Harry Potter: Fantasy or Sci-Fi?

[naama_gat at hotmail.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 14030


--- In HPforGrownups at y..., foxmoth at q... wrote:
> 
>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. 

Can the marvelous be "supposed to have been produced by the 
application of scientific undestanding"? It seems to me that by 
postulating the existence of a scientfic explanation you take the 
marvel out of the marvelous, don't you? I mean, we say of 
technological innovations "wow, its like a miracle!", but we do use 
"like" and not "is", because we are sure there is a scientific 
explanation even if we don't know what it is at the moment. But 
perhaps your "marvelous" is not the same as the "miraculous"?

> 
>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.
>
<snip>
> 
>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.
> 	

I agree with this. But I would like to point that the question is 
exactly the "discoverability" of the laws of magic. If magic is 
conceived as a natural force of some kind ("the utility theory" in 
Ebony's quote) then presumably you can discover its laws. For 
instance (and as far as my limited knowledge goes), a lot of what we 
call magic in the middle ages was inseparable, at the time, from what 
we now call science. 
I do think, however, that if we look at the way 'magic' is conceived 
today (the way it's generally used), it is almost the antinomy of 
'science'. It refers to the (inherently) miraculous, the (inherently) 
unexplainable. From this point of view writers who use magic in its 
"utility" sense (natural force) are actually writing a fantasy, 
because they're depicting a world that is very essentially different 
from our own - a world where magic is explainable. This is rather off 
the top of my head. Ebony, if you read this, can you give a few 
examples of such books?
Harry Potter is also a fantasy for the reasons Pippin gave - the 
magic in HP is "magical" - unexplainable, unpredictable, and very 
clearly antithetic to science.

Naama, rambling away...