History, science fiction and the alternative

Fantasy seems to be taking over.

One of our consultants stopped into a local games shop recently.  This is the kind of shop that has mostly wargames of various sorts, sorted into two types: the game that comes in a box with a hexagon-grid board with codes for terrain and cardboard squares to represent warriors; and miniatures, where you buy a rulebook and as many little figures as you can manage, and play on a large surface measuring distances and converting.  Each of us has some experience with both, but long ago and not much.  We found that the games not only take a great deal of time, but require an opponent also with a great deal of time.  We haven’t visited such a shop in years.

Our consultant made a tour of what was on offer.  There were some games of the type we’re familiar with, historical re-enactments of chiefly the American Civil War, Napoleonic Wars or WWII.  There was definitely a tendency to have a basic game with add-on modules, sort of like sequels, and no doubt for much of the same reasons.  But the overwhelming amount of space was taken up with fantasy wars.  The various figurines covered whole walls.  Dungeons & Dragons had its place, of course, but that venerable institution was a tiny corner compared to the massed armies of fearsome and improbable creatures to buy and set at each other.

We connected our consultant’s report with the last couple of decades of the Hugo, Nebula and similar awards, which recognize outstanding science fiction and fantasy writing.  Fantasy now comfortably outnumbers science fiction among winners.  We are living, it appears, in a fantastic age.  Why?

We’ll discard such possible explanations as the general Spirit of the Age being a flight from reality (which wouldn’t exclude historical gaming or space opera), or a lack of scientific and historical background in recent generations of readers and gamers.  Some of the most durable of the older science-fiction series, after all, display a disregard for physics that borders on the absurd; and games were touted (and sometimes functioned) as a way to learn history.  We suggest two other possible motivations.

First, a heightened sense of the ethics of what games or stories are about.  What used to be an abstract movement of cardboard squares into certain hexagons has become harder to separate from (say) Nazi tanks causing carnage somewhere in Russia.  It’s not that the games have become so much more realistic (though often that has happened), but that the gamers are more aware of what is being simulated.  And the colonization of planets throughout the universe is no longer assumed, now that colonialism is a dirty word.

Second, the restrictions in doing straight science fiction or historical gaming have become, for most, too restrictive.  In writing, as science has made enormous advances in the last half-century it has ruled out almost as much of the old fictional universe as it has made real.  There are no tropical jungles on Venus nor water canals on Mars; you can tell by asking your handheld phone.  And the closer you get to an accurate wargame, the more difficult and frustrating it gets to accomplish your victory conditions.  Just like in history.

So, we think, the trend is to shake off uncomfortable restrictions and avoid ethical blunders by moving into fantasy.  But can we?