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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 2289464" data-attributes="member: 812">Dannyalcatraz: I'm having a very hard time understanding your point. Could you try summing up your position? I THINK you're suggesting that SF and fantasy are NOT genres at all, but categories that depend purely on textual details -- names and descriptions -- as opposed to any particular story qualities.Assuming that by "genre" we mean a specific TYPE of story that can be distinguished from others without recourse to textual elements.I'm not one hundred percent sure what I think about it. It seems to me that there ARE SF and fantasy types of stories that are different in their structure than other types of stories rather than just in their textual details. That is, that there are stories that CANNOT be told in any other form without losing something essential to their nature.But clearly I'm having some trouble getting at exactly what that essential something is. I'll admit my ideas are not worked out very fully, and I appreciate your thoughts and challenges to them.Let me offer a response to your question, however. The fact that a story with SF or fantasy trappings (text) appears to in fact conform to the story structure typical of some other genre is NOT evidence that there does not exist a story structure typical of the SF or fantasy genres. It simply means that the story in question may not be a SF or fantasy story. I don't see the point of this line of questioning, frankly.Putting up example stories and demonstrating that they are not SF or fantasy stories according to the current working definitions doesn't really help the discussion much, either. That a given story is not a genre story doesn't invalidate the genre definition. The genre definition is invalidated once it becomes clear that it is not defining anything that can be meaningfully called by the title of the genre. Which is of course a circular process, but that's the nature of definitions, right?For example, the fact that Harry Turtledove's books are very close parallels to real-world historical conflicts tells us NOTHING about whether or not they are SF or fantasy (or neither). That doesn't enter into the discussion at all. The issue at hand is what is the nature of the stories themselves, how they are told, not what they are "about" (at a textual level). One can use real-world historical events to tell any kind of story one desires. The question is, is Mr. Turtledove telling a story that fits our definition of a fantasy or a SF story? And if not, is that significant for the usability of our definition?Remember, it's of little concern to me if my definition matches the way in which books are distributed in a bookstore to any great degree. I'm happy to change the names those definitions use if it turns out that while they DO define certain kinds of stories, maybe those story types don't meaningfully conform with the genres at hand.I think they do, but it's far from certain, I'll grant you.</blockquote>

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