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

[ilya187.livejournal.com]

why do all these stories inevitably seem to present the lost science in a mystical way (i.e. lost secrets that get presented as the wisdom of the ancients)?

I think Alastair Reynolds deals well with this problem, in the "Merlin" series and in the recent novel "The Revenger". In both cases scientific method and scientific inquiry exist, and people to discover/invent new things, but some of the ancient artifacts rely on physics so far removed from what the protagonists possess, that trying to reverse-engineer them really is hopeless. They know that these artifacts were made once, and theoretically could be made again, but doing so requires so many paradigm shifts, so many equivalents of Newton/Einstein/Hawking, that one might as well assume they are magic.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

If what we mean by "magic" is "things I know are science, but a science I don't understand because I don't yet know enough of the pre-requisite science", agreed. I'm trying to draw a distinction between small-m magic used this way and big-M magic meaning "insights I have not yet remembered or arrived at" which I think is different. But at this point I think I'm trying to cut points so fine there's not much point in continuing to cut. 8)