This one gets a little contentious! I’m feeling spiky.
In workshop once, Kevin Brockmeier called my writing “hard science fiction,” and I’ll admit I was pretty surprised. About the “hard” part, not the science fiction (SF) part. I’ve seen variations in the definition.
How empirical the science is. “Hard” involves foregrounding of the math and gears and physics stuff; “soft” focuses on biology, anthropology, etc. Think Andy Weir’s The Martian versus Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness.
How explained or understandable the SF elements are. My favorite example of an unexplained SF element is “the force” in Star Wars. How does it work? Answer: It’s basically magic.1
(A rephrasing of the second rule): How consistent or plausible the rules of the story are. More on this later.
Did a woman write it? (jk! but this happens, and is part of the problem with this taxonomy.)
Before I go further, I should mention that Kevin Brockmeier is wonderful and he was probably just referring to the foregrounding of technology in my novel. And it’s true—I have a great time inventing technologies and seeing how they might break down. Yet I was surprised by his comment because my inventions are not especially practicable. I design them based on what I find interesting, not what I find to be likely. I have explanations for things that are plot-relevant to the decisions my characters make, but otherwise not, and some things are left unexplained.
I create speculative elements by, well by feel, but as I edit along the way, I use “thematic webs.” For example, in my novel, intimacy and the body are very important, so I sabotage or eschew digital spaces in favor of technologies based in more physical experiences. This isn’t because I predict the downfall of screens and pixels. I’m not a futurist. And it’s not because I have a great logical explanation for why people would rather use tangible technologies or else hallucinate (essentially) than use virtual or augmented reality, or how exactly that hallucination works. My technologies aren’t real. They are an externalization or literalization of an idea, symbol, or state of being. So depending on what definition you apply, my novel might move from one box to the next.
Anyway, like many genre divisions, these hard/soft categories break down almost as soon as they are introduced. The reason I bring in the hard v. soft spectrum is that in the internet of speculative fiction readers and writers many people are, it seems, really into fantasy that follows clear-cut rules. AKA, “hard” fantasy.
And I’m bored by it.
When I read fantasy, it is because I want magic. I want the unreal in its fey, strange, unpredictable and arcane manifestations. A lot (not all) of the magic I’m encountering in contemporary genre fiction feels rather tame, almost as if it was made to be playable, like it came out of the world of tabletop games.2 Why dream up a world filled with marvelous creatures and laws that defy our physics, and then hamstring them with our pedestrian logics? Where is the escape, the awe, in that?
I’m sure it’s just a trend, and in the way of trends, tastes will shift. (“Cozy” fantasy may—or may not—already indicate a shift in a new direction.)3 Perhaps the hard fantasy trend is the influence of a certain prolific writer of Kickstarter-record-breaking fame, perhaps it’s because the soft elements of Game of Thrones were dropped so hard (or else deployed disastrously) in the TV adaptation, perhaps it’s a blurring with YA (young adult) styling, perhaps it’s the nostalgic influence of fan culture, or perhaps it’s a discomfort with ambiguity, unknowns, and difficult writing.4 Related to the prevailing preference for “tropes” that can be easily listed, and sorted through.
That’s not to say I think “soft” fantasy is by definition better or worse than “hard” fantasy! Often stories contain a mix of both, anyway. The problem is when writers and readers think there is only one way to tell a story.
So. There’s a trove of practical advice out there about how to write magic systems. But what if you don’t want a system? What if you want to write a magic that isn’t a science? How do you write “soft” fantasy that still feels real, with high stakes, and that suspends the reader’s disbelief?
Let’s look to one of the presiding queens of the form, Kelly Link.5
This is Collected Fictions.
Link’s short story “Stone Animals,” which appears in her collection Magic for Beginners, is both weird and absolutely convincing. You can read it first here and avoid mid-level spoilers.
It has a simple set-up, which it announces itself on the first page: this is about a haunted house.
Link’s tone here!!! Isn’t her winking, dark humor great? The cohesion of tone and atmosphere grounds the reader in a world in which stranger things happen. Every sentence in this story is pure Link, and within the texture of the world she’s made. Her whimsy and the mundane stuff and creepypasta is consistent throughout: a precision of POV (point of view).
The surprising tone undercuts the haunted house trope, so it feels fresh, but the trope still signposts what territory we will be venturing into—in this case, a domestic horror. Sort of.
Another important trope appears early on: the threshold. This threshold at the front door hints early at the strangest element of the story, the bunnies, which gives them time to take seed in our minds. Thresholds are a landmark of fantasy, this nesting of worlds, of wardrobes and garden gates and doors that are not normal doors. Each threshold adds a sense of depth. And it is, what’s more, a landmark of haunted houses, of a stark division between public and private spaces, of the city and the suburban/rural environment, the life of youth and of middle age.6 House as family. House as ownership, responsibility. House as claustrophobia. (We will realize that although Henry loves his family, he loves his job in the city, too.) Thresholds create a strong delineation, a definite in/out, which Link will later blur. It is a symbol, but first it is literal: Step inside.
The reader is most receptive at the start of a story. We accept that the house is haunted as a “given,” along with the husband’s name is Henry, and so on. It doesn’t require additional explanation (contrast this with reading a realist-contemporary novel that, after 150 pages, introduces a dragon reading the newspaper at the dining table. That would require some additional explanation, I’d bet, and you would risk losing your reader).
