Science Fiction, Magic and Mythology

A couple of days ago, The New York Times Books twitter posted up a tweet for an article about how H.G Wells was the father of science fiction. The resultant chaos online was a bit of fun to scroll through, with many pointing out how there were many many writers before him who wrote science fiction, including many women who are typically thought of as early figures in the genre, such as Mary Shelley and Margaret Cavendish. Others reached even farther back, bringing up ancient Greek texts. While the conversation around the erasure of women in many fields – with religious studies and especially the anthropology of religion being a big one – is something I could write quite a lot on, that is not why I’m bringing up this tweet.

Scrolling through the comments was fascinating – not because it was full of wonderful feminist memes, but because the comments followed interesting arguments about genre. When did science fiction really start? Some argued bringing up Mary Shelley’s name wasn’t proper as her work is horror, though others rightfully point out that books can have many genres, and that Frankenstein can fit both horror and science fiction at the same time. But the bit of the conversation I latched on to was a more quiet implicit argument going on between people even if they didn’t realise it.

At the core of many of these arguments was one central one: the differences between science fiction, magic, and mythology. I thought this was an interesting debate, and one I wanted to weigh in on. Science fiction, magic and mythology each have something to do with what I do – the intersections and relationships between religion and popular culture. When is science fiction actually science, versus a mysterious type of magic? When is mythology mythology, and can mythology embody science fiction?

In the classic words of any professor in the humanities or social sciences, I wanted to “unpack” this argument, because I think at its core, it teaches us a lot about science, and why science can be so readily ignored by so many – something that has balked many in the age of COVID.

Science Fiction

Let’s start our conversation here – half because it’s as good as a place to start as any, and half because the genre of science fiction is what got us to this discussion in the first place. To go back to the original tweet, if we’re to talk about where the genre of science fiction started, we’re going to have to confront the question of what science fiction is.

On the surface, this seems an easy question: science fiction is a genre of popular culture (including films, television and books to name a few) which involves complex actions, both currently possible and not, that is primarily explained by science.

In science fiction, the scientific explanation for what is going on in the world is paramount – it’s what’s necessary to set it apart. Travel on the U.S.S Enterprise needs to have Geordie saying something about nuclear fusion generators to explain why the ship has stopped and the crew are suddenly in a bit of a pickle. And it also needs Wes or Data to also use some reference to astrophysics or subatomic particles in some fissure as a way to solve the problem (not always but is as good as a demonstration of the genre as any).

What is notable about Star Trek: The Next Generation as our example is that science fiction’s explanations don’t always have to make sense. The science doesn’t have to be absolutely accurate to our understandings of contemporary science to exist as science fiction. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have science fiction that involves space flight to alternate galaxies – we can’t exactly do that right now, but we can pretend that science will get us there eventually.

It’s not realism that makes science fiction what it is either. A lot of work that is classically defined as science fiction does not exactly seem massively realistic, especially at the time of its original writing. Ray Bradbury, for example, wrote about dystopian futures which seem massively out of possibilities, and even references technology which seemed absurd at time of his writing. We have found a way to replicate some of these items in our contemporary time, but have managed to skip the bit of burning books (for now). Likewise, to go back to our Star Trek example, the leaps and bounds of both technical changes and social changes that is envisioned for the human future is a bit hopeful – to say the least.

Science fiction isn’t necessarily about it making sense or being realistic in that sense. Rather, what matters is in how the explanation appears. If the explanation is given through the voice of a scientist, it’s science fiction. This may be a rather crass and basic stance on the genre, but I think it sums up some of the general consensus on what it means to be a science fiction novel, or show. Where science is an answer, then we got science fiction. But when science is not the answer, it’s typically considered in the realm of magic.

Magic

In science fiction, amazing feats and actions are explained through science or technology. When science is not the answer, it’s explained through magic. Magic becomes the catch-all for amazing actions and feats which are “unexplainable”. Where Picard succeeds due to the scientific explanations of Geordie and the thrusters, Gandalf succeeds because he has wizard powers. We don’t really know how Gandalf does it, just that he can.

But magic can work differently depending on the location we find it in. From a literary perspective, magic can fit into a “system”, which can be either hard or soft depending on the level of explanation provided. Soft systems are a bit more malleable, and typically not as easily explained. Hard systems, on the other hand, fit very firm rules and followable explanations.

Diagram by Alexandra Darteyn. Click link for her blog on magic systems.

The magic systems created by Jim Butcher tend to be hard magic systems, both in the Dresden Files and in the Codex Alera. In any given situations, the reader knows what the confines are for the system they find themselves in. They know that when cornered, the protagonist can’t just use an unexplained magic element to get out of it – the magic has to follow the rules that they have already learned and constructed the world around.

In these instances, magic functions very differently to the “unexplained answers” aspect that sets it apart from the science fiction elements of fiction. Hard systems, and even some soft systems that adhere mostly to rules, begins to feel a bit more like a science in a way. It follows a set structure, and there are elements to magic that are possible or impossible depending on the structure and system that has been set up.

