Narrative Voice in SF & F

The Narrator’s Voice Defined

The voice telling a story, conveying the story’s point of view. The tone of the narration conveys the writer’s class, biases, sympathies, limitations, and attitudes, as in King Solomon’s Mines and Herland, both first person narratives. A work may have more than one narrator, as in an epistolary novel such as Clarissa, or The Color Purple which consists of letters by more than one character. “Where there is a voice, there is a speaker,” John Barth has said). Speakers reveal their class, their racial identity, their social aspirations, etc., by word choice, syntax, spelling, etc.

Point of view is the perspective from which a story is told:

• First person point of view. “I” tells the story.
• Second person point of view. The story is told to “you.”
• Third person point of view, limited. “He,” “she,” “them.” But not Godlike.
• Third person point of view, omniscient. Narrator knows all.

A book may have multiple narrators, but most SF/Fantasy works are told in a single voice. Here are some variations on the typical narrative voice:

Intrusive narrator, found in many 18th- and 19th-century works, an “I” who interrupts to address the reader. See The Hobbit, starting on the second page (“I suppose hobbits need some description nowadays…”)

Unreliable narrator does not understand the world and draws incorrect conclusions based on bias or madness. See Poe’s “The Black Cat” and “The Telltale Heart.”

Naive narrator, is unsophisticated and does not understand the story, though the reader does (a concept related to dramatic irony). Naive narrators are often children, though they could be adults, as sometimes appears the case in Herland.

Self-conscious narrator, a postmodernist specialty, calls attention to the text as fiction. This is rare in the history of SF and Fantasy, which seems to take itself extremely seriously, but see Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, and the works of Philip K. Dick and William Gibson.