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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2269680" data-attributes="member: 4937">That would work as a definition for me except - as this thread proves - no one seems able to provide an encompassing definition of what the science fiction setting is.   Sure, there are setting - such as 'too the stars' - which are so prevalent in science fiction and so essentially non-existant outside of it, that we could probably universally agree that they were a science fiction setting.  But notice that, for example, Orson Scott Card is very careful to avoid that sort of definition because he is well aware just how broad the sort of settings in which science fiction occurs have now become.  'Dying Inside' is set on a normal college campus.  So for that matter is 'As She Climbed Across the Table'.  The movie 'Sliding Doors' is set in the present day.  And the playing field just keeps moving.  We are living in a science fiction world.  What happens today, happened only in the stories of a decade or two past.  Is the present world suddenly not a fitting setting for science fiction simply because it is the present?  If we move our definition of setting from place to time, what are we to do with science fiction stories set in the past?  If I write a story about alien landings in 1950 is it a fantasy, but if I write about alien landings in 2050 is it science fiction?  Is it only science fiction or fantasy because its implausible?  What about FTL travel?  What are the boundaries of implausibility around which implausible things are accepted in science fiction, but across the border lies fantasy?  What if I write a story about the disappearance of the clock work makers of Rhodes?  Now the story is plausible, and in the past, is it now not science fiction?</blockquote>

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