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Topic subjectrelated - "Defining Science-Fiction" (link)
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181916, related - "Defining Science-Fiction" (link)
Posted by imcvspl, Thu Mar-05-15 01:36 AM
http://www.nerds-feather.com/2015/03/blogtable-iii-defining-science-fiction.html

some interesting thoughts there including:

"There are two ways of talking about genre. (Actually, there now seem to be three ways: I've started to see anything that might link disparate bits of writing together being described as a genre. Fiction by British-Asian writers: it's a genre; fiction by women: it's a genre. So far as I can see, this is a completely useless and meaningless employment of the term, but beware, it's out there.) The oldest and broadest and, for some people, still the only correct way to use genre is in terms of type of writing. Prose, poetry, drama: these are genres; science fiction, in this context, clearly isn't.

The more recent, and now more generally accepted use of the word is as a characterization of story. Here we know the basic structure of the story, we know the end point towards which we anticipate the story will lead us (or which may be subverted, but you need to recognize where it should go in order to recognize the subversion). Crime is a genre: it leads us to the solution/restoration; coming-of-age is a genre: it leads to personal growth; quest is a genre: it leads to the finding of what was lost; romance is a genre, bildungsroman is a genre. Genre is what shapes the story we are reading. Science fiction is not a genre, there is no natural end point towards which a science fiction story leads (a point made in very different ways by Brian Stableford when he talks of an sf story having no ending, and by Brian Attebury when he describes science fiction as a parabola open to infinity); on the contrary, science fiction can employ any of these genres. Science fiction, in other words, is what enables the story, not what shapes it. The same is true of historical fiction, for instance, or contemporary mainstream literature. "

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