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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dannyalcatraz" data-source="post: 2288753" data-attributes="member: 19675">Perhaps I'm conflating your position with someone else's, perhaps I'm misunderstanding it...But the quoted statement about SF IS about Identity, and the clause "is to speculate who we would be if we weren't who we are or who we would be if we were someplace completely outside our ordinary experience" is about...setting?  So ID + Future Setting =SF?  If so, then what distinguishes SF from other liturature that asks about identity is...setting.And the quoted statement about fantasy is equally applicable to Japanese historical fiction set in the Feudal era.  It is equally applicable to the Sci-Fi Epic Chung Kuo series by David Wingrove.  Thus, it is not sufficient to distinguish fantasy from other literary forms.No, Magic IS a central portion of the Darkness series.  Turtledove transforms the Nazi slaughter of the Jews into a nation's bid for necromantic energy.  The Manhattan Project becomes research on the deeper theories of magic within his world, and when understanding is realized, this fantasy world too sees cities destroyed from afar by the actions of but a few mages.  The air-forces of the nations here are foul-tempered dragons with riders.  The main weapon of choice is a "Stick"- essentially a magic ray gun, charged by mages, occasionally recharged by necromancy.The series has 3900+ pages; events within it are relayed by a group of POV characters, one of whom is this world's equivalent of a Jew, and thus, hated, hunted and reviled by many.  Her struggles to remain hidden are gripping, and even there, magic is involved.FYI: The two main characters are an ascetic monk-warrior (D&D terms Ftr/Monk Dagger specialist), and the courtesan he first guards and then falls in love with.  She is much in demand because she is god-touched by the pain-loving fallen angel/diety Kushiel.  About 1/2 to 2/3rds of the books' intimate scenes revolve around the giving of pleasure through pain.As I said- I haven't read everything.   Quoting myself (emphasis is new):  I compared the body of sci-fi and fantasy of which I'm personally aware to the various GENRES I know of- not particular works, but genres of fiction.  I also didn't say that they had equaled the efforts of masterpieces of other genres.  But since you ask...Certain books in Moorcock's Eternal Champion cycle includes a great deal of Joyceian stream of consciousness, at times more like Finnegans Wake than Uylsses.  There are messianic and religious themes all through the cycle.  In several arcs, the Eternal Champion dies to save others.  And then again, he toys with the question of the nature of the Eternal Companion, and the Eternal Object- in turns a demon-inhabited black sword (Stormbringer, Mournblade and 1M others), the Runestaff, a Needle Gun and the Holy Grail.  He toys with words and their meanings, sometimes radically.I've not read Thomas Mann's Dr. Faustus.  From reading a few synopses, it seems 1 part retelling of Goethe's Faust (man sells soul to devil) and 1 part political analysis of post-WW2 Germany.  The Faust legend has been told and retold many times, and the form didn't even originate with Goethe.  The recasting of real world events for the partial purpose of dissecting them has been done in many specultative fiction writers.  Star Trek revisited the Cold War and Viet Nam.  Most notably, Harry Turtledove has written many thousands of pages on fantasy versions of real world events- WW2 in both fantasy and sci-fi settings, several retellings of the Civil War, and even the Revolutionary War.Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot? Another I'm unfamiliar with.  The nearest I know of from my PERSONAL library is Barbara Hambly's 6+ book account of Benjamin January, a free man of color who is medical doctor, musician and part time detective, set in 1840's New Orleans.  I know its a poor comparison- Hambly is telling her story straight up, not delving into the meaning of words, or some such.  But, if that's what you're looking for, read Dick, Moorcock, Vonnegut, or Robert Anton Wilson.Maurice Blanchot's Thomas the Obscure I compare to Stephen Baxter's Manifold series.  In each, the same characters go through a set of events revealing as much about their inner states as about the universe outside them.  The books are interrelated, but are also divergent and non-sequential.Rilke?  See Phillip K. Dick or Kurt Vonnegut.So... I reiterate: What GENRES (not individual books or authors) have been left untouched by sci-fi and fantasy mimics?</blockquote>

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