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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wayside" data-source="post: 2311991" data-attributes="member: 8394">Nobody's even disputed this.All you've done here is lay down a line of reasoning that can only end in the conclusion that there are no such things as genres (except on the individual level of the work) at all.According to you, no work of SF can be anything but SF. Everything that's part of a work of SF is SF. If a SF story has a squirrel, then squirrels are part of the definition of SF. If a SF story contains a play, then plays are part of the definition of SF. Since a SF story can contain nearly anything whatsoever, everything is part of the definition of SF. SF, as such, is therefore meaningless. Pardon me if I think this is insane.And at the same time, how is this supposed to help you define SF in the first place? You have to know what it is before you can determine a particular work is SF; yet in order to know what SF is, you need recourse to those particular works of SF. This line of reasoning is circular. At some point you have to make a break and establish something.I think you need a better argument than "well this seems like SF to me, so everything that's in this is SF." What the appeals to taxonomies and math sets are supposed to illuminate, I have no idea. Those things aren't comparable to genre theory, and I think by continually bringing them up you've muddled the issue. I thought the point was to isolate SF in its SFness, not open up an infinitely broad space in which every part of every work that seems like SF to you fits, and then to call that space the "set" of SF.You can describe every existing work that seems like SF, but I thought the point was to be able to say why X is SF but Y is not, or to find a way to define all the works that have not yet been written, or to set up a method for reading SF that highlights what is essential, so that new or non-SF readers might use it to "get" the issues of SF works, the way readers of the Nouveau Roman need help to "get" what's going on in the works of Robbe-Grillet.Maybe I should start with a modest assertion: a definition of SF contains only what is essential to all SF (and not everything that has ever been included in every remotely SF story ever but which is in no way obligated to be a component of any SF story at all).That's what I've been arguing against, not for. Imagery, bare plot points, none of this stuff is satisfactory. We need a more dynamic definition of SF so that, as technology progresses and our world begins to look more and more like SF itself, we don't lose our bearings. My question about genre, in the words of Molly Bloom, has been: "Who's he when he's at home?"</blockquote>

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