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Message: <blockquote data-quote="smerwin29" data-source="post: 1919837" data-attributes="member: 15050">This discussion comes up every semester with the students in my fiction-writing classes.  Those who say that SF/Fantasy differs from other forms of fiction in that SF/Fantasy takes place in a make-believe setting while other fiction takes place in "the real world" don't really understand fiction.  Whenever you create a work of fiction, regardless of genre, you are creating a new world--or at least a portion of a new world.  Writers of genre fiction can fall back on various tropes that readers are comfortable with.  With this in mind, it is often the case that writers of certain genres can actually get away with being less imaginative than writers of contemporary literature--certain assumptions (tropes, if you will) are utilized that allow the writer to take shortcuts.Let's take D&D-based books as an example.  Certain races tend to stand for certain things.  Rather than create a fully realized character in certain situations, the writer can fall back on the stereotype of a race and expect that the reader is going to identify that race with that character.  Of course, the writer can create a well-rounded character that breaks the racial stereotype, but even that tends to be just a drastic reversal of the stereotype, which becomes a stereotype in itself.If a writer of fiction that takes place in a world resembling the one in which we live, she would get blasted if she tried to rely on stereotypes--and rightfully so.  Anyone who thinks that it takes any more imagination to write SF or Fantasy than it does to write contemporary or literary fiction hasn't read much (or much well-written) literature recently.  Pick up "The Hours" or "Ahab's Wife" or "The Night Inspector" or "100 Years of Solitude" or hundreds of other incredibly rich and evocative works of fiction and tell me that those works are not as imaginative as any work of fantasy or sci-fi.When you write well, especially something as expansive as a novel, you are creating a world with words.  In fantasy/SF you might be creating new races and laws of physics, but in contemporary fiction you are creating people in unique and unusual situations and settings as well.  No one genre has a monopoly on imagination.Shawn</blockquote>

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