For much of the last half century the public has become increasingly enthusiastic for works in the genre of fantasy, in literature, movies, and computer games. During the same time period, at least in the US and in Europe, enthusiasm for organized religion has waned outside of a shrinking but more vehement segment of the public. After two centuries of very rapid technological development based on the discoveries of scientists, fantasy that substitutes technological marvels for magical or spiritual ones has become especially popular under the label of science fiction. The name is not appropriate in most cases, since the fiction in this subset of fantasy rarely deals in any depth (if at all) with working scientists carrying out research using the scientific method, and its extrapolations of future science-based technology generally miss the mark, both in details and in the timeframe needed to bring a new technology to general use. One might say that faith in technological progress has overtaken faith in the divine, and that the marvels once found in religious stories and scripture have been overtaken by the imagined marvels that science will bring us. But are both commensurate in their relationship to fantasy?
Fantasy is the branch of fiction that attempts to draw the reader into a
world that is distinctly other than what the reader could encounter in
real life, either first-hand or through the direct experiences of other
people, either contemporaries or not very many generations removed,
whose accounts she or he could hear or read (with those accounts being
considered by general consensus to be largely trustworthy).
There are many literary genres (from both marketing and critical vantage points) that exist within the overall category of fantasy, or that significantly overlap its borders. Some of the more commonly recognized ones include mythological tales, heroic sagas with unnaturally outsized or even super-powered characters, imaginary worlds or countries, alternate history timelines, fairy tales, stories in which a defined system of magic is seen as a working part of the world, speculative futures such as utopias or dystopias, horror stories that are driven by anything beyond human cruelty or known predatory animals, science fiction or technology fantasy, surrealistic stories, tales of esoteric or occult practices, “strange stories” intended to disquiet the reader (where the fantasy—often horror—element will be very understated), “dying Earth” stories (set in the far, far future), portal fantasies (where someone from our contemporary world is drawn into a fantastic otherworld) and intrusion fantasies (where some fantastical element is recognized as having intruded into our normal world). And many of these genres can be combined or overlap within a single literary work. Works in all of these genres, like those in genres of fiction not related to fantasy, can tell their stories following certain conventions and styles that will be familiar to a contemporary reader and that will make a work less difficult for a regular genre reader to engage with, at the expense of some amount of originality. But conventions, styles, themes, concerns and assumptions about the world will come and go, always in a sense fashions, some longer-lived and some more transient.
A great number of individual authors, from Apuleius to Shakespeare to Swift to Kafka to Werfel to Le Guin to Marquez to Atwood, have written fantasy works, some on a one-off basis and others to the exclusion of almost anything else. People need fantasy, need a way to experience temporarily a world other than the world they know and everything that they've been told exists now and has existed in it. Fantasy works comprise a subset of overall works of fiction, and, like all fiction and some nonfiction, they are produced by, and presume a reader engagement based on, the fictive response of our minds to the world, that is to say, the mind's tendency to construct or adopt narratives that are provisionally treated as if true despite their unreal context. In works of fiction, the fictive narrative is usually treated as provisionally true just for the length of the story. In a poorly written work or badly told oral tale, this provisional acceptance may break down before the end—in fact, that failure of the “suspension of disbelief” is one criterion for judging a story to be poorly told. Fantasy requires a more drastic acceptance of the unreal, which means it bears an added burden that other types of fiction don't have to struggle with. This makes it even more rewarding when a fantasy work is especially well done.
Science fiction is one way of constructing the other world found in fantasy, although it is claimed by some critics and fans to be distinct from fantasy. It is actually just one subset of fantasy, the one which tries to construct the narrative's otherworld of experience based on whatever contemporary scientists consider possible at the time the story is written. It has considerable overlap with the much more common technology fantasy, where the scientific basis may be shaky or largely absent, but where the fantasy aspect centers around the products of what is presented as scientifically based technology. It also has some overlap with utopian and dystopian fantasies, to the extent that some scientific basis is claimed for the type of environment and society being portrayed. Few science fiction works are rigorous in their accurate use of current scientific knowledge to underpin the narrative (those that do are often termed “hard science fiction”, although that label can be misapplied). More take wild imaginative leaps in projecting future developments based on contested or poorly understood theories.
