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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 2271642" data-attributes="member: 2205">Here's another twist on things as well.  John Carter of Mars.  Not very scientific.  Not even, necessarily, by the standards of its day.  Although, keep in mind that when it was written, our knowledge of things that we take for granted today was yet to be discovered.  Einstein wasn't to have spelled out relativity for decades.  Percival Lowell was in the national news all the time with this theories of canal building civilizations on Mars (which Burroughs actually follows relatively closely, in many ways).  Although the genre of science fiction hadn't been really "invented" yet when Burroughs wrote the JC of Mars stories, it's hard to see them as anything else, unless we can take works back out of the the corpus of sci-fi as the science on which they are predicated is invalidated by newer discoveries.Similarly, the same could sorta be true for Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon, which were written a good 70-80 years or so ago.  Ironically, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow which very closely imitated Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon in many ways, would not pass muster because of the time when it was written.Clearly, extremely hard and fast rules of genre categorization are difficult, but I still think there's plenty of value in the discussion.</blockquote>