My answer was "If it has swords it is fantasy, but if it has ray guns it is science fiction."
More pedantically: if it has only swords (Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings) it is fantasy, but if it has both swords and ray-guns (Dune, John Carter of Mars) it is science fiction.
My favourite answer was "Science fiction has light swords because the writer believes they might be possible; fantasy has light swords because the writer believes they are impossible."
Definitions of this kind always break down: to sustain your argument you have to say that beavers are fish, carrots are fruit, and Star Wars is science fiction. Since people like George R.R Martin and Robin Hobb appear at science fiction conventions and Forbidden Planet sells Tolkien books, the distinction is probably not all that important.
The most useful definition is "Science fiction is the kind of thing that is liked by the kinds of people who like science fiction." This definition also works for Folk Music and Socialism, incidentally.
Tolkien was troubled by Orcs. There is a scene in Lord of the Rings where Sam looks at the body of a human soldier who has been killed fighting on Sauron's side, and wonders if he was misled rather than evil. Orcs on the other hand are a kind of vermin that can be killed freely and without compunction. Gimli and Legolas have a competition to see how many they can kill at Helms deep. (Peter Jackson turns this into a running joke across two movies.)
Tolkien toys with the idea that Orcs are a kind of automata, mere extensions of Morgoth's will; or at any rate that their wills have been totally overridden by Sauron. They talk among themselves, in lower class English accents, obviously, but he speculates that they may merely be imitating the sounds of human speech without understanding what it means. But the published texts seem clear that Orcs are people: they have agency and feelings and subjectivity. In origin, they are probably twisted or corrupted Elves. This is a fairly major theme in the mythos. Evil does not create, or have independent existence: it only twists and corrupts the good. Trolls are broken Ents, Orcs are broken Elves, evil itself is a discordant counter melody which God will incorporate into the great cosmic concerto.
Unlike the Christian Satan, Sauron is capable of repentance: Morgoth himself may come back to the light at the very, very end of time. But there is no hint that there are, or could be, good Orcs, or that Orcs can be redeemed. Dead humans pass beyond the circles of the world into an unspecified but presumably Christian afterlife; dead elves' spirits find their way back to the Undying Lands and may become re-embodied. I suppose dead orcs remain in middle earth as ghosts or demons.
Joseph Campbell, who is generally wrong, said that "mythology is psychology misread as biography". Ursula Le Guin, who is usually right, said that poetry and dragons speak "the language of the night" -- they follow dream logic rather than logical logic.
Le Guin is thinking about the way in which characters can be both people in a story and also symbols: that at one level Gollum is a Hobbit who desires a powerful magical Ring, and happens to become the guide of Frodo, another Hobbit who resits the Ring's temptation. But looked at another way, Gollum is Frodo's distorted reflection: he represents what would have happened if Frodo had succumbed to the Ring. Gollum tripping over his silly feet and falling into a volcano is a dumb event which just happens to happen; but it also represents the fact that the Quest can only be completed by Frodo's dark side -- what Le Guin calls his Shadow. (Astonishingly, this is also the plot of a Wizard of Earthsea.)
C.S Lewis complained about Dickens' handling of the character of Jingle in the Pickwick Papers: it is okay, he said, to ask the audience to laugh at a comedy rotter; but to show the baddie facing the real-world consequences of his actions is not playing fair with the reader. I have found this a problem in "serious" situation comedies like Rev. or even Friends: the more real characters become, the harder it is to laugh at their comic antics.
If you like fantasy, you have to accept that it is not real. You make a tacit agreement to put certain hard questions on hold for the duration of the story. I think this is as true for meticulously constructed worlds like Middle-earth as it is for more whimsical constructs like the Discworld. Why does Gandalf, an immortal Maiar sent into the world to defeat Sauron, wear a pointy hat? Because he's a wizard. Why don't the Fellowship fly to Mordor on the back of an eagle? Because it's a story. (That was Tolkien's exact answer. The eagles are part of the machinery: what we would be more likely to call a plot device.) Why are Orcs evil? Because that's what Orc means.
One of the things we like about High Fantasy -- and superhero comics, and cowboy stories -- is that the differences between good and evil are exaggerated. Black hats are crueller and more callous than any actual cattle rustler is like to have been; white hats are kinder and less corruptible than we can really expect from our police officers. This doesn't necessarily imply a simplistic morality: High Noon is quite a sophisticated little morality play exactly because Gary Cooper is so perfect and and Lee Van Cleef so nasty. Fantasy takes it a lot further: a Black Hat on a Black Hatstand in the Land of Mordor where the shadows are leads an infinitely large posse of ugly deformed Uruk again armies of immortal, beautiful, incorruptible cavalry with the light that existed before the sun and the moon literally shining out of their arseholes.
