Science Fiction vs Magic vs Religion

On my podcast I’m a Fan of That, we recently did an episode on genre, more specifically on how certain pieces of fiction cross genres. We talked about those successes or failures. I obviously brought up my thoughts on genre and its beautiful mixing in Shape of Water, which I wrote about more extensively already. But, as we were talking in that episode, as well as after, I was left thinking a lot more about genre, and how the divisions we draw between different forms of fiction are incredibly nuanced and not exactly all that clear. So, today, I want to talk about three areas of writing and reading that intersect all the time, whether you realise it or not: Science Fiction, Magic, and Religion.

I know on the surface these three as being my case studies here may seem a bit strange, especially throwing in that last one of Religion. Obviously, we can think that religion has very little to do with fiction - or, maybe, that’s only what religious people will argue against. Others may be very excited about this category being thrown in. Spoiler alert, neither of you may be expecting which way this is going. But even when we remove religion, we are left with discussions of science fiction and magic, two worlds which are, very much, kept separate.

On it’s very simplistic basis, science fiction can be defined by imagined scientific futuristic endeavours. Space and different planets are often the setting for science fiction - not limited to these settings, of course, but it is typical - because discussions of space travel, different atmospheres, and different locations throughout the universe feel very “science”.

But then, we have Star Wars. Star Wars is very obviously a fantasy story, but it’s given the very typical science fiction setting of space. In fact, Star Wars is probably the best case study to use for the intersections of our three main endeavours here of science fiction, magic, and religion. It’s setting is space, with space travel and laser fights, and all the typical renderings of a science fiction movie. But the story is a fantasy, with magic forming the basis of a lot of the interactions and engagements between peoples, and the basis of this magic is in religion. Because, whether you realise it or not, the Jedi are a religious order - a deeper dive into that should be reserved for a different time, but its not exactly a hidden aspect of the movies.

So let’s take this one at a time, slowly complicating and nuancing each of these genres - and some not genres - of storytelling.

Science Fiction

We’re starting with Science Fiction for a few reasons. For one, I think it seems, on its surface, as the most directly different. As someone who reads fantasy and really has never really gotten on with science fiction, I could probably argue that there is some kind of inherent difference between the genres. I think I can explain this while still keeping these very fuzzy distinctions in mind, but we’ll get there.

But we should start where its always best to start academic discussions: with definitions. We start with definitions because otherwise we’ll be arguing over different things thinking its the same. So what is science fiction? As I stated above, it’s typically reserved for avenues of futuristic tellings involving space. But those are typical settings, not typical definitions. You can have a science fiction story set in the past. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells is a good example, and speaking of H.G. Wells, War of the Worlds, while not being set in the past, is set in the same time period as his time of writing, so still not future.

So let’s not settle on something that relies on setting. Maybe we should focus on an important word in the title of this genre - science. What’s important in science fiction is not necessarily the very real possibilities of what is happening, but rather the fact that it could or is explained by science.

In science fiction, the scientific explanation for what is going on in the world is important. The Time Machine is a scientific instrument, the aliens coming have a very real possibility of existing due to the very real scientific possibilities of life on other planets. Science needs to be used to explain things.

I’m always reminded, here, of Star Trek - the ultimate science fiction television show. Unlike Star Wars, Star Trek is not a space fantasy, but it is an active space, futuristic, time travel. And we know this because we are given scientific explanations and backing, even when it’s all not actually based on the science in our non-fiction world. Travelling on the U.S.S Enterprise necessitates Geordie explaining things about nuclear fusion generators to us. We’re treated to explanations as to why things have shut down when they have. It’s necessitates Wes or Data using references to astrophysics or subatomic particles in some fissure as a way to solve the problem.

And if my above explanations seems strange, I think this is why I’ve personally never really enjoyed science fiction. It’s all fiction, I don’t care about your strange explanations. I can buy the system is down and you gotta wait to restart it. I don’t need to hear you ramble something about physics that doesn’t exist to make a reason for it. Because this is an important part of science fiction - the explanations don’t have to make sense. They don’t necessarily have to be grounded in reality, just to seem like it is. If we needed it all to be real, then we wouldn’t have amazing futuristic stories of space travel - we can’t do inter-dimensional travel yet (at least, as far as I know).