Because the ambit of what scientists consider possible expands and contracts with new research and experimental results, works originally conceived as science fiction may be viewed as pure technology fantasy, planetary romance, or some other alternate genre, after the passage of time. In fact, works that call themselves science fiction featuring faster-than-light spaceship travel and instantaneous communication on a galactic scale continue to be published many decades after scientists have recognized these possibilities as nonsensical. Telepathy and other forms of ESP were once considered valid elements of science fiction, but despite some contested experimental evidence for them, they've never been shown to work in any consistent or useful way, so they are no longer science fictional. Time travel stories are also on similarly shaky scientific ground. The trope of a human consciousness being uploaded into a computer will probably soon go the way of ESP and FTL. Technology fantasy, on the other hand, has no problem accommodating anything that once had any amount of scientific credibility, or that can be described with scientific sounding jargon. Much of what has been published as science fiction from its early days in pulp magazines was never more than fantasy adventure fiction using improbable or inaccurately characterized technology as a substitute for magic and the supernatural.
Since technology fantasy often endows machines and other physical artifacts with magical-seeming properties, either by using a mix of inappropriate (or just impenetrable) technical jargon, or by extrapolating unreasonably from current scientific knowledge, often ignoring the costs of energy required to make a new technology feasible, its crucial ingredient is sometimes mockingly referred to as “handwavium” by critics. But genuine science fiction is no less fantasy, despite its premises being more scientifically acceptable and likely to resemble some future developments. It retains the provisional otherworldly context of all fantasy narratives.
The type of magical fantasy in fairy tales is another obvious subset, along with the “tall tales” of characters like Paul Bunyan and Pippi Longstocking. Longer cycles of legends about supernatural beings (gods, angels, demons, ghosts) interfering in human affairs or endowing humans with supernatural powers form another large subset of fantasy, including ancient works like Gilgamesh and the Iliad as well as modern works like The Lord of the Rings. Superhero comics shade into this category, given their media proliferation and the interconnection of different series since the mid-20th century. Stories in which the physical laws of our world are broken without explanation (or with absurd or satirical explanations) are another sort of fantasy, sometimes shading into surrealism and sometimes into magical realism. And so are stories lacking magic or advanced technology that are set in wholly imaginary countries or worlds (such as the Ruritanian romances of the late 19th and early 20th centuries).
A fair amount of historical fiction, especially that about the sufficiently distant past, also shades over into fantasy. This is most obvious in stories about prehistoric people, or in tales based on classical mythology as presented by authors like Mary Renault, Henry Treece and Naomi Mitchison. If we look back to the first years of the modern era and earlier, we find many supposedly “true histories” and travel writings with clearly fantastic elements, while in modern times we can find a semi-realistic travelogue like Hav by Jan Morris that visits a completely imaginary country. A popular form of fantasy up through the mid-20th century was the “lost world” or “lost civilization” story, in which intrepid explorers would find a fantastic country (like Arthur Conan Doyle's land of prehistoric beasts or A. Merritt's high tech Incan civilization) hidden in a previously unexplored part of the world. At one time these stories could have been considered marginally science fictional, but now they are obviously part of a separate and rather dated genre of fantasy.
What we now call mythology constitutes a major branch of the tree of fantasy literature, with stories that were once taken (at some points, by some people) to be accounts of actual events. A question that has caused some difficulties for religious believers, especially those who belong to scripture-reliant religions, is to what extent they can continue to hold their own scriptures and traditions as authoritative truth while treating the scriptures and longstanding oral traditions of other faiths as mythology. These difficulties have exacerbated divisions within some religions like Christianity, where some Christian scholars accept their scriptures as human originated stories (often modified and reinterpreted by the scribes that copied them prior to the printing press), stories that include mythological elements which are to be taken as metaphorical or symbolic. Meanwhile other Christians have gone to the opposite extreme of considering all of their own scriptures as God-inspired and literally true, with the fantastic elements being accounts of actual miraculous historical events. Note that much of the scripture considered foundational by modern world religions consists of material that is not overtly mythological, such as rules of social behavior, ethical exhortations, attacks on contemporaries (including other writers of scripture), mundane stories of the lives and deeds of supposedly historical figures, poems, songs and collections of adages.
