As well as Utopias and Dystopias

Fantasy comes from the Greek word meaning: “a making visible”

It explores what might have been and what still might be.

Rat Bradbury says: “The ability to fantasize is the ability to survive. … We survive by fantasizing. Take that away from us and the whole damned human race goes down.”

A Quest - often full of difficulties and seemingly doomed to failure.

Growth – the main character has to grow and evolve through the struggle and eventually prove worthy of their quest.

Good vs. Evil – It has to deal with the “ambiguities and dualities of life” such as, innocence and quilt, heroism and cowardice, order and anarchy etc.

A metaphor for the “human condition”.

Tamora Pierce: The Immortal series; Trickster’s Choice and Trickster’s Queen

Shannon Hale: Princess Academy, River Secrets

M.M. Kaye: The Ordinary Princess

Patricia C. Wrede: Dealing with Dragons and the rest of that series.

Jane Yolen: Sword of the Rightful King

Legend of the Seeker

Quote by Ursula K. Le Guin“The basic concept of fantasy, of course, is this; you get to make up the rules, but then you’ve got to follow them. Science fiction refines the canon: You get to make up the rules, but within limits. A science fiction story must not flout the evidence of science, must not, as Chip Delaney puts it, deny what is known to be known.

Technology must fit in natural laws

Except in the case of Time Travel

Set in the future or alternate reality

Has to have some excitement!

Some of the same elements of Fantasy

Sometimes set in space or on another planet

Exercise: make your own short SciFi

Scott Westerfield: Uglies, Pretties, Specials and Extras

Okay so most of my favorite SciFi is on TV:

Firefly, Star Trek, Stargate (Atlantis especially), Doctor Who, Dollhouse, Lost, Quantum Leap, Dark Angel Etc…

Favorite of all Time: Serenity

Utopia: From Greek for “no place” or “good place”. Basically a perfect society.

Dystopia: a diseased or bad land

It is something we can all may have dreamed about.

Utopia novels attract readers longing for a perfect society. A society with hope and happiness where no one wants for anything.

Dystopias attract the most readers because they warn of what could happen in a not too distant future. They show a horrible and sick world that society is already drifting towards.

Plato’s Republic

Ebenezer Howard, Garden cities of To-morrow

Thomas More, Utopia

Aldous Huxley, Island

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

George Orwell, 1984 and Animal Farm

Lois Lowry, The Giver

Elizabeth Knox, Dreamquake

In a quote from Jane Yolen:

"In fantasy stories we learn to understand the differences of others, we learn compassion for those things we cannot fathom, we learn the importance of keeping our sense of wonder. The strange worlds that exist in the pages of fantastic literature teach us a tolerance of other people and places and engender an openness toward new experience. Fantasy puts the world into perspective in a way that "realistic" literature rarely does. It is not so much an escape from the here-and-now as an expansion of each reader's horizons.”