Far be it from me to critique other people's ideosyncratic classification systems

[james_davis_nicoll]

After all, I will argue that Starship Troopers is proto-MilSF.

Brin's system of sorting SF from F will produce counter-intuitive results, like Asimov's Foundation, which is all about restoring the Old Order What Stood for Thousands of Years, is fantasy, whereas any Diskworld novel about clackers and the post and dwarves and trolls learning to coexist is SF.

(it's important to note "Having said that, what is my definition of the separation?". Brin's definition, not THE WORD OF MIGHT DEGLER HIMSELF)

Comments

[vschanoes.livejournal.com]

That seems to overlook steampunk, whose driving idea is that the technology of yesteryear was much better. It also assumes a certain kind of relationship to magic, i.e. it's a tool that the ancients understood. I'm not convinced that's inherent to the idea of magic.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

I haven't read enough steampunk to really comment meaningfully there; my impression was that steampunk rested on the notion that what was better was the sense of wonder around technology that was a lost cultural value with the arrival of post-modern cynicism, and so what's lost is a set of cultural behaviours and values, and not better tech.

And I'm not sure I mean to suggest that magic is a tool at all; my proposition was that it was a truth about the world that the ancestors understood that, if the present fallen person understood, they'd be closer to rightness with the world (in the sense of harmony and alignment with natural order, not in the sense of good-bad).

The proposition of the fantastic narrative seems to be that those who do seek to use magic (or wisdom) as a tool are in grave danger of expressing hubris and that this hubris is "evil" or at the very least, catastrophic to those around them. The "good wise person" sees when things are "aligned with the natural world as they're supposed to be" and sometimes this understanding can be used for happy purpose (healing, creativity, etc); the "bad wise person" tries to use their understanding for selfish things, and then fear leads to anger, leading to hate, etc, etc, etc.

[vschanoes.livejournal.com]

Is it not possible for it to be a truth about the world that the ancestors did not understand? That seems to be how many feminist reworkings of fairy-tales work: here's a truth about the world that the patriarchy, which has tons of history and ancestors backing it up (and I've heard it defended for those reasons) simply can't account for or understand.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

That's really interesting. I suppose that goes to the implication worked out in the specific work in question: that is, is the point "if only I could gain the wisdom that the right ancestors knew, I could arise", or is the point "if only we had not ignored this whole process of available cognition, we could know these things making us better off". To me, those are interestingly different themes, and the second one is much more forward looking than the other -- it's sort of like "until you understand germ theory, there's a whole bunch of knowledge you're not ready to know" as analogous to "until you understand patriarchy and feminism, there's a whole bunch of knowledge you're not ready to know".