At various points in time, religious organizations have tried to limit the range of acceptable scriptures for their followers by creating an official canon that includes some scriptures and excludes all others. But this adds a further number of humans who must be involved, for deciding what the divinely inspired writings are. And these writings have already been copied in potentially variant versions by different human scribes and then often passed through different human translators and redactors before reaching the intended reader. Academic careers have been devoted to tracing the provenance of manuscripts and evaluating the accuracy of different translations. At each step we must believe that divine inspiration was required to guide the human go-betweens in preserving the divine message. The question for literalists is why God chooses to communicate in such an indirect manner, involving so very many human intermediaries, when there is no obstacle to a more direct approach. One must not only have faith in the content of the message, but in the performance of all the messengers involved in conveying it. Indeed, if God once spoke to us in a more direct way, is it the case that God has stopped speaking or that we have stopped listening?
Attempts to add to an existing canon or create new bodies of scripture are usually actively resisted by the communities in which they take place. Some do manage to give rise to new religious groups, as with Joseph Smith, Aleister Crowley, and L. Ron Hubbard. Closing the canon is an important step in defining the purview of an organized religion. One can argue that when the acts of writing and reading were new, or when levels of literacy were locally very low, the written word by itself seemed to have magical connotations, thus embellishing the magical aura of content that had a religious theme. In this way, as the original or oldest known beliefs and practices of a religion were considered “truer” by strict traditionalists (and reformers whose goal was a return to the pristine faith), so the earliest known scriptures are felt to be more integral to the faith and unassailable in comparison to later works. But this again is a human judgment. In areas other than religion, such as science or history, the most recent writings would be more likely to be considered authoritative, given the expectation that they have incorporated the latest improvements to the discipline and the knowledge base underlying it.
The scriptural elements resembling mythological stories could be fantasy episodes embedded in the non-mythological content to appeal to the fictive response of readers, to add color and human interest, and to dramatize the points being made in the adages and moral and ethical exhortations. In many cases an oral tradition contributed heavily to the original set of writings. The oral source could be the words of a storyteller, a poet, a singer, or even an actor in a dramatic presentation (a ritual re-enactment or—passing on a dramatist's words—a formal stage play). All of these sources would have a shared trove of fantasy tales on which to draw, which could supply tropes and story lines to the teller. In the centuries before the printing press, a large portion of the original works written down must have been based at least in part of contemporary orally transmitted knowledge.
In the earliest stages of religion, the content of dreams and other altered states of consciousness (from fasting, sleeplessness, psychoactive plants, etc.) can be an important part of the narrative around which a religious tradition crystalizes. Since the “objective truth” of these experiences is completely unknowable, the fictive impulse is readily brought to bear on constructing a meaningful narrative, in much the same fashion that it is used to create modern works of fantasy. As much historical fiction now is a form of fantasy, conversely the fantastic narratives of religions can be (and in some cases, manifestly are) reinterpreted as history. This is especially the case with ancient religious stories, which came into being in times when histories were less concerned with accuracy than with presenting chronicles of events (real or not) which would seem appealing to the reader (and noncontroversial, if not downright flattering, to the author's patrons). Chronology was often unclear, even when actual events were reported, since numbering of years was not used consistently in histories until relatively late. Although factual material may have been part of early histories, myths, rumors and other fictions could be included, and references to actual events could be backdated to construct “true” prophecies. All of this would make it difficult to distinguish between history and myth.
Even now, when historians have a much more critical view of sources and stricter methodologies for judging evidence, historians can be misled by their own biases and those of their academic community of peers (or political sponsors), although this almost never introduces overtly fantastic elements into contemporary histories. One could argue that some “conspiracy theory” views of history are fantastic, but in most cases that would relate more to “unbelievable” as one alternate definition of “fantastic”—since in a general sense conspiracies are a regular part of life, and could be “business as usual” in some types of social and economic interactions, rather than sinister cabals meeting in darkened rooms; but the particular alleged conspiracies with all powerful cabals and an ever expanding list of shadowy crimes are the ones that strain credulity.
