Celebrim
Legend
I don't think it is a big of killer as all that. When I first invented the definitions and started refining them, my main goal was to be able to distinguish science fiction from fantasy. Everyone seemed to agree that it was something that they could recognize and distinguish from each other and there was a broad agreement between different observers as to what fit into which category, but no one seemed to be able to explain how they were recognizing the two things.
Like pornography and other slippery terms, this seemed to me to imply a situation where authorial intent and theme played at least as big of a role as content.
Separating the two according to what purposes the fantastic elements of the story were put to solved the problem. It was only after that I begin to explore the problem that the definitions were leaking out into other areas. At first I considered this a feature rather than a bug, because I could show that science fiction had a rich history and wasn't just some passing fad defined - as some texts I was reading at the time would have it - solely by novelty or a narrow set of tropes (robots, lasers, spaceships). This is something I still believe, as evidenced by the fact I will defend 'Frankenstein' as the first modern science fiction story and my not completely in jest claim that Gilgamesh is in conception at least in part a science fiction story.
I think my approach settles the first question, "what diagnostic features separate Fantasy as a modern literary genre (not in the more generic definition of the word) from Science Fiction", fairly nicely. It's the part about "other literary genres" that my conventional formulation has problems with.
But I don't think it is in any fashion a lethal problem. I think all I need is to more clearly define 'fantastic elements'. For example, I pointed out that Javier from 'Les Miserables' fits my definition of an embodied abstract ethical idea, and hense puts 'Les Miserables' in the category of fantasy by my definition. And, while I think there is something important about the story revealed in that analysis, the story isn't like what we normally think of as fantasy because none of the fantastic elements require a full suspension of disbelief on our part. Javier, while obviously exagerated in his self-discipline, persistance, and commitment to the ideas of justice to a degree which is almost inhuman, is nonetheless not an impossible or necessarily even an improbable character. Even though they are far out of the ordinary, rare individuals do possess such exagerrated virtues (or vices). Jean Valjeans extraordinary commitment and near superhuman strength is likewise within the realm of possibility. Mystical events like the Messianic boy with the sou who leads to Jean Valjeans conversion, or the providential fate of literally falling into the nunnery just as Eponine needs an education and finding the gardener is a man whom he formerly saved are obviously meant to be supernatural, but neither are they unexplainable as ordinary coincidence.
In short, all I need to do to tighten up my circle is to introduce some good definition of the fantastic. I don't have it yet, but I have some ideas what it would be like. With such a definition, I think it's pretty obvious I can stop the unlimited leak of fantasy into less fantastic genera's, while simultaneously keeping my ability to distinguish between sci-fi and fantasy - something you can't do with definitions that depend solely on defining the fantastic as some other people more famous than me have proposed.