There is, in stories like this one, a “just-so” or “just-is” quality. Why is the house haunted? It just is. It’s an inheritance from the realm of fairy tales. Why can’t you eat food in the underworld? Why is it the seventh son who is fated? Why a glass slipper? It just is. Things in fairy tales are immutable, atomic. Colors are undifferentiated and materials like metal and rose or spindle are platonic ideals. A general “abstraction” or “flatness,” as Kate Bernheimer puts it, to the characters as well. As if we are just at the beginning of the world.7 A once-upon-a-time.
It is fey logic. How do we learn it?
Henry is supposed to be able to work remote, but his boss wants him to come in to work, in the city, just this once—and when he does, that is when his son says there is something wrong with his toothbrush, and Henry first dreams of rabbits.
Then he falls asleep without meaning to and misses the train home.
The story reality gets messy. Small sections without transitions serve to destabilize the reader. Time is squishy, hard to track. The haunting escalates as more items in the house become wrong, as Henry continues to rush into the city to work, as the dreams become more difficult to tell from reality. The crosstalk dialogue gets worse: one character speaks to another, who is asleep. We begin to wonder just how much time has passed, and why Catherine is still pregnant.
This escalation is the rising action of the plot, but it is also central to how we understand patterns.
Fairy tales accumulate knowledge by repetition—one house is made of straw, one of wood, and one of brick.8 This story is no different. Things are associated by placing them side by side, in order, and the reader, leaning in to know, picks up on the pattern. It is a strange language, and we may not understand all the grammar, but we have enough. It’s Henry’s fault his son’s toothbrush is haunted. Why? A: He missed dinner. Cause-and-effect is present, even when the mechanism is strange.
This associative, symbolic logic is also present in Catherine’s incessant repainting of the house walls. She cannot stop nesting, she keeps trying to make the house right. Link juices the image of Catherine, pregnant in a gas mask, painting and repainting the walls, so much that the rooms seem to be getting smaller. Tonally, we are in that sweet spot of mundane, funny, and creepy:
Another way to think of hard v. soft is: genre prompts what questions the readers ask. Genre primes reader expectations. The “soft” way of telling does not require an explanation of how exactly objects in their home become haunted, and in fact, an explicit, in-depth explanation would only weaken the reader’s belief in the story.9 What matters are the patterns the reader tracks without knowing why…such as how names, like true-names of a spell, carry weight. Names cannot be further broken-down, they hold power. Much like symbols.
The reader understands that something has got to give, as the home becomes less and less stable, as the home is turned inside-out.
Link is playing with the tropes around haunted houses. For one thing, haunted houses are usually about grief. Nobody has died, though—just their old way of life. Henry resists change so much that he falls out of time. Henry is not devoting himself fully to his suburban family reality. He still hasn’t met the neighbors, and in fact, they seem like ghosts. He keeps waking up at 4 AM. He is stuck between worlds. Even when the mechanism is strange, there are consequences for their choices, therefore their choices still hold weight.
Soon he will find out why he dreams of rabbits.
Ted Chiang’s genre division works especially well for Star Wars, which has the look of science fiction, but the feel of fantasy.
It may be related to the prose conventions of contemporary genre as well. But that is another discussion!
Actually, I believe “coziness,” despite its apparent softness, is often still within the same “hard” fantasy trend…in favoring knowns, squeezing the last drop from established tropes without remaking them, painting in a constrained palette and set of expectations, in rendering magic cottagecore. I totally understand those looking to escape a stupid, hurtful world with cozy stories, and I adore Alice Hoffman, but too often these recent, intentionally “cozy” reads become pastel nothings, rather than respites…reaffirming the status quo (see Chiang) and misunderstanding what power softness can have, if it is allowing textural and tonal variation. For example:
My pet-peeve is watching the de-toothing in online spaces of Hayao Miyazaki movies as “cozy.“ Yes, I find his movies nostalgic and beautiful and often in celebration of the human spirit. I would indeed like to live in the warm cottages and charming villages and dappled forests he creates. Yet Miyazaki is also challenging; his work leaves room for the audience to be undecided; it includes not only difficulties of mundane scale (like with burnout in Kiki’s Delivery Service) but also great sorrows over the human predilection for war and destruction of the environment. He has morally grey characters like the fascinating Lady Eboshi in Princess Mononoke. To avoid the shadows in his work is to render it bland.
Don’t take these too seriously, please god. Also: reasons are not mutually-exclusive.
Further reading: this delightful profile in anticipation of Link’s latest story collection, which is on my TBR.
At each threshold, something is sacrificed, and something is gained.
Much indebted to Kate Bernheimer’s “Fairy Tale is Form, Form is Fairy Tale” throughout.
Still deciding if this includes “change”—the hallmark of most plot—or merely repetition and ordering. Henry and the family are moving from the world of change and the flow of time into a fairy world, a world outside of time…perhaps that’s where the real change occurs. The journey into the underworld is a change, but into a place of static, stillness, once-upon-a-time.
See “midichlorians” in the Star Wars prequels for an example of how explanations can ruin a soft fantasy element.