(Marketing) Category Error
Ted Chiang thinks that to understand the difference between SF and fantasy is to consider the difference between science and magic, and having started from such a shoddy premise, manages to get the whole thing wrong.

The problem is one of shitheap ideology. Chiang talks about the mass production of technological goods (radios, what have you) versus notional artisinal production of magical goods (pumpkin coaches, etc.) and says "Once the Industrial Revolution began, though, everyone could see tangible, practical consequences of the universe's impersonal nature."

That's quite a statement, sitting as Chiang is in a country where people think Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to church on Sunday, that a news report about a plane crash is a secret message to them from God saying "I killed those eighty-nine people to make sure you take Greyhound to Disneyland instead of flying", and that they're going to win the lottery one day if they keep playing their birthday as their lucky numbers. Plus, how about those folks who shake their fists at their computers when the DSL blinks out, who look heavenward and say "Why me?" when they're stuck in traffic or struck with cancer, and pretty much, you know everyone except for the sociopathic fatalist? The last thing people want to see are the tangible, practical consequences of the universe's impersonal nature...unless and until it suits them. Then we can shrug and say "Ah, well, that's what happens in a free market/when you don't pay attention in school/ when bad weather hits some continent I've never been to/ when my neighbor gets cancer and I don't." Indeed, even social systems, which can certainly be personal in nature, are conceived of as impersonal forces -- a part of the natural universe divorced from human agency -- when it suits the observer, his or her prejudices, and his or her needs for ego defense.

And speaking of ego defense, this is where Chiang goes wrong. He's not defending his own ego, I don't think, but he is repeating an argument that echoes through the hallways of airport Holiday Inns every weekend -- the SF writer's self-justification. Most SF, the so-called "literature of ideas" contains precious little of either. It's Boy's Adventure stuff, with the math worked out. Sometimes. But it's a bit difficult for a mature person to dedicate large swaths of his or her life to producing mediocre books for teens (who then commit the crime of playing videogames instead!) so they pretend to be doing something else, namely dealing with the Heavy Shit of philosophy, technology, and economics. They certainly can't claim to be excellent writers! (Chiang can, and he's rare for it.) It's the same Heavy Shit anyone in a college town can get access to by hanging around in the right coffeehouse and eavesdropping on the sophomores, but there you go. The kings of the shitheap want to be special, just like their readers do.

If SF proponents are progressive (or as progressive as Mill and Hobbes are these days, which is to say not at all), they need to cast fantasy as utterly retrograde, even feudal. Thus, the content-free (Chiang manages to name precisely zero examples of the fantasy he purports to describe) declaration that in fantasy (as a reader? a writer? a character? someone who has heard about fantasy?) "successfully interacting with the universe requires acknowledging that you're dealing with a person and not a rule-bound system." Not so. Plenty of fantasy magic is rule-bound, and indeed depressingly so. The sub-Tolkien Eddings/Brooks fantasists tend to go for magic as a technological analog. Individuality, enlightenment, the role of consciousness and perception, these are all missing -- magic instead works the way a not-very-bright teenager thinks electricity works. There are polarities, laws of conservation and dosage, and magic is often quantifiable so that it can fizzle out at dramatically appropriate moments, etc.

Chiang's confusion about this, I think, is due to a conflation between mass production and mass consumption. There are plenty of people who not only are oblivious to the impersonal nature of the universe, but who couldn't tell you why electricity doesn't just pour out of the outlets in the form of tiny yellow lightning bolts and puddle onto the carpets like water. The electrician is their wizard, the plumber their mage. Doctors are gods. We could likely all get a job on an assembly line making radios, but that doesn't mean that we know how radios work. We could potentially find out, by studying and tinkering and learning the lexicon (how to read schematics, practicing soldering, taking enough courses to learn how a transmitter works both in principle and how actually-existing transmitters are designed, built and deployed) but the average person doesn't do that for any number of reasons, including the fact that the economy needs lots of lugnut-tighteners and not so many lugnut-designers. After about seventh grade, education is generally cultural gravy plus computer applications and driving skill development. Millions of people make their living either making phone calls or answering the phone. Significant skills sets aren't involved.

So who can learn about the radios, design the MRIs, perform brain surgery? "Special" people, at least in the Western conception. And that informs genre conventions. We rarely see protagonists in either SF or F of mediocre intelligence, strength, and potential, because both genres make their bucks appealing to the aspirations of their audiences, To Be Special. Whether it's rocket science or wizard school, we're not going to find many major characters in SF or F who drifted through high school, went to community college, dropped out and had a kid, then years later matured enough to return to school, got a degree (in physics, gargoyle studies, bootyology, whatever) and then saved the world. Nor do we see the true protagonist of the Industrial Revolution, the Mass Hero of the millions of workers, slaves, and colonial subjects upon whose backs the revolution was built, as anything other than set dressing. Occasionally, in slice-of-life SF like Triton or China Mountain Zhang we'll see minor league support personnel for this or that technocracy as protagonists, but those books are as rare as they are wonderful.

Instead, our heroes (rare, special) masterful producers of wonders (scientific or magical), in a landscape full of consumers who stand there, get threatened, and then are saved, so that they may consume again.


SF and fantasy are different, but the difference isn't one of progressive libertarianism versus reactionary communitarianism. It's Coke vs. Pepsi. Both colas, both essentially a bellyful of sugars and battery acid, and with tons of cash spent to explode minor differences into major brand loyalties. And both go flat right away.