On the Importance of Aesthetics in Fantasy and Science Fiction

The title here makes what I believe to be an obvious observation: that the presentation of ideas, the way we encounter fantasy and science fiction matters. It goes without saying that everyone loves certain aesthetics. Some of us are into classic 1950s, space-faring sci-fi. Others want steampunk, or cyberpunk, or solar-punk. You may be a Tolkien fan, or you may be a Le Guin fan. And here I don't mean the specific stories or characters‑‑-although they are obviously important too. What I mean instead is the style certain authors, genres, books, or artists. I'm not talking only of the written word either, but rather of any piece of art we encounter. For me, it was often an illustration that brought me in as much as a well-crafted sentence. Maybe the backing music of a video game or movie trailer was enough to pique your interest in something‑‑-enough to make you investigate whatever it was you were looking at or hearing. All this to say that the "vibe" of something matters. The way it's crafted matters. You cannot, in other words, separate the message from its trappings. The trappings rather are part of the message. And if that's a "no duh" statement, great! Welcome. But I'm going to dive a bit deeper nonetheless because I think that people sometimes don't give enough thought to the aspect of art that is aesthetics. We gloss over it as too obvious, as too surface-level, when we should in fact be embracing the whole of the art. And all of this is doubly true in fantasy and sci-fi, where the creation of a foreign world absolutely must revel in the feel of that creation.

The purpose of this article is not to convince you of the above. It is instead a mere introduction to one of the primary conceits of this website. The site itself, the collection of all the articles taken together, is my ongoing exploration of the above ideas. I will be looking at a number of specific examples from fantasy and sci-fi (which I may refer to collectively as just "fantasy" or "sci-fi" because, while I used to be religious about keeping the two separate, I've not come to believe that they are really more alike than us nerds used to convince ourselves of) individually. I will veer off on tangents. I will dive deep into why a specific book or game or movie makes us feel a certain way. However, I want to write down here at the outset my overarching thesis: that all this talk of aesthetics is not just "vibes," but also a window into the heart of whatever it is we are talking about. Why does a certain vibe matter? Why does an aesthetic fit? Why does the artistry of how something is put together matter as much as what that something is trying to communicate? If I can hang onto those questions, I think what I write about will remain so much more focused. I hope, then, that what I write will remain so much more interesting and provocative to whoever it is that is reading this right now. That's the goal! And besides, I also get to write about a lot of really great art along the way. And I love that idea all by itself.