On bookshelves we see the division of our labours into genre.  Science fiction, fantasy and horror books all lined up on their own shelves, with their own authors and readers and their own separate identities. 

Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings, with its orcs and goblins and ringwraiths.  Stevenson’s Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with its scientific experimentation and subsequent tragedy.  The telepathic powers in Silverberg’s Dying Inside . . . wait a moment.  Those are fantasy, horror and SF respectively.

So why do we have such horrific creatures in fantasy, scientists experimenting in horror and fantastic powers in SF?  What happened to demarcation?  Where’s the line?

The more I consider it, the more I come to believe that there never was a line.  The three are one, as one of my more pious callers insisted, a long time ago.  One must have spawned the other two, but which was first?

I put my question to the recently diseased Professor Crowe, when he visited the other day.  Although he insisted he was no longer infected, I donned my air-filtering helmet and let him in.  Since my new assistant, whose name appears to be Senga, is not housetrained yet, I poured the drinks myself.  I have learned not to let the Professor pour his own.  To do so causes a pain in the wallet.

One delightful side effect of the Professor’s recent disease state is that he is not, at the moment, smoking.  I won’t have to waft the formalin around after his departure as long as he stays off the cigars.  As he was kind enough to explain, no cigars means he has to compensate with double whiskies.

He sipped at his glass.  "An interesting taxonomy.  I think it would be safe to say that science fiction came last."

"How so?"  It was difficult to drink through the mesh of my helmet.  All the juiciest lumps were sieved out.  I decided to risk it and lifted the visor.

"Because science came last."

"Well, science goes back quite a way." I stared into my glass.  The drink stared back It blinked first.  "Before that there was alchemy, and what we now call magic.  I think those count."

"I’m sure they do."  The Professor grinned.  "Superstition, however, goes back much further.  What it comes down it is who was first, the bogeyman or the fairies?"

He coughed.  I pulled my visor back down.  "So," I said, "which was it? Surely tales of demons precede those of elves?"

"Hard to say.  Fairies and elves used to be considered the souls of the restless dead.  They were dangerous and to be avoided."  He swilled whisky around his mouth before swallowing.  "Perhaps the old legends of the Fir Bolg, or the Tuatha de Danaan of Ireland would be more suited to fantasy.  Even before that, though, came Gog and Magog, the giants of Albion, and then there was the Roman legend that ferrymen on the French coast would transport the souls of the dead to Britain.  All that and much more is in the legends of just this little group of islands.  The rest of the world have their own tales, just as complex."

I sniffed.  "It’s not going to be easy, is it?"

"I would say it would be a nearly impossible task.  You’ll have to content yourself with equal shares of the world between fantasy and horror.  Are they really so different anyway?  Vampires, werewolves, and so on are in equal parts horror and fantasy, surely?"

"Perhaps."  I had hoped to hear that the monsters came before the gentler creatures, but the Professor’s knowledge did not go deep enough to answer my question.  So we are stuck with the blended genres for now. 

Perhaps all that matters is the order of the elements, rather than the elements themselves.  A story might start as SF, with a spaceship or a time machine or a test tube.  It might end as SF, with alien contact or with a battle won or a world discovered.  Or it might change into horror, with Hell’s gates opened or ghosts unleashed upon the living.

Any element can be brought into the horror mix, even romance if the story involves succubae or incubi.  Time period is irrelevant—Sleepy Hollow was set in the 1800’s but told of a headless horseman.  For it to be true horror, it must take place in this world so fantasy settings cannot be used but fantasy creatures can.  SF can be brought in at will, providing the tale is plausible enough to be frightening.

The Professor coughed again.  I checked the seal on my helmet but this cough was deliberate.  He held up his empty glass, which I refilled. 

"So, there really is no definite line between fantasy and horror, not even between those two and science fiction?"  I risked lifting my visor to take a drink.

"Not so you’d notice.  Where you’d classify a story would really depend on the reader’s reaction to it.  The reader will tell you whether it’s fantasy or horror, but I suppose I’d say fantasy was allowed to tell stories in worlds that don’t exist, while both science fiction and horror are constrained by the bounds of credibility."  He frowned for a moment.  "Especially science fiction.  You could invent a new form of physics but you’d have to be bound by its rules.  No magic, and no coming back from the dead."

"So, science and horror would be compatible?"

At that, he smiled and took a rolled-up copy of a recent science magazine from his pocket.  He opened it and placed in the table before me.  What I read made my eyes open wide and set my idea-generator into overdrive.

In a place with the rather strange name of CERN, there is a very big machine indeed.  Big enough to circle my swamp.  It’s underground, a long way, and it’s very cold.  Cold and dark places are where horror breeds and some have suggested that this machine might bring about the end of the world.  It might, some say, form a black hole into which we will all be sucked and atomised.

Will we?  Or will that black hole lead to Hell?  Perhaps it will open a world to other, terrible places, like the box in Hellraiser.  Perhaps it will let loose Lovecraft’s demons.  Perhaps the dark mind of Poe will spill forth when those large hadrons collide.  Who knows?

Science fiction lets the machine open its gates and form that black hole.  It’s what happens next that decides which shelf the story is stacked on.