As I’ve been working through Octavia Butler’s Dawn, I’ve realised why science fiction as a genre rarely resonates with me. It isn’t the aliens or the starships; it’s the scaffolding. Sci-Fi carries the weight of the Modernist project – questions posed and quickly answered, problems rationally explained, the reader guided toward the “lesson.” It feels like indoctrination: tidy, didactic, instructional.
Fantasy, strangely enough, I tolerate even less. Where science fiction pushes forward, fantasy looks backward. Sci-Fi imagines the future of the Modern experiment: technology, politics, survival scenarios, all with a rationalist bent. Fantasy imagines the past of the same experiment: kings, bloodlines, prophecies, destiny. One proclaims progress, the other tradition, but both insist on role conformity.
This struck me as almost political: science fiction reads like fodder for Liberals and Progressives, those who believe we can build better systems if only we’re clever enough. Fantasy, meanwhile, often aligns with a Conservative ethos – a return to order, hierarchy, and providence, just with dragons and spells thrown in. Both are catechisms of Modernity, just oriented in opposite directions.
It may just be me. I don’t identify with the Modern project, and so the genres that proselytise it – looking forward or looking back – leave me cold. I prefer literature that unsettles, that leaves silence where there might have been certainty, that lets ambiguity breathe. But for many, Sci-Fi and Fantasy provide something else entirely: reassurance.
Ridley Park 