Harry Potter: Fantasy or Sci-Fi?

[foxmoth at qnet.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 14001

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., "Ebony AKA AngieJ" <ebonyink at h...> wrote:

> Is Harry Potter a fantasy series... or sci-fi?  Or something else 
> altogether?

Wow Ebony, thanks for asking such a fascinating question. Here's my two 
knuts.

	The marvelous cannot by definition be a part of everyday life, and 
therefore stories of the marvelous must take place in a marvelous 
milieu. If this milieu is supposed to have been produced by the 
application of scientific understanding, then we have a science fiction 
story. 

	The appetite for marvels has always been suspect, and this 
suspicion extends to the literary critical establishment. The 
practitioners of science fiction, which originated as a subgenre of 
fantasy, therefore agitated to have their work considered separately 
from the discredited fantasy genre. They wished to escape the 
'escapist' label attached to fantasy and graft themselves onto the more 
academically respectable 'revelatory'  branch of the lit-crit  tree. 
They claimed that science fiction stories were an attempt to anticipate 
and reveal the effects of possible future technological developments 
and so were not escapist at all. 

	Your source accepts this division and then attempts to distinguish 
between imaginary magic, which is the supposed province of fantasy, and 
imaginary technology, which is the supposed province of science 
fiction, by presuming that magic operates by direct intention of the 
magician without the need for tools.  The claim is that since magic of 
the kind described in most fantasies requires tools or processes of 
some kind, it should really be called  technology and such works ought 
to be considered science fiction. 

	This is a misunderstanding of the use of the word technology as 
applied to science fiction. The word technology has two meanings: one 
applies to the exploitation of scientific knowledge, the other applies 
to the entire body of knowledge related to tools and processes. The 
imaginary technology of science fiction is specifically the first kind 
of technology: the technology which is derived from scientific 
understanding: from the systematic study of a universe which is 
presumed to operate according to discoverable natural laws. 

	The Harry Potter stories are not science fiction. The whole point 
of science is that it is discoverable, the essence of magic is that it 
is not. (Aspiring fantasy writers are told over and over again by every 
practitioner of the art that the one thing they must never do is 
explain how the magic works.) The Potterverse never offers any kind of 
scientific explanation for its magical devices, nor do the characters 
presume that there is one. Therefore, while those devices are indeed 
technology in the broader sense, they are not technological in the 
sense which I would apply to science fiction.
	
Pippin