There was a bit of a stir about this X post from what appears to be a literary cove.
“Sci-fi’s essential purpose is warning. Fantasy’s essential purpose is reminding.” Andrew Snyder
And the curtains were just blue (As I recall the story, an English teacher lectured his class on the meaning behind the important symbolism of the blue curtains in a story. Then one of the students wrote to the author asking what he’d meant by it. The author said he meant the curtains were blue.)
IMO: The poster above has fallen into a couple of errors. The first is the ‘the curtains are blue because that shows the metaphysical world of torment of the author’s soul…’
What the reader gets from a book isn’t necessarily what the author meant.
Does it matter? Well… no. Not to the author, unless he wanted to convey a particular message and is upset by something utterly now beyond his control. Not to the reader: they saw exactly what they wanted to see. And in the process, money changed hands and the author (assuming, quite reasonably, that he wanted to make money) got paid. If lots of readers like what they see – even if it’s not even vaguely what the author intended, he makes lots of money.
Many of the successful authors told the poster that the essential purpose of the story was to be enjoyable to read (therefore selling lots of copies). This is of course essentially correct from the author’s point of view, even if that particular reader believes the essential purpose to be warning or reminding.
Of course, there is the second error – which is that books are not – oddly – pigeons. I have never seen a book depositing my opinion on the statue of a famous figure. By this I can deduce that they’re probably not going to fit into pigeon-holes, as to their category, let alone that category’s essential feature.
Speaking purely of my own writing, I’d have said its essential feature (besides being fun to read) was exploring ideas. It doesn’t always warn or remind – you as the reader may take warnings or reminders as much from my sf as fantasy or vice-versa. It doesn’t really matter what you derive (I am sure if you wanted warning and/or reminders you could find them) but my intent was to show a set of conditions and let the reader find ideas, think about things.
RATS, BATS & VATS was (from my point of view) about what it meant to be human, and how biology and language shape that. It’s sf, and I don’t think it is a warning of anything except the dangers of exploding inflatable lady-rats, and the superb vulgarity of Shakespeare.
TOM (which is fantasy) explores what it means to be human and how biology (because Tom is a transformed cat, changed into a human – and the effects of biological instincts and the effects of being in a human body with a human mind and its capabilities) shapes him and the story. To the best of my recollection there was no reminder in it (perhaps I need a fantasy to remind me).
Some sf or fantasy may fit his parameters. But I struggle to find an essential warning in DEMON BREED (James H Schmitz) – it’s essentially about human ingenuity played against aliens, or a reminders in THE NOVARIAN CYCLE -where de Camp essentially explores and show the weakness and strength of different possible political systems and viewpoints. For e.g. The Paaluans consider themselves civilized – but that means total nudity and cannibalism to them. People who don’t do that aren’t civilized. Essentially – it is about points of view…
Sf and fantasy are essentially what you make them. And for readers… what they make of them.
Mad Genius Club 
6 responses to “Blue Curtains.”
As a famous writer ironically said, “All generalizations are wrong.” 🙂
All cats are grey in the dark. 😉
Without loss of generality, literary theory is not the theory of mathematics.
There are different ways we can talk about what academic fields do well or poorly at, as learned at the tertiary level.
One is ‘descriptive’ and ‘prescriptive’. A good descriptive field can explain what on earth it thinks it is doing to people, to be able to accurately explain how it thinks and feels to people who have not studied it themselves. A good prescriptive field has a set of rules, or recipes, or guiding ideas that can be easily communicated between people, and can teach a broad range of people how to do the core skills.
Some academic fields contain actual mental skills. (Some times there is a value for these skills.)
A physical skill, you can see how someone moves, but you do not automatically see how they trained, or felt about stuff. Physical skills are not perfectly ideal for learning by imitation, but the correct sort of smart person can learn a great deal by watching more experienced people do the same work. (This is rarely exactly the same sort of intelligence as book smarts.)
Mental skills are different than physical skills, because there is a lot more room for ambiguity and reading whatever one desires to into the communication attempts, even if the other party is honestly attempting to communicate.
There is an easy and hard breakdown of goals for a field. Easier goal is how well the field teaches the tasks and skills compared to other fields, or to no tertiary and just secondary, or whatever. Harder goal is the strategic direction the field identifies as pursuing, and the changes in value of the skills and how they are learned year over year. These are somewhat correlated, but it is possible to be a disaster at the hard goal, and accomplish the easy goal fairly easily.
I think mathematics is valuable, and has limits, limits that are often poorly understood.
Literary theory? I am much skeptical. I think the electrical engineering theory of communications is probably more accurate, trustworthy, and definitive than what linguistics often tries to say about language, for example. I think absolute truth, and absolute morality exist, and also that human to human communication is so lossy and so free will that a lot of the mainstream theoretical models are just stupid.
You reminded me of how much I enjoyed Tom which is a hoot and great YA. Cats and boys are both contrary and fun and the book made that clear.
Whoever posted that take about SF vs. F was more than likely a doofus thinking he posted something profound rather than idiotic. He’s the college freshman trying to impress his still high school friends.
And to think I was just writing about them.
https://writingandreflections.substack.com/p/the-much-maligned-blue-curtains