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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TwinBahamut" data-source="post: 4356754" data-attributes="member: 32536">My brother commented well enough on the Dune thing, so I won't repeat hat he said, but I guess I have a few things to mention myself.I'll pass. I have been slowly drifting away from books over the past several years, and hard science fiction and the like has never interested me very much. Red Mars put me to sleep halfway through when I tried sitting down and reading it a few years ago...  You are not making much sense at all. By your own definition, the super-race element is irrelevant. The nature of the protagonist is irrelevant to your definition as well. If you want to convince me on this one, you really need to explain yourself a lot better. because I am not seeing it.All my years of college have tended to make me a bit jaded when confronted with "critical essays" and the like... Maybe it is the fact that I got into being an English major only after studying the physical sciences, math, and philosophy for a few years, but I could never accept the "someone wrote it down, so it must be true" mentality that pervades the entire realm of literary study, where what matters is what a few "canonical" academics claim, rather than what is empirically true. I prefer direct logical analysis based on my own observations, myself.I never liked the term "speculative fiction", myself. Maybe it is just the name, but I don't like the fact that it just tries to lump so many different things together under a presumption of authorial intent... In many respects, many Science Fiction and particularly many Fantasy works are not about some kind "speculation" (meaning that they are not trying to tell some kind of "what if", but instead simply use the tropes of the genre to tell a very different kind of tale). For example, I would claim that Star Wars is Science Fiction, but not Speculative Fiction (using my own definitions). Also, the problem with using an all-encompassing label for both is that it ignores the fact that there are many stories told under both genres that would work just as well under a very realistic or historical setting.The big problem is that the very ideas of "Science Fiction" and "Fantasy" are too all-encompassing to be defined as genres of any kind. You can't claim "Star Wars is not Science Fiction" because the term Science Fiction is too broad and inclusive. You can easily say something like "Star Wars is not Hard Science Fiction", since Hard Science Fiction has very specified restrictions (and thus is reasonably defined genre, sometimes), but it is much harder to argue that it is not Science Fiction.In many ways, I even wonder if the narrow definition of Science Fiction that you are using is just a misapplication of a widely used word with many broad connotations for a very specific and small genre... Perhaps it is the original historical use of the word, but words change in meaning, and it in this case the term Science Fiction has become far more broad as it has grown in use.Why is the bookstore definition any less valid than any other definition? If they don't use some "standard", doesn't that just mean that the standard is irrelevant? As you say, bookstores shelve their books according to what readers care about and are looking for. It hardly matters whether an author thinks his work is "Science Fiction" or not, and what an academic thinks matters even less, but what genre a reader identifies a work as does matter, and bookstores and publishers cater to that and that alone (and do so quite well).Anyways, this is enough of a divergence from the topic of the thread for me. I won't comment on this any further.</blockquote>

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