With most serious historical works, the fictive impulse forms a narrative in which the assemblage of documented facts is embedded, which may give them a very slightly fictional character, but the absence of an otherworldly context in the most heavily documented time periods and societies exclude history written and published as nonfiction in recent years from the category of fantasy.
The present situation finds us viewing history of the nearer past as narrative more heavily laden with documented facts, detailing its sources and their provenance, and far more careful about dating and chronology; history of the distant past becomes more a catalog of artifacts and linguistic (or even genetic) clues to analyze, with a much more hedged view of what can be interpreted from these artifacts—and even from contemporaneous writings when those exist—about the lives and beliefs of the people who lived then, with ambiguities and unknowns more likely to be handwaved away than overinterpreted. How often have we read that an object or structure “may have been used in religious rituals” as the uninformative default conclusion of an archeological paper? One can no longer expect fantastic marvels to come out of any but the more unprofessional and disreputable popular histories.
For religions, the challenge has been to navigate the currents of history and science without sinking. One path to a successful voyage requires rationalizing, reinterpreting, and reimagining the fantastic traditions and contexts that have been part of the belief system. But this may also a necessitate a requirement for reconnecting with the felt sources of religious experience in the present-day environment. It seems unlikely that the experiences that give rise to religious feelings are somehow not accessible to us now due to “progress” or “civilization”. The other path is more or less one of radical rejection of history and science in favor of a closed community of belief reliant on the total agreement of all believers, using circular proofs when necessary, practicing the exclusion of dialog with unbelievers (to the maximum extent that the surrounding culture allows). The pressure for these responses and the conflict between them is not a sudden developments but one that has been gaining force over the past several centuries.
Not accidentally, more recent times have seen an even more rapidly accelerating expansion of the appeal of fantasy among people living now, especially younger people. It's not uncommon to hear that fantasy and science fiction are our “modern mythology”, although much of the basis for that may be due to popular authors borrowing heavily from the themes, plots and types of characters found in older mythology. But with the success of science and engineering in producing technology that would have been considered fantastic and marvelous even a generation or two before, technology fantasy has become (along with the rarer true science fiction) one of the most popular genres of fantasy. And the mystique of advances in technology has been used by some scientists, and by authors of popular science books, to make claims for the inevitable replacement of religion by science as a guide for individual human lives and as an organizing principle for future human societies. Technology has solved so many problems, is it not unreasonable to imagine that technology will solve ever more, that it will become almost salvific in a quasi-religious sense?
The answer, of course, is that it is unreasonable to imagine that as a practical reality—all technology has physical constraints, particularly when it comes to energy and other natural resource requirements and to the problems of safely disposing of waste products. In addition, technology is both created and put to use in existing social and economic systems that constrain who benefits. One trope seen in technology fantasy is that of “post-scarcity” societies, as if the main causative factors in scarcity were technological rather than social and economic. This is surely unrealistic, as is the notion that the outputs of technology, toxic or otherwise disruptive products of unlimited consumption, can keep being pumped into the environment without grave consequences. In the past dozen years or so, a genre of dystopian technology fantasy has grown explosively as authors have come to recognize this. So the tendency to venerate salvific technology may be tempered by the realization that technology is at best a partial substitute for what religion provides, and only to the extent that it stimulates our wonder and aids us in exploring the mysteries of existence. Ultimately it does not address our human concerns with meaning and value, nor does it help much in answering existential questions about how we relate our lives to other lives and to the larger world.
The more that cutting edge science and its applications become sufficiently specialized and complex as to be beyond the comprehension of even most educated lay readers, the more fictional technology and the superficial trappings of science can substitute for magic as a source of fantasy fiction. And the very best written fantasy can provoke questions and the exploration of themes that would normally be considered religious or philosophical. So for the present, it appears that, like magical fantasy and historical fantasy, technology fantasy will remain a popular genre within the overall category of fantasy, and that the public's overall engagement with fantasy will continue to flourish. This may influence the further development of religious beliefs and their expression, but it is unlikely to ever completely overtake or substitute for them.