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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 4363695" data-attributes="member: 6533">From a critical as well as pedantic perspective Pawsplay is correct.  Any attempt to move beyond this point is more or less an exercise in reifying one's own prejuidices.  From the perspective of the writer or the literary audience as a whole there is no necessity to any of the claims brought forward about science fiction or fantasy except that they are fictions that are explicitly unreal and not-true.Beyond that you're just selling books to people's personal delusions about what sort of audience they fit into.The John Gabriel effect - where you buy books because there are the following things on the cover: the words Star Wars, a spaceship, a planet scene from space, or some combination of the above - is the only way anyone who identifies themselves as a reader of Science Fiction or Fantasy works it's just that a lot of us are less efficient/bigger snobs than John Gabriel.This would be true if SF or Fantasy were literary genres, but they aren't.  They are genres of trapping not of story.  You can tell pretty much any sort of story you want in SF or Fantasy.  It's a literary community not a literary genre.The same is definitively not true of Tragedy, Comedy, or Satire.  Or even Mystery, really.  Mystery has necessities of plot, SF or Fantasy do not.From a structural perspective there is no such genre as Science Fiction or Fantasy, they're just adjectives added onto a real genre such as adventure, romance, epic, or satire.And even the distinctions between the trappings are close to moot because the trappings can mean very different things based on the story and the author.  Historically, the community as a whole has been extreme willing to play with even the appearance of literary convention within the genre.  You can talk about speculative fiction, romantization or new mythology and those are interesting ideas for the literary community, but writers have shown time and again that the writing still works even when you violate those norms as long as you have sufficient quantity of the recognizable trappings, fit the explicit unreality criteria, and are willing to have editors, marketeers, audience, or critics label you as something belonging to the corpus.I think I can follow where this comes in from the rest of your argument, but it seems extremely wrong headed.On the one hand it blithely ignores the extremely fundamental role of wish-fulfillment in Science Fiction, and on the other the importance of wish-fulfillment in any scenario based explication of a philosophical point.  1984 may not seem like a wish-fulfillment fantasy, but when you compare it with a Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and see how sex figures into the argument, it's pretty clear what faculties of human imagination and readership it's working with.On the gripping hand there's the issue of philosophical fantasy, but even if you're willing to ignore Tolkein or Lewis there's a lovely little iceberg called 100 Years of Solitude that's bearing down on this Titanic of an argument.</blockquote>

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