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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 2291631" data-attributes="member: 2205">Huh?  Plenty of fantasy is dark and horror-driven, and plenty of sci-fi is utopian and bright in outlook, which has been pointed out many times in this thread.I do realize that the definition I espouse isn't all that cerebral; it's a "working" definition rather than a "literary" one, as someone (I believe Wayside) said earlier.  And as Corey says, it's not necessarily all that interesting except in terms of where do you shelve the book in your hand.But it's gotta be the baseline.  Any other definition, in order to work, must not<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">contradict the working definition,</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">be too inclusive and admit plenty of works that are not fantasy by the standards of the working definition, and</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">be too exclusive; fail to admit works that the working definition does consider fantasy.</li> </ol>Because much of the gray area around the working area is overlap or deliberate hybrids with science fiction, that's been the focus of much of the discussion here, but many of these alternate definitions, especially those you've proposed, Zander, are especially guilty of the second flaw mentioned above, and not even necessarily with just sci-fi leakage as the culprit.Heck, I don't think any of the proposed solutions match the baseline "working definition", without tons of exceptions that are considered fantasy by baseline but not by the definition, or no clear-cut match between what is fantasy and what is simply some other type of fiction altogether.  Which is why, ultimately, I can't accept them.  They may be interesting; they may be more cerebral; they may really say something about some works of fantasy, but they ultimately fail to pass any reasonable standard as a definition of the genre, and what separates it from other related genres.Oh, and as a pet peeve to no one in particular, but since I've seen it a lot in this thread; the plural of genre is genres.  Genera is the plural of genus.  Since no one has proposed, to my knowledge, a Linnean classification system, or even a cladistic one, for that matter, for fiction, any discussion of genera has nothing to do with the topic at hand...  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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