One of the things we like about High Fantasy -- and superhero comics, and cowboy stories -- is that the differences between good and evil are exaggerated. Black hats are crueller and more callous than any actual cattle rustler is like to have been; white hats are kinder and less corruptible than we can really expect from our police officers. This doesn't necessarily imply a simplistic morality: High Noon is quite a sophisticated little morality play exactly because Gary Cooper is so perfect and and Lee Van Cleef so nasty. Fantasy takes it a lot further: a Black Hat on a Black Hatstand in the Land of Mordor where the shadows are leads an infinitely large posse of ugly deformed Uruk again armies of immortal, beautiful, incorruptible cavalry with the light that existed before the sun and the moon literally shining out of their arseholes.
People who don't really do fantasy very naturally see this as a vile colonial metaphor. And vile colonialists certainly sometimes interpret fantasy in that way. "We, the light shiny people have the right to kill you, the dark ugly people, because we are light and shiny and you are dark and ugly." But if you do like fantasy, you will probably understand that the elves represent us but that the orcs represent us as well. Elves are what we aspire to be and Orcs are what we are afraid of being. The eternal war between Light and Dark (which light wins but at great cost) represents an inner conflict which is happening in the head of all human being at all times. It was the people who mindlessly vandalised trees that Tolkien was inclined to call Orcs.
Okay, most people who read fantasy probably wouldn't say that at all. They would be more likely to say "Life is messy and complicated but the Lord of the Rings is fun. In real life there aren't Light Shiny People and Ugly Horrid People -- there are just people. But one of the nice things about Lord of the Rings is that it is simpler than real life." Tolkien had no objection to people who called his books Escapist.
It is not okay for the Dark Lord's Minions to have feathers in their headdresses. It is not okay for them to have slitty eyes, hooked noses or for their bankers to have a Star of David mosaic on their floor. There has been lots and lots and lots of High Fantasy over the years and maybe we don't need any more of it. Realism has something to be said for it. Circe and Joffrey were arguably more hateful villains just because they were humans as opposed to shoggoth. The people who say that Dungeons & Dragons can't possibly have a racist subtext because African Americans don't really have yellow scaly skin, 1D4 hit points and treasure type A are insufferable twits. The Star Wars mythos was rather improved when the Sand People stopped being "injuns" and became an indigenous nation with their own culture and language.
Some people say that stories about Chosen Ones -- swords in stones and empty thrones awaiting sons of Adam and daughters of Eve and boys with funny marks on their foreheads -- are irredeemably aristocratic. Some people are born to rule, and some people, you and me, are born to chant "All Hail The Long Lost True King of the Northlands" in silly naarthen accents. And you can read the stories that way. And the fact that they can be read that way may make them dangerous stories. But wasn't Joseph Campbell on kind of the right track when he said that the point of Star Wars and the Sword in the Stone and Harry Potter is that we are all the Chosen Ones -- that the journey of the hero is a way of thinking about everyone's trajectory through life.
We are all Anakin and Mordred and Tom Riddle unless we make a positive effort to be Luke or the Wart or Harry.
Richard Bach wrote a silly book called Confessions of a Reluctant Messiah; a sequel to the even sillier Jonathan Livingstone Seagull. At the the time, I thought it was saying "You, Andrew Rilstone, might turn out to be the second coming of Jesus. Wouldn't that be wild?" I now, of course, understand that it was saying "Everyone is the second coming of Jesus; terms like son of God and Messiah are just ways of understanding what it is to be human." Which is very poor theology but quite good psychology.
Science fiction and fantasy are ways of reading, not ways of writing. If you speak the language of the night, you look at the Lord of the Rings and see a vast tapestry of symbols. If you speak the language of the day then you see a not very coherent or believable collection of facts. If you read the Lord of the Rings and ask "I am sure this poor Orc as its own feelings and point of view -- as it would have if it existed in the real world" then you probably find that Lord of the Rings doesn't work for you. If you read the Lord of the Rings and say "In this world there are the forces of good and there are the force of evil and that's cool" you are probably on Tolkien's wavelength. (If you read it and think "There are good white people and it is natural they should rule nasty dark people and that's true in the real world as well as in Tolkien's" then lots of people on Twitter agree with you.) But if you are uncomfortable with the whole idea of evil races, maybe you aren't the person to be developing a prequel to Lord of the Rings?
Science Fiction is when you write about Evil Races because you believe that some Races are really evil. Fantasy is when you write about Evil Races because you don't. Discuss.
Hi,
I'm Andrew.
I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.
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