Fantasy vs. Science Fiction

In the beginning, that being the early 20th century, there was no distinction between fantasy and science fiction writing. It was all 'fantastic fiction'. Back then, the word 'fantastic' didn't mean 'awesome' as it does today; it meant 'weird', 'strange,' and 'otherworldly'. It had a more negative connotation than it does today. The reason for that would be the Fantastic Four comic, which changed the meaning of the word for millions of readers. But we're looking back half a century earlier than that.

In the early days of the pulps, publishers didn't worry much about what 'genre' a story was. If it was an entertaining story, they published it. The main exception to this was the Romance genre, which was always the most popular and thus was the first genre to get its own specialty magazines. 'Adventure' was its own category, encompassing everything that had to do with action and adventure. That included westerns, fantasy, weird tales, science fiction, some subtypes of mystery, war...it was all 'adventure' fiction.

That began to change in the 1920s. Prior to that, there were specialty magazines that covered a...not a genre, but a theme. Railroad magazines, for example, were pulp fiction collections where the stories all had to do with the railroads. They might be romantic, they might be thrillers, they might be weird...but they were all linked by the theme of the railroads. Other examples would be the Western, with different types of stories but all with that primary theme of being set in the old West.

But it wasn't until Hugo Gernsback got into pulp publishing that the 'weird' category started to splinter. Gernsback had a passion for science. He published a magazine about the new technology of radio, and was a firm believer that science would be the key to a utopian future. He went so far as to found the first magazine dedicated to what he called 'scientificion', Amazing Stories.

I've reviewed some of the earliest issues of Amazing a long time ago in this blog. One of the things that Gernsback was determined to see was stories that were based in realistic, or at least plausible, science of the time. Back then, scientists still didn't know about the vacuum of space; the ether was the scientifically-accepted explanation for what lay between the planets and the stars. Gernsback wasn't interested in magic or supernatural horror; he was a realist from top to bottom, and so he began the split between the genres we now know as fantasy and science fiction.

However, Gernsback's idea didn't take off right away. There was a lot of overlap between fantasy, horror and sci-fi in the 1920s; Weird Tales was the magazine that collected all kinds of stuff. For example, Robert E. Howard's Conan stories often included elements that wouldn't have been out of place in a Lovecraft story. One of Lovecraft's stories actually includes a mention of a character from the Hyborian (Conan) Age, albeit not one that was written by Howard. Yes, the shared literary universe existed even then.

Gernsback didn't last very long at Amazing; his tenure was noteworthy mostly for his reluctance to pay his writers, and eventually he was forced out and ended up starting another magazine, Wonder Stories. Amazing would continue on, its direction slightly shifting from scientific realism to scientific adventure.

See, readers back then wanted what today's readers want: Adventure and romance. And the new Amazing Stories gave them both, in spades. It was during this period that Amazing published some of the most popular and well-written stories in science fiction history: Buck Rogers, The Skylark of Space, Triplanetary; authors such as Burroughs and Merritt introduced new works in the magazine, and new authors made their debuts here such as Lovecraft, Jack Williamson, and John Wyndham.

During the 1930s, science fiction was one of the most popular genres, far outstripped fantasy, which had been left behind to lurk in the corners of Weird Tales. Rockets and alien worlds were the attraction, not swords and supernatural or mythological creatures. And so, the splitting of the weird and fantastic into the sterilized genres was complete.

Growing up, the genre split was all I knew; sci-fi was sci-fi, and fantasy was fantasy, and while they shared space on the library shelves and in the bookstore, everyone knew they were not to be mixed. The old days of 'weird and fantastic' were long gone, and largely forgotten by the younger generations. But that was a temporary situation, and the winds were slowly shifting...