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Message: <blockquote data-quote="HaroldTheHobbit" data-source="post: 9109729" data-attributes="member: 7031679">That genres are arbitrary and defined from many different perspectives - not the least marketing, profit and consumerism - is true.I still mean that using general analytic methods for defining good litterature shoots beside the target when judging wether a genre book is good from a genre perspective. That is especially true - imho - for sci fi, which in it's very core is about ideas etc, such as I described in my earlier post, rather than intimate and believable psychological deep dives, glimmering prose etc etc.That doesn't mean that a sci fi can't be good literature in a conventional sense, or that sci fi can't be innovative and on the frontline of literary progress. But that's not the only way to define good genre literature.Take my pick as best sci fi book for example, Neuromancer. In a convensional sense it is a postmodern rehash of older noir books, themselves defining literary thrash, combined with underlying technophobia and a bordering on racism fear of Asia replacing US technoimperialistic dominance. But from within the genre frames, it's a subgenre-defining masterpiece taking sci fi into the postmodern literary era with innovative prose, asking questions about a lot of bleeding edge technological phenomena such as AI and a connected world and how that will affect humanity. And all that combined with interesting characters and an exciting story - from an in-genre perspective.So in a thread about best sci fi book, perhaps applying out of genre frame perspectives is perhaps not the most fruitful, even if those perspectives are meaningful too.Edit: In my lit undergrad days, a professor pointed to HP Lovecrafts technique of using gaps to induce fear in the reader to illustrate phenomenological analysis methods. So it's not only Dune that get used in the academy <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":-)" title="Smile    :-)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":-)" /></blockquote>

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