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General Tabletop Discussion
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Genre Conventions: What is fantasy?
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<blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 2264476" data-attributes="member: 6533"><p>Honestly, from my perspective the differences between fantasy and sci-fi are not large enough to qualify them as distinct genres.</p><p></p><p>For my money, sci-fi is a subset genre of fantasy in literary terms and the reverse is true in marketting terms.</p><p></p><p>The idea of speculative fiction seems rather spurious to me, though I might qualify it as equivalent to magical realism in that its an attempt to grant literary credibility to fantasy/sci-fi genre tropes that often prove fairly liberating and analytical when applied to literary modes of writing.</p><p></p><p>In all of the above I am operating off of a more basic technical division between literary and 'genre' forms of the novel and short story, where said division was, I feel, articulated best by the debates between HG Wells and Henry James where, in my much simplified synopsis, James maintained that the future of the novel lay in character interaction and Wells claimed that it lay in its ability to create worlds and tell stories. I only use the term 'genre' to express Well's view because, well, James's side effectively won the debates and got their own prestigious category where Wells's scions have been relegated to various literary ghettoes.</p><p></p><p>Naturally, neither camp would deny the techniques of the other, but it's fairly clear to tell where the nature of the analysis lies.</p><p></p><p>Now, none of this is neat from the perspective of audiences for these works, but audiences are always the messiest and worst way to analyze fiction save from the perspective of functionality. And in that case I don't really know that there's enough of a difference. You could argue for a difference in speculative effect, but the potential speculative result of either fantasy of science fiction is still a speculative result.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Dr. Strangemonkey, post: 2264476, member: 6533"] Honestly, from my perspective the differences between fantasy and sci-fi are not large enough to qualify them as distinct genres. For my money, sci-fi is a subset genre of fantasy in literary terms and the reverse is true in marketting terms. The idea of speculative fiction seems rather spurious to me, though I might qualify it as equivalent to magical realism in that its an attempt to grant literary credibility to fantasy/sci-fi genre tropes that often prove fairly liberating and analytical when applied to literary modes of writing. In all of the above I am operating off of a more basic technical division between literary and 'genre' forms of the novel and short story, where said division was, I feel, articulated best by the debates between HG Wells and Henry James where, in my much simplified synopsis, James maintained that the future of the novel lay in character interaction and Wells claimed that it lay in its ability to create worlds and tell stories. I only use the term 'genre' to express Well's view because, well, James's side effectively won the debates and got their own prestigious category where Wells's scions have been relegated to various literary ghettoes. Naturally, neither camp would deny the techniques of the other, but it's fairly clear to tell where the nature of the analysis lies. Now, none of this is neat from the perspective of audiences for these works, but audiences are always the messiest and worst way to analyze fiction save from the perspective of functionality. And in that case I don't really know that there's enough of a difference. You could argue for a difference in speculative effect, but the potential speculative result of either fantasy of science fiction is still a speculative result. [/QUOTE]
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