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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2271732" data-attributes="member: 4937">*sigh*Ok, fine I'll address this point.  No offense, S'mon, but I think the subtleness of what I was suggesting went right over your head.  Suppose you set out to immitate Tolkein's works, but you lack sufficient understanding to recognize his palete of themes for what they are.   Instead, you are entralled by the epic action, swords, sorcery, and conflict and you miss the deeper meanings entirely.   (I would argue that to a large extent this is true of the movie treatment of the books.)  You can then tell a story filled with swords and sorcery elements without any awareness of what you are telling other than you find knights, wizards, dragons, demons and such to be exciting.  Your story can simply be a high adventure story in which the meaning of the elements in your story is never explicitly discussed or examined, or which the theme is only expressed intermittantly and inconsistantly.   But, if you tell such a story in a compelling way its highly likely that the reason the story is compelling is that on some level you've unconsciously in your imitation tied into mythic themes of good versus evil, birth and death, renewal and harvest, and your protagonists are probably larger than life exemplers of some heroic ideal (or anti-heroes which call into question these same conventions).   You won't need to deliberately set out to make a morality play, you'll create one incidently merely by using the paints by which fantasy stories are created.The same would not be true if you set out to imitate the works of Agatha Christy or Tom Clancy.  Instead, in imitation of them you'd end up creating a story which was about the sort of things those authors stories are about, and without entering into a debate on what that is, it would not be a fantasy story but rather a detective story or geo-political thriller. All I'm saying is that following the conventions of a genera is going to create a story about what the conventions of a genera are about, and even deliberately setting out to defy the conventions of a genera still produces a story which is shaped by those conventions.   'Unforgiven' may not use the same moral palette as the traditional romantic western, but by deliberately trying to turn those conventions on thier head, its still a story about those moral conventions.On a completely unrelated note, while I'm refuting assertions people are making, I'd like to refute the notion that SF and fantasy can be distinguished merely because one has 'plastics' and 'machines' in them and the other doesn't.   It seems to me that 'plastics' could fit quite well in Ebberon without removing it from the fantasy genera, and I could easily see Terry Pratchette writing a story about the beginning of the petro-chemical industry on the Diskworld.</blockquote>

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