Because Magic! Because Science!

I've been thinking about the genre boundaries between fantasy and science fiction. 

There's a stellar interview (this is a long debate between the two, but this one is funny) between Ursula Le Guin and Margret Atwood, real life besties who disagree about genre boundaries.  Le Guin argues that The Handmaid's Tale and Year of the Flood are sci-fi and labeling them otherwise is a disservice to the works because you have to critique them differently.  (It's also a disservice to the sci-fi genre as a whole when people get elitist about a story because it's too literary to be lumped into sci-fi with all the pulpy, alien squid monsters.)  Atwood argues that her work is not sci-fi because she doesn't write sci-fi.  Atwood sets the boundaries like this: if it could happen today or with technology already in place in some form, it's speculative fiction; if it could happen in the future but not with technology that's been invented (faster than light travel, time travel), it's science fiction; and if there's no way it could happen, it's fantasy.

In the last few months I've read and reviewed two books (The Forgetting and Where Futures End) that "start as fantasy and end up as science fiction."  But what does that mean?

Using Atwood's definition, we could say that we assume at the beginning of these two stories that they present impossible situations, but then we're given more information and told, "no, no, it can happen.  With SCIENCE!"  If we roll with this, it means that readers are naturally skeptical and start these books assuming there's no way this could happen and have to be convinced.

Another way to define the genres is to look at the central conceit.  Stories in these genres typically have one big "what if" or one thing that is fantastical about which the reader is asked to suspend their disbelief.  The rest of the story, the world building and character reactions and plot, are affected by this.  In 1984, we're asked to imagine a government that watches people's every move.  In Harry Potter we're asked to imagine that wizards exist and are educated at a boarding school.  Aliens send us a message.  Dragons exist.  Water molecules stacked a certain way freeze anything they touch.  If we think about it like this, in science fiction the central conceit is explained by or derived from technology.  In fantasy, the central conceit is magical.

This definition gets a little screwy if you start looking at it too hard.  We generally assume that everything set in space is sci-fi (and it's marketed as such) because advanced technology is required to get them there.  But The Little Prince, where he travels around in space and visits different planets, is fantasy because he travels with magic rather than technology.  The movie Apollo 13, which is (mostly) true and doesn't require us to suspend our disbelief, does not count as science-fiction because it's not fiction.  The movie Gravity is fiction, but I'm not sure it counts as science fiction either.  All the technology used is already up there and the conceit is "there's an explosion that messes stuff up" which doesn't have anything to do with technology really.  We suspend disbelief that this happened rather than that this could happen.  What about Star Wars?  Our conceit is that there are people and aliens on a bunch of different planets with space ships and lasers that blow up planets and lasers that are like swords (all sci-fi), but also a conceit that there's a magical force that connects people to the universe and gives them magic powers (fantasy). 

So in these cases, I can see where Atwood is coming from.  Gravity is speculative, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (or Blade Runner, either way) are sci-fi. They both have tropes common to science fiction, but they're not the same.

And where does magical realism fit into all this?  By definition, the fantastical elements in magical realism are never explained.  The reader assumes thing happen "because magic" and leave it at that, but since it isn't explained (even to the level of "because magic"), it could very well be "because science."  Maybe it's radiation or nanites.  We don't know.

So this would imply that until we're given an explanation, we assume "magic" and the story is fantasy by default.  This would explain those two genre shifting books that start off as fantasy until you learn more and they become science fiction.  And isn't that a neat thing--that the human mind jumps straight to magic, that that's what we're most comfortable with?