SF or Fantasy? — Six Works That Defy Easy Classification

[james_davis_nicoll]

SF or Fantasy? — Six Works That Defy Easy Classification

Comments

[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.