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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7763072" data-attributes="member: 42582">It's not about modernism - it's modernist. (And feudalism is called into question - part of why Conan is a popular king of Aquilonia is because he doesn't accept the force of feudal tradition, either in his own case or as a governing principle.)It's modernist because all the in-fiction value comes from within the protagonist. Conan isn't an agent of providence, or playing out some fore-ordained requirements for human redemption (cf Frodo, Gandalf, Aragorn; or the children and Aslan in Narnia; or even Ged in the Earthsea stories). He sees a situation, decides who he will help and who he will oppose, and acts on it. It's Nietzschean vitalism (and the main commentary we get from the author - from "outside" the fiction, as it were - is that "civilisation" stifles vitality and produces effete and ineffective human beings).A story about seeing a situation and imposing your will on it perhaps counts as a morality tale in the American vernacular! (I'm only half-joking there.) But not to me. There is no external source of morality. No one gets his/her comeuppance, or his/her due, except as Conan wills it so.And to change examples for a moment: Kubricks' 2001: A Space Odyssey is far more of a morality tale than any REH Conan story (what exactly the moral is I'll leave as an exercise for the reader, given the board rules about politics), but by any measure is a work of sci-fi and not fantasy. I think I would say the same about Blade Runner: a clear morality tale, in a sci-fi film.(By morality tale do you mean not a story that exhibits a moral principle but a story where the goodies and baddies are easily identified? But in that case the Earthsea stories don't count as morality tales and so cease to be fantasy - very counterintuitive - while Minority Report is a morality tale and so ceases to be sci-fi - equally counterintuitive.)I agree that tropes on their own don't do a perfect job. But for the reason I've given I don't think your version works either - it fails to pick the radical difference of both internal and external aesthetic of (say) LotR vs REH's Conan.That tropes don't do a perfect job doesn't mean that they do no job at all. What inclines us to call Star Wars sci fi? They talk about parsecs, and planets, and hyperdrives, and the like. That's tropes, and it pushes away from fantasy.Is Star Wars nevertheless really fantasy because it involves magic, and princesses, and dark lords, etc? Certainly the absence of those tropes from 2001 is what helps make it clearly sci-fi. But in Star Wars they are present in combination with sci-fi tropes. I think I'm with [MENTION=6873517]Jay Verkuilen[/MENTION] in doubting that really is going to help us here. Genres aren't natural kinds; at best they're shortcuts to help us engage in analysis and criticism of a work.</blockquote>

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