So, science fiction is defined by explanation, by the way things are happening and the way it’s being presented to us. When we have space travel and people just shrug and say “we just do” then it doesn’t feel like science fiction in the same way it does when we have a man with a visor explaining particle physics to us.

And this explanation is important. Even in our current world, with the technology we have, we don’t always have the explanation present. It’s summer here in the UK, and as such I’ve been dying of the heat. I don’t like hot weather, and am currently in my annual lament that we do not live further north. And so my husband and I were talking about potentially buying a small portable air conditioner unit. And I realised something - I have no idea how AC works. If I was in a science fiction book, I would be the one making it fantasy, because I don’t have the explanations. I don’t have the reasons and the science behind it. It just works because it does - it’s almost like magic to me.

Because that’s the thing about science fiction - it necessitates an authoritative voice explaining the mechanisms behind the extraordinary feats to us. And if we don’t have this, it can seem just like magic. And that’s how we get space fantasy with Star Wars - because without this authoritative explanation, we are left with the same levels of wonder as magic.

Magic

Which brings us to magic. So, as we did before, let’s talk about some definitions here of magic. Here is where things can start getting a little tricky, so we’re going to tread a bit lightly. We’re also going to state very firmly here that we are grounding a lot of this discussion (at the moment) in the world of fiction. We’ll touch on magic outside of fiction a very little bit, but we’ll get there. We’re starting with fiction first.

So how do genres define magic? Magic for these fantasy worlds are special actions which are left unexplained, or they are explained but by using supernatural or mysterious circumstances. Magic is set as firmly against science in this manner. The explanations are missing, because it’s just special magic. Or these explanations are given through non-scientific explanation.

Magic, essentially, becomes the catch-all for amazing actions and feats that we cannot explain. Picard succeeds due to the scientific explanations of how thrusters work, but Gandalf succeeds because he’s a wizard, and wizard does special unexplained stuff. We don’t really know how Gandalf does it, we just know he does.

But magic can work differently depending on where we find it. There are a variety of different types of magic that proliferate the fictional scene, so much so that we have begun to categorise them into two different types: hard vs soft. Soft magic systems are a bit more malleable, and typically not as easily explained. Soft magic systems are often the ones where you shrug and just say “because magic”. Hard systems, on the other hand, follow very firm rules and explanations that the reader can map and understand. These, of course, are less strong categories and more of a spectrum that magic systems can fall along.

The most recent writer I’ve come across that loves a good hard magic system is Brandon Sanderson. The Mistborn trilogy, for example, sets up the reader to know the exact dimensions of the magic of the Mistborn. We’re given detailed information, studies of how it all works, details of where it comes from. All this means that when we are reading, we know exactly the limits and dimensions of the magic our protagonist has. We know how desperate the situation can be, or we can try and figure out how exactly they’ll get out of it.

In these instances, magic functions very differently to the “unexplained answers” aspect of magic that we started off with. Hard systems, and even some softer systems which adhere vaguely to rules, can begin to feel a bit like a kind of science. It follows a structure, there are elements and possibilities, it follows a reality to the world that is based on real functions for the world. Not everything is on the table, but only that which fits within the realm of what is established possibility.

Enter Religion

And here, we begin to strike on something that is inherently present in any distinction drawn between science and magic: it’s all relative.

Our idea of magic as something inherently different or separate from science is an inherently social and culturally built conception, and has been partially influenced by the view of religion created by white and western scholars looking at other cultures.

I know, where did religion come from in this discussion? Remember when I mentioned that our discussion of magic can be complicated, and we were going to start by only looking at fiction? Well, it’s time to start looking at it outside of fiction. Because as much as we like to think about our fiction books as being separate from the world, they are very much a part of our world. Writing and reading are all inherently political acts, and these books - yes, even silly little smutty romantasy books - can make big statements about the world we live in.

A lot of the views of magic and other cultural worlds can be summed up by the work of early anthropologists. There are a few different branches this can take us, but we’re going to talk about two things in particular.

