A while ago my brother and I had a conversation about science fiction and fantasy. We were trying to figure out where comic books fell, and ended up having to define the two categories first. This is a debate that I’m hoping to get into again sometime, for I’m still not absolutely sure of my position. But I am convinced that, even though Superheroes like Spiderman use science to gain their powers and make their gadgets, comic books function as fantasy. This conviction does not come from any sort of ridiculing of the science found within their colorful pages, but from the focus on the hero and the hero’s place in the world. Fantasy, after all, usually revolves around some sort of unlikely hero who is good and just, and able, surprisingly enough, to conquer the powerful evil that threatens his world. Harry Potter certainly fulfills this, as do Frodo and Garion and so many other protagonist that have been inked into this world. Fantasy loves to see the struggle between good and evil, and it loves to let good win out.

Science fiction has always seem colder and more calculating. It should, I suppose, for it is not about the individual as much as it is about society. Keeping in mind that this is a unpolished generalization, think of the great classics. Asimov’s I Robot, for instance, which questions how man would respond to artificial intelligence. The series, too, provides a plot that seems almost like a canvas on which to display different ways of living so that we can better discover how we should live. Even Ender’s Game, which has a hero of sorts, is presented more as a social experiment than an excuse to talk about anti-gravity and aliens. It is how Ender’s government reacts to certain events, how Ender’s siblings use politics to manipulate the nation’s leaders, even how a person, perhaps you or me or a super smart child, might react if they were taken up into space to learn war.

Anyway, like I said, I haven’t really thought through it all yet, but I read a book over Thanksgiving that brought the conversation to my mind. It was the second imager book, and I was enjoying the complexity of the world the author had created, and thinking how much more I knew about this fictional world’s politics than my own, when it struck me. Imager is science fiction. Even though it is set in a different universe, and not on an Earth a thousand years from now, or some alien home world only recently discovered; even though the bad guys use poison and guns to attack the good guys, and people travel on wooden ships and trains; even though it’s main character is certainly a hero, one with magical powers no less; despite all these things, it is Science Fiction. It is Science fiction because it is about societies. It’s not about good conquering evil, it’s about how things are tied together and what would happen if they were tied a little differently. The former is why science fiction is called science fiction and not social fiction (jeepers, that sounds frightful doesn’t it?) – the “how things work” attitude of science is directly transfered to people. The latter is the “what if” of scifi – what if people were telepathic? or if the government could track us? or what if there was a world somewhere where some people had strange powers but most didn’t? Wouldn’t the people with these powers need to find a balance between respect and fear with the rest of the world? Wouldn’t they have to be careful in how they effected politics?