What makes a book "science fiction"?

[Aust Diamondew]

Scifi is a very mixed up category where people shove wrong things in and not some of the right stuff.

 

[sniffles]

To me, SF encompasses it all. Hard science fiction, pulp, speculative (another term I also dislike), slipstream, space opera, whatever you want.

The implication of pulpiness is exactly why so many people dislike the term sci-fi. If you like pulp, fine (and I do), but not all sf is pulpy, so it shouldn't be saddled with a term that taints it from the very start.

I find it amusing that Harlan Ellison (a person I admire, if not always agree with) hates the term 'science fiction' and would prefer to be referred to as an author of 'speculative fiction'. But isn't *all* fiction speculative?

 

[takyris]

Cthulhu is right about pretty much everything, including touchy SF writers getting antsy about the term "Sci-Fi" because they'd rather be literary and powerful respectable and, you know, dull. (If you look real close, you can see which side of the fence I'm on.)

And yeah, it's pretty much completely up to the publisher, and which imprint you're being published in. Christopher Moore is published in literary fiction, and his stories feature vampires, demons, talking bats, and several varieties of sea monsters.

I personally dislike the current way that SF and Fantasy are divided up in some bookstores. Sometimes it's all mixed in, which is annoying in some ways, and sometimes there's this "Swords in Fantasy, Ships in Sci-Fi", which is great unless you have an author who writes both, so you have to hunt in both sections, or until you've got a story with elements of both in it. Or, less easy to figure, an SF novel that reads like Fantasy (a non-technical space opera novel) that SF folks won't really like but fantasy folks will, or a Fantasy novel that's gritty and technical and has magic explained in enough detail to qualify as a fake science, so it's almost like an alternate-world-historical-SF story instead of fantasy.

Really, there's no great way to categorize books. There are just a wide range of ways with a wide range of disadvantages. I can find the authors I want to find, so it works well enough for me right now.