The first is the idea of cultural evolution. While this is almost fully renounced now-days (though, there are a few who still use this - be wary), cultural evolutionary theories were quite the rage in the 1800s. This began due to the popularity of the biological theories of evolution that began to be circulated both in academia and outside of it. Charles Darwin’s work had a huge impact on the literary landscape, the social landscape, and the academic landscape. Anthropology was no exception.

Scholars like James Frazer and Edward Tylor began to think of anthropology along similar lines of evolution, and created the idea of cultural evolution. The idea was that we, as humans, have now “completed” our biological evolution (I know, it’s already wrong, we’ve got a long way to go), and after reaching this point, started a development of cultural evolution. The idea was that societies started out as animistic, then became polytheistic, then monotheistic, and ended their cultural advancement by getting to be atheistic.

Obviously, there are a lot of problems here, but before we tackle them, there’s another really important dynamic of their thoughts here: these scholars believed that by studying a community of polytheists in Africa, they could understand the early thoughts of polytheistic Britain. On top of that, they also thought that this cultural evolution also was something we went through as we grew up - meaning that studying children was akin to studying that group in Africa.

Obviously, there’s a lot wrong here. The first of which is that the history of different groups does not reflect this exact growth. Very few groups have developed along these same exact lines. Some areas have gone backwards on this line, and some not moved at all. Also, this assumes a lot about the white scientific atheist.

But on top of the inherent wrongness of this theory, it was primarily rooted in basic good-old-fashioned racism. It’s based on the idea that white people were the most culturally advanced, and Black people were not.

There was a second level to this dynamic as well - the idea of rationality. This is also something at the core of our science/magic divide. Where one’s explanation of authority of science makes it feel more inherently possible, compared to the hard magic system of authoritative explanation that falls short of this. These same early scholars of anthropology and religion often saw religious ideas - particularly those who were not Christian or atheist - as inherently irrational. This is still something that comes up a lot when engaging with studies of other religions. I had to often field students’ snubbing their nose at people different than them simply because they couldn't comprehend a mindset which allowed this thought process as rational.

Enter our second branch of anthropology chat - that of E.E. Evans-Pritchard. His book Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande was formulating one important basic fact: other people are just as rational as us. Their systems of religion, belief, and ideas are based on considered thought and hard understood systems. They were not improvised, but rather deeply intentional. And it all made complete sense.

It may seem crazy to think of an anthropologist making waves by simply having a thesis which states “other people think like how we think”, but - as you can see from our above discussion - it actually was immensely groundbreaking.

What is still inherently present in our society, though, is the lingering presence of the cultural evolutionary theorists’ view of the Other. For many in the UK or USA, Christianity will be heralded as something which makes sense, while another religion - say, Haitian Vodun - is considered irrational and silly.

Essentially, “magic” has become a catch-all for beliefs and actions white people don’t like to see as either religion or science. “Religion”, or rather “proper” religion, has explanations we can get. It’s something which has a history of our understanding, and therefore gets treated differently.

Despite this, there’s a lot of elements of science fiction which can be found in mythologies around the world. We can find automatons in Greek mythology, and flying machines in Hinduism. If found in an old fiction book, we’d describe it as science fiction. But because it’s mythology - a word we often keep in the realm of religion - its considered something different. But if these weren’t, and explained through an authoritative voice, would they be science fiction? If they weren’t, would we think of them as magic?

The Consequences

Regardless of how writers may feel about these various categories, we are, in the end, at the mercy of our systems. A library or publisher is going to label something the way they will - and we very seldom have any say in the matter. How genres are split is sometimes overly simplistic in comparison to the far more nuanced humans who are creating and reading them.

Perhaps we can do something, though, and we are not fully at the mercy a system beyond us. This is where the crossing genres can be really fascinating. By blurring the boundaries between different genres, we can demonstrate how complicated these genres can be. That was part of the genius behind Shape of Water - it showed interesting sides of each of the genres, proving both their nuance and their boundaries. It demonstrated some of the beauty in the monster, allowing each of their facets to shine.

Maybe someday, one of you lovely amazing writers will write a cross between science fiction and fantasy that demonstrates something about each of these genres. It’ll illuminate the similarities, but also the differences in an interesting and unique way that I haven’t even thought of.

And I look forward to reading that.