SF or Fantasy? — Six Works That Defy Easy Classification

[james_davis_nicoll]

SF or Fantasy? — Six Works That Defy Easy Classification

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I first got this sometime in the 80s when I read either an interview or an introduction by Roger Zelazny where he stated that he didn't distinguish between SF and Fantasy in his writing. Since I was a reflexive classifier at the time but really liked his work, much of which defied that classification, this was a revelation.

Riderius

[connatic]

In this context, I find the Steerswoman series interesting - it's SF that in the beginning masquerades as fantasy.

[lydamorehouse]

Oh! I was just prepping a lecture on this subject for my class. I will link my students to your article. Thank you!!!

[ba_munronoe]

I believe Russian has a general color term that covers aquamarine and other colors that blend blue and green.

Given that Smith encounters actual Gods or at least arch-Demons in at least four of his adventures, there's rather a lot of genre-bending even without his encounter with Jirel. (I won't count the one where he meets Medusa, since re-imaginings of classical monsters is a fairly common SF trope: Circe, OTOH, is a bit much)

[(Anonymous)]

Russian doesn't have a word for blue-or-green (it does have separate words for light blue and dark blue), but lots and lots and lots of languages use the same word for both blue and green. (Some of them will have lesser-prominence words to distinguish the two, on the line of the odd names Crayola puts in the box of 64 crayons.)

[ba_munronoe]

Ah. It's been a while since I read that book on the history of color. Clearly the ol' memory gnomes have been at work, rewriting stuff.

[julesjones]

Ah. Thank you for reminding of Metropolitan, and that there is a sequel I hadn't read and have now found.

[julesjones]

In addition I have just bought four CL Moore books at Kobo, at least one of which I already have in paperback, and it is *your* fault, Nicoll.

[chrysostom]

There's a section of the old rasfw FAQ that talks about this.

[dormouse1953]

I always thought the move a few years ago to split the Best Novel Hugo in Fantasy and SF was doomed to failure. Especially as quite a few recent finalists have quite obviously been both.

Incidentally, Lynne Murphy in her book on American vs UK English, The Prodigal Tongue, talks about language prototypes and she uses sandwich as an example. To someone in the UK, the default meaning for sandwich is two slices of bread with a filling. A burger in a bun is not a sandwich, for instance. A submarine sandwich is usually called a baguette. She tells of the impossibility she had in getting a cafe in Brighton in England to give her a bacon sandwich on toast. A sandwich had to be two slices of untoasted bread and the idea of making a sandwich with slices of toast was beyond them.

[jbwoodford]

A couple of the commenters on Tor mentioned Pern, which was clearly fantasy--until she retconned where Thread came from, gravity in the Pern system was non-Newtonian -_^.