recent example of this tendency.
Part of the attraction of the young audience to SF and fantasy can be attributed to the popular films from the 1970s to the present; it is here that the links between SF and the fairy tale have been deliberately affirmed and exploited. George Lucas's four ‘Star Wars’ films, Star Wars (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), The Return of the Jedi (1983), and The Phantom Menace (1999), replay a version of Freu d's ‘Family Romance’ (the child as hidden royalty) in a quasi‐Arthurian Bildungsroman. The wish‐fulfilment of finding the absent father and gaining a magical friend is the central motivation of Steven Spielberg's E.T.: The Extra‐Terrestrial (1982), and Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) offers similar compensatory fantasy for the adult audience.
If wish fulfilment is enlarged to the concepts of adult desires, fears, or hopes, and the self‐knowledge that is the ideal goal of the fairy‐tale quest is enlarged to agency in social transformation, then fairy‐tale content remains a viable structuring element in contemporary SF. The monster‐slayer, or the (generally) Male Cinderella, of whom George Lucas's Luke Skywalker is but the latest exemplar, do not exhaust the relationship of fairy tale to SF.
Three such stories are Samuel R. Delany's Babel‐17 (1966), Vonda N. McIntyre's Superluminal (1984), and Marge Piercy's He, She, and It (1991). In the 1960s, SF's ‘New Wave’ brought deliberately self‐reflexive literary techniques to the forefront in SF writing. In addition to the older structures, fairy tales among them, these writers experimented with aligning techniques from contemporary fiction with the narrative content of SF. In Babel‐17 Delany addresses the effects of linguistics on our perceptions of reality as his heroine, the poet Rydra Wong, her accomplice, the Butcher, who seems more humanoid than human, and her crew—12 teenagers, a married ‘triple’, and three ‘discorporates’ (i.e. dead persons)—seek the source of a mechanical language linked with successful enemy sabotage; theoretical complexity and freewheeling traditional narrative structures function here in unison. Vonda N. McIntyre invokes many of the conventions of adult romance, yet the love stories among humans so radically altered for survival in the oceans or in deep space that they can no longer sustain meaningful relationships with the unaltered, undermine reader expectations as often as they fulfil them; thus she recuperates what would otherwise be banality. Piercy reflects on the nature of story itself, interweaving the political and ecological struggles of an imperilled colony of Jewish descent against world‐controlling corporations, with the ‘bubbe meise’, or ‘granny tales’ of the Golem of the Prague ghetto—not simple fairy tales, to be sure, but told by an elderly programmer as part of the socialization of the android warrior she has helped to create—a re‐enactment of the ancient cultural work of the fairy tale.
Although the most transparent appropriations of the fairy tale appear in American SF, the utopian potential of fairy‐tale structure was also exploited in the former Soviet Union, primarily in the 1960s and early 1970s by the brothers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, notably The Snail on the Slope (1966–8) and Roadside Picnic (1972), to express the hope that technology would help to reduce the gap between socialist utopian dreams and human reality. The Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, one of the most stringent critics of SF's dissipation of its critical potential in the ‘empty games’ of space opera, used fairy‐tale structures to parody the foibles of his robot inventors in the short stories collected as The Cyberiad (1967).
All of these stories attest to the durability of the fairy tale while not replicating SF's earlier trite use of the old motifs. The ‘story’ of SF has never been separate from that of the fairy tale; these contemporary works speak of some of the best that that long association has to offer.
Bibliography
- Aldiss, Brian, and Wingrove, Owen, Trillion‐Year Spree (1986).
- Broderick, Damien, Reading by Starlight (1995).
- Csicsery‐Ronay, Jr., Istvan, ‘Towards the Last Fairy Tale: On the Fairy‐Tale Paradigm in the Strugatskys' Science Fiction, 1963– 72’,
Science‐Fiction Studies , 13.1 (1986). - Delany, Samuel R., ‘About 5,750 Words’, The Jewel‐Hinged Jaw: Notes of [sic] the Language of Science Fiction (1977).
- Jackson, Rosemary, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (1981).
- Le Guin, Ursula K., “‘Do‐It‐Yourself Cosmology’”, in The Language of the Night (1979).
- Rabkin, Eric, “‘Fairy Tales and Science Fiction’”, in George E. Slusser et al. (eds.), Bridges to Science Fiction (1980).
- Scholes, Robert, “‘Boiling Roses: Thoughts on Science Fantasy’”, in George Slusser and Eric Rabkin (eds.), Intersections: Fantasy and Science Fiction (1987).
- Suvin, Darko, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (1979).
— Amelia A. Rutledge
