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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wayside" data-source="post: 2299201" data-attributes="member: 8394">To be fair, I was less stating your position than performing a reductio on Psion's reading of it, that is true.There are certainly all kinds of ways to define genres (none of them being factually right or wrong, since there is no fact to be right or wrong about). My very plainly stated goal though was to define (or to think about what would be necessary to define) SF and F in such a way that they could end up on a syllabus at a respectable university, but for the right reason (you'll find Lewis Carroll's Alice books being read in classes on language philosophy, but not as literature--but at the same time, that's often the sort of literature they are).That isn't true at all. As I said in the post you're replying to here, you're mistaking the idea that all writing is mixed for the idea that no writing is definable (i.e. pure). However we define SF or F, this does not preclude the elements of our definition from being incorporated into non-SF or F works, just as however we define tragedy, this does not preclude elements of our definition of tragedy from being incorporated into non-tragedic works. Elements of SF or F should pop up in frontier literature and vice versa; that's not a problem. The idea that you can't define SF or F as genres because a given work of SF or F will always contain elements of other genres is logically incoherent. This means your criticism of barsoomcore's definition fails as well (which is not to say I agree with it; I'm so far from having an answer here it's ridiculous. I wish I had the time to give serious thought to the question instead of just replying to other peoples' posts, le sigh).In addition to rejecting this argument for the above reasons, it is also inconsistent with the setting- or imagery-based approach. Are Geoffrey of Monmouth or other early Arthurians fantasy authors? Anyone who assents to this, I suspect, is doing so only to avoid contradicting themselves. No, as I've said before, definitions are inherently historical, not absolute--not even absolute in terms of setting or imagery--and at least part of this historical dimension has to do with the intentions of the author and the expectations of the audience. F makes use of a great deal of historical imagery, but none of that imagery, in itself, is F, as your example of Japanese historical also shows.I feel I must point out that plot is far more than a mere series of events. Your western version of Star Wars is enormously lacking; it isn't at all "Star Wars, but in the wild wild west." We have yet to find a set of imagery either  <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=";)" /> . There have been many statements to the effect that we should use imagery, but no arguments that weren't negative (we must use imagery because it produces the fewest number of exceptions, we must use imagery because there are no unique SF or F plots). Every argument for imagery that I've seen so far has failed to argue for imagery, rather they have argued against everything else, and I don't think, though I may have missed it, that there has been a single case where the argument against X wasn't also an argument against imagery.Re: Asimov. Their comment belies an amazing lack of insight into the nature of language, if nothing else. For that very reason it strikes more as F than SF.I don't accept your either/or, both because you cannot define SF and F in terms of imagery, and because if the essences of SF and F are their imagery, then SF and F as such aren't literary. Again, do not mistake this for my saying that particular works of SF or F aren't literary. That is not what this statement means. It means, quite simply, that whatever is valuable in a particular work of SF or F will be the elements it borrows from other genres. SF and F are invalidated as literature, but only at the level of a pure genre, not at the level of a mixed work. And as soon as you try to argue that SF or F as such are literary in their own right, you've come over, so to speak, to the dark side, since you've tried to isolate them in some way from the genres they borrow from.</blockquote>

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