Quote:
Originally Posted by jallanite
Science-fiction is vague by that definition, though supposedly a science-fiction story should also seem to be scientifically possible, even if it involves time travel or faster than light travel.
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You will not be able to find any definitions of fantasy and horror that are universally accepted. I was at a conference here in Toronto last weekend at which academic Robert Runte discussed writer Margaret Atwood who has very much denied being a science-fiction writer and has been blamed for making up a definition of science-fiction of her own which no-one else uses. Runte showed that the definition Atwood was using was the same one Robert Heinlein used, but that since the date when he put it forth science-fiction criticism has moved on.
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I've heard that Atwood is keen to have her work regarded as "speculative fiction" rather than "science fiction" (to avoid the alleged 'genre ghetto', perhaps?). I once had a brief discussion with another student in an undergraduate tutorial years ago about Philip K. Dick's
The Man in the High Castle and whether or not it was "science fiction", my view being 'not necessarily'; it was motivated by the discussion the novel's characters have about the genre of their own (meta)fictional alternate-history narrative and whether or not it was sci-fi. My suggestion was that if we strictly classify a novel like that as science-fiction without flexible boundaries, we may as well call something like
Atlas Shrugged science-fiction as well.
I myself am presenting a paper (my first one ever, woo) on Tolkien and Orwell next month in the hope that we can read
The Lord of the Rings etc as something other than just "Fantasy" by some loose definition, more specifically in regards to 'Secondary Worlds' as a commonality rather than what conventional genres may prescribe.