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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 5097138" data-attributes="member: 22779">For me, genre definitions work better being defined by the center, rather than the edges.  There's lots of concepts out there like this.  Take a forest, for example.  When does a group of trees become a forest?  Who knows?  Who really cares.  It's not like we define forests as number of trees per square meter or anything like that.However, most people can recognize that when they're standing somewhere and all they see is trees, they're likely in a forest.Speculative Fiction definitions work a lot like this.  There's all sorts of bleed over between stories.  Genre is very porous, particularly in genres as broad as SF and Fantasy.  To me, its better to try to say that High Fantasy is stories with grand scope and Low Fantasy is stories with limited scope than try to define secondary settings or level of magic.  Either is pretty nebulous and hard to agree on.  But, I think, most people can look at Tolkien and say, yup, that's high fantasy - grand scope.  Whereas Conan is Low Fantasy - limited scope.  Because, as far as magic level, both come out pretty close.  Both have demons, magic swords, powerful beings, flying monsters, etc.  And, Hyboria is not meant to be earth, it's definitely a secondary world.  ((Yeah, yeah, I know, alternative history and all that, come on, it's a different world - easily as different as the Harry Potter world)).  So, going by the magic level and secondary world parts of the definition, both Middle Earth and Hyboria come out as High fantasy.I'm not really keen on a definition that puts Conan and LotR in the same basket.</blockquote>

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