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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wayside" data-source="post: 2286673" data-attributes="member: 8394">This is a silly argument against defining them. A bildungsroman and a tragedy can overlap as well, but that doesn't mean they aren't different kinds of narrative. I don't think any narrative can be pure, though we try to define it in its pureness to get a handle on it. (I'm not really disagreeing that the narrative approach won't work either, because I think the unity of science fiction and fantasy has to be more abstract and account for more diversity, like the unity of medical discourse.)I admit that I don't have the background in genre fiction that you or the other posters in this thread have. It simply doesn't appeal to me. But even so, I'm fairly certain the second part of this claim is bogus. And I don't even mean that there aren't fantasy equivalents of Pynchon or de Sade, though that's true even if we look at the more cerebral folks writing fantasy, like Gaiman. But there are all kinds of narratives fantasy and science fiction haven't told, so it becomes an important question why they haven't entered into those narratives, because if you can answer that question, it might help to define them. Like why isn't there a science fiction equivalent of The Diary of Anne Frank?The Dragonlance Legends trilogy deals extensively with time travel.And this definition is fine by me. But you understand, it invalidates science fiction and fantasy as literature. They need to be able to do something other literary types cannot do, otherwise there is no point. Exceptions are only a problem if you look for a timeless ideal of what science fiction and fantasy are--an approach that will always be a failure. There is nothing timless about them; they have their own historical determinations, appeared when they did for definite reasons we ought to be able to discover and think about. No doubt they will change a great deal as time goes on, as every other genre has changed and will continue to change, so that even the "setting" approach to defining them will lose all scope and become meaningless. In that way, I see the "setting" approach as a very temporary solution to the question before us.</blockquote>

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