Are Fantasy Readers Dumber

This is a comment on a thread that I made at A Dribble of Ink on the question of "are fantasy readers dumber than SF readers?"   

I wouldn’t say that the readers are dumber. They enjoy different types of stories. The fact that there is a lot of overlap in the fandom, shows that the stories are not too dissimilar. I perceive that a majority of SF readers also read fantasy, but that the percentage of fantasy readers that cross over into SF is significantly lower. I won’t say that one story focuses on story, characters, or world building more than the other because I can come up with titles that are for and against for both genres. I will say that good SF does seem to be more about an overreaching idea than most fantasy I have read.


I tend to enjoy science fiction more. I also tend to learn more from reading science fiction. Some science fiction builds from current minor discoveries and builds on them. I think that SF would be more of an academic read for that reason. Anyone that has read a Neal Stephenson novel can attest to the pages upon pages that he goes through discussing the science or math that he is using as a plot point. It can be sometimes off putting to me as well. I am not saying that fantasy is not academic and can’t be learned from, but, in my reading experience, science fiction tends to do this a lot more.

In defense of Ender’s Game; I believe OSC has gone on record about the ansible and FTL stating that he didn’t have the science and didn’t want to explain them with bad science. As they were needed to move the plot along and not put in as a Deus Ex Machina at the very end, this is excusable to me. Ender’s Game was all about the idea of the Battle School.

Someone mentioned WoT. I hope that no other writer tries to write so many characters into a series ever again. That is complex in a bad way. It has almost turned me off of serials.

Science Fiction's Responsibility (and Guilt before) the Mentally Ill

Budd recently brought up Orson Scott Card's novel Xenocide, which created a religious movement out of OCD. As someone who suffers from OCD, I have always been fascinated by Card's depiction in Xenocide. I think OCD is a deeply underused mental illness in science fiction, even more than the almost equally underused schizophrenia and bipolar. Phillip K. Dick, at least, portrayed the complexity of schizophrenics lives in unusual, tender terms. But OCD is even a more interesting mental illness, in sci-fi terms. What Xenocide pointed out is that OCD has some evolutionary benefits. For instance, my OCD gives me literally almost superhuman powers of concentration. I can read 300, 400 pages a day often, or work on a paper for 10 hours straight, and not be tired. I think contemporary science fiction too often emphasizes the victimized or maladaptive elements of mental illness, without realizing that mental illness is not necessarily maladaptive, if channeled in the right directions. Of course it causes problems. But so does one's sexual orientation and science fiction authors don't routinely demonize LGBT people (nor should they).I think science fiction really needs to come to terms with its own history of psychophobia. Obviously, I am in part talking about Scientology. I don't think its any accident that it was science fiction that created the most deeply anti-mentally ill ideology of the last century. Science fiction, from its conception, has always emphasized the power of the ubermensch, and therefore neglected the hidden powers that undermensch populations can also have. Science fiction's history of ableism and racism is directly linked to its inability to divorce itself from the myth of the superhuman. But I'd really like to science fiction to link itself to the underdog for a change, not for the Paul Atreides's, Enders, and Supermans of the world. Science fiction, quite simply, owes mentally ill people for the crimes done in science fiction's names. And it's about time that mentally ill people collect.