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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2286747" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think an even better question would be, "If there was a science fiction equivalent of The Diary of Anne Frank, what would it be about that the original wasn't?"  If you argue that science fiction is only setting, then arguably it isn't about anything that the original wasn't.  But to me, that's an answer which rings false on some level.   It seems to me that changing the setting of the story to a speculative one at the very least changes the story from being one about a specific person, to one that is about that idea in general.  And I think that there is even more to it than that, because I think that the choice of a science fiction setting over say a fantasy setting is choice between choosing two different symbolic languages designed to express different things well.  The villians in each story have a different character when are setting it in a magical world, and when we are setting into speculative history or a future place.  And that is a clue to me that the settings themselves are about something, and that if we were to remove the normal trappings of the setting but retain that 'something' then we would have retained the 'fantasyness' or 'science fictionness' of the story.  The question becomes how do we really recognize the fantasy setting for a fantasy setting, or the science fiction setting for a SF setting.  Wayside made some good points about what was wrong with this, but he missed one that I thought was glaringly obvious.  Which criteria for distinctions between sci-fi and fantasy has the fewest illustratable exceptions depends on what you consider to be an exception.  It's a circular argument.  You can't define what constitutes an exception until after you've made a definition, but the proof of your definition that you offer is that under your definition of an exception its produces the least exceptions.  But of course, that only works if you accept your definition in the first place.  By my definition, Star Wars is not an exception to the rule, and its departure from a traditional fantasy setting is irrelevant, and I can use it from my perspective to show an exception to your rule.  But of course, that's only an exception if you accept that its not a science fiction work in the first place.</blockquote>

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