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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 2287840" data-attributes="member: 812">Well said. I agree completely with this definition, and it's basically what I was trying to say in my post.Note that you've not so much convinced me as come to the same conclusion I (and my lovely and talented wife) have come to independently. We've been discussing this at some length for a while, so it was interesting to discover this conversation and see where thoughts were going.So what? The point is that Lucas is NOT considering the question of identity by speculating on who we might be if we were someplace completely outside our ordinary experience. Star Wars is fantasy. It can have all the mundane themes it wants.Put it another way -- in order to tell the story of Star Wars as the tale of how a young page came to sit at the Round Table, all you need to do is change the names and a few nouns. You would lose nothing that was essential to the tale itself. It's fantasy.(I'm using Star Wars here to refer to the movie I saw when I was nine -- it was called Star Wars. They've changed it's title since then, but I'm stubborn that way.)Try translating the story of Case from Neuromancer into an Arthurian tale. Or Dave Bowman's journey in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Not so easy, is it, and I'm willing to bet that if you DID find a way, you'd lose either something essential to the story itself, or to the nature of Arthurian fantasy.Can you provide a little more detail here on how you see literary devices as being "relatively recent"? Are you suggesting that, say, Homer, does not employ such devices? Or are you using the term "text" to refer to more than just graphical representations, and considering the entire oral tradition of storytelling that goes back who knows how long?In either case, I think you're on shaky ground to assert that metaphor is a RECENT methodology, and reject its use thereby. Central to Celebrim's definition quoted above is the assumption that the writer will be using some sort of metaphor (another planet, an alien race, whatever) in order to represent some sort of altered circumstance that affects the human condition. Perhaps you don't want to suggest that such things need be metaphors?But to return to our previous example, the original film Star Wars is absolutely about individual power. It is about a young man who, powerless at the start of the film, comes to learn his own power and how to employ it. It is every bit as much a fantasy as is The Lord Of The Rings.Fantasy stories employ a metaphorical representation of power and demonstrate ideas about the individual's relationship to that power. The Ring, the Grail, Ningauble's cave, the priests of the Black Circle, the Great Wheel of Dragaera, the Dominator, Phedre's sexual irresistibility... I think this is the unique quality that fantasy stories provide, the type of story they alone are able to tell.Dannyalcatraz: if you're asserting that Gibson isn't speculating on who we might be if we were someplace completely outside our ordinary experience, I don't know what to say. I think that's the central theme of all his works -- discussing the very nature of the human experience and how our relationship with technology alters it. From Neuromancer to Virtual Light to Pattern Recognition, I think it's clear this is EXACTLY what he's talking about. I don't know exactly what you mean by "focuses on the individual" but it's certainly of no import as far as classifying the stories as to whether or not there's plenty of description of one person's point of view.Dream Park is "barely" SF. You MIGHT be able to extract some sort of vague discussion of identity through unfamiliar situations from it, if you wanted to give it more credit than it really deserves. It's also "barely" a fantasy (you could probably argue that the hero (or maybe the GM?) is used to explore a relationship with power, represented through the game itself) but really, Dream Park is a thriller with technological trappings (which are used to explain the fantastic setting of the story (which is used to provide "coolness")).You seem to want a definition that will allow you to easily find SF or fantasy stories on a bookshelf. I agree with you that "setting-based" definitions are better for that purpose.But I find Celebrim's and Wayside's ideas much more INTERESTING. They're discussing the nature of the stories themselves, and searching for the essential components of those stories to determine if there is a kind of SF or fantasy story that cannot be told in any other classification. Using them, you'll often find that stories you consider one form are stored at the bookshelf in another form's space, but that doesn't invalidate the usefulness of the definitions themselves.</blockquote>

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