Our idea of magic as something inherently different or separate from science is an inherently social and culturally built conception, and has been partially brought on by the view of religions as the white and western scholars began to look at other cultures. Some early anthropologists used evolutionary theories to understand religion and how it can grow, seeing that the growth of culture goes from animistic views, to polytheism, to monotheism, and ultimately ending in atheism. Not only is this view not accurate to how many cultures and societies have developed, but it’s also inherently racist. These scholars would go and study polytheistic or animistic societies, typically in places like Africa, and equate them to what it was like for early white societies – despite an inherent difference in geography, society and history as context for how these ideas develop. They also saw these societies as inherently childish, being able to equate childish understandings of belief and thought to these other cultures.

While a lot of anthropology has progressed beyond this originally quite racist thought, our initial understandings of many things – from what is rational thought, what magic is, what religion is – all stems from this historical context. Even outside of academia, the understandings of rational thought is inherently tied to white supremacy and western cultures. Christianity, for example, is seen as a religion that makes sense, while some other religions – such as Haitian Vodun – is irrational and silly.

Essentially, magic has become a catch-all for beliefs or actions that white people don’t like to see as either religion or science. This also has an impact on wider social understandings of what these words mean and how we interact with the things we’ve categorised as each of these. Magic is essentially designated as the “Other”.

The role of magic is even more complicated by its position in storytelling. While our social understandings of these different words are affected by a lot of the contexts around us, the context of the specific conversation is also worth separate conversation. Stories have genres and contexts and understandings in and of themselves. My trigger into this whole debate started with misinformation about literary genre, and how genre categories are split and understood are complicated and just as filled with colloquial understandings and information as any other word and definition which can be discussed. We’re talking about storytelling here, and stories tend to be categorised into genres, even if the storywriters themselves may like to combine, destroy, or even reject genre categories. Magic, even when scientific, is found in fantasy as opposed to science fiction narratives. But what’s important to remember is that we draw these lines not based on general thoughts and feelings in the immediate – and these genres are typically drawn by marketers rather than literary scholars.

And the importance of storytelling leads us to also think about the history of storytelling. Rightly so, some comments on that original twitter thread suggested that some of the original science fiction did not actual start from Mary Shelley, but rather in ancient Greek texts – texts which some may describe as being mythological. I would even venture to suggest that science fiction being defined by the presence of overly-advanced science and machinery would also throw in mythology from India as well, where advanced machinery makes a lot of appearances, and would therefore predate even the Greek stories brought up in the comments.

Mythology

So where does mythology sit in all this conversation? Does it have genres as much as other stories do, or is it its own genre, away from the others? Obviously, I have my own thoughts on the definition and understanding of mythology, but I want to continue through the strand of more colloquial definitions that we’ve done through the article so far, and think about how people typically think of mythology and compare that to these other thoughts regarding magic and science.

The colloquial view of myth is two-fold. The first is that “myth” is used to mean a story that is not true. Many online articles will declare that reading it will tell you “10 myths” about whatever subject you may wish to find. The second colloquial understanding is more applied to the fuller word “mythology” rather than the shorter “myth” – “mythology” is a story that is old and sacred, a narrative that is spun to tell the stories of gods or ancient warriors, or times before the ones we know.

An old coin representing Talos, an automaton in Greek Mythology.

The role of explanation continues to be important. Many of the definitions of myth that see it as these old tales of gods also see it as explanation. It explains the world. Why is lightening always followed by thunder? For myth, its’ the tale of how lightening and thunder are parts of the gods. For science, it’s the role of static electricity and sounds waves. In this view of myth, myth is bound to pass away in the age of science – science is the ultimate and superior form of explanation.

It is also inherently tied to religion. The mythological explanation is much like magic in that these are explanations not provided by science. And like magic, the mythological explanation is relatively unexplainable. This is not just in tales like where lightening comes from, but can also extend to aspects of healing and other parts of life. Folkloric remedies are sometimes tied to stories, and these remedies are passed down through generations. The same remedies are often argued as unnecessary in the age of science, but there are many examples where this may not necessarily be the case. When Western doctors came to villages in Africa for Ebola, they disrupted the folkloric type of quarantine that the people had already set up, and because of this actually led to more cases spreading than if they hadn’t messed with the system to begin with. There were also lots of folklore and myth around the healing powers of rosemary for HIV, a remedy which was often scoffed at by white scientists. However, after one group did some testing, they found that there is a chemical within rosemary which actually does prohibit the replication of HIV cells.

All this to say that mythology, like magic, is often viewed negatively in the age of science. It’s used to relegate other views, stories and opinions as less than. This is actually where the first definition of “myth” as falsehood really comes in. We designate myths as inherently false, without thinking more about what it is they are saying and why what they are saying really matters.

Science is not better than myth and magic, but rather a different form created by a different group of people. Magic has been relegated as such by the white colonial forces trying to Other the people they are oppressing. Myths are the stories told by these people. Science is the forces of explanation of the oppressors.

And this is why science can be easily ignored by people, even the age of COVID. Science does have a use, and a proper place of explanation. But it’s history of positioning itself between the Others has relegated it as separate and better, even if it’s not.

For science to truly survive, and for it to serve the betterment of those around it, it needs to learn to listen. To not Other those around them. And to learn that science is itself a form of magic and a type of mythology.