How literary genres resemble light cones: a followup to my last post

My theories about literary genre have run into opposition, on Facebook in other places. The big question people are challenging me with is: how can science fiction and fantasy be the same thing? While most of this opposition comes in pedantic forms (along the lines of "science is science, magic is magic"), I realize this is something I didn't explain completely in my last post; in addition, my understanding of exactly how fantasy and science fiction are the same thing has evolved.

Here's what I think now.

The difference between the chart I posted before and the one I'm about to show you works something like this picture on the right. This is a standard diagram of a light cone, something very important to relativistic physics. That's not the important part. What matters is that this diagram shows only one dimension of space and one of time. It simplifies a four-dimensional problem into a two-dimensional one.

That's what I did with my alignment chart: I simplified a three-dimensional arrangement into one dimension to make a point. Now I'm going to look at all three dimensions of genre/space, and disregard the dimension of narrative type/time, and give you a little more information that will--hopefully--clarify things.

Here's my new diagram. The genres in my last post (nonfiction, realistic, and fantastic) are areas on the Realism axis (left to right). The farther you get from the dot marked "Earth", the less like our reality it is. (Assuming the existence of an objective reality, of course). Once you leave the dot, you immediately start running into author bias, which is why history textbooks don't coincide with actual reality. Also notice that I've added a section on the chart for alternate history and future fiction, and that stories in this reality-genre can vary widely along the magic/science axis.

The magic/science axis (front to back) is what causes the apparent difference between fantasy and science fiction. This whole three-dimensional model came from my trying to construct a spectrum with "hard" science fiction at one end and "pure" fantasy at the other. Then I realized it would work better if I bent it into a U shape, with "hard" at one end and "soft" at the other. That's the up-and-down axis, and the towers at the fantastic end of the Realism axis are the ends of the U. At the top of the towers are books like The Silmarillion and The Star Wars Guide to Planets and Moons, which are essentially the nonfiction of a fantastic world, and thus as hard as you can get.

There's a sort of bridge connecting the towers; I've marked that and the "ground" between them Science Fantasy. This is the subgenre that leads me most definitely to the conclusion that science fiction and fantasy are alike if not the same; Diane Duane and other authors have combined the two so effortlessly that there has to be something there.

But that's just what I think. "And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now...you tell me what you know."