Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

I am. so. totally. shocked. by your answer. :)

I found the first comment to be weird, though. Also incredibly inaccurate and superior/fanboyish. :P

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I have given up arguing with people who say, "Fantasy always X!", for the most part. Anyone who claims that fantasy novels all have the same elfy-welfy setting and that fantasy writers all pull rule-breaking endings out of orifices is not reading very many fantasy novels. I'm perfectly fine arguing with people who are not reading very many fantasy novels if they have the self-awareness to say, "I don't read a lot in this genre, but what I've seen is X," rather than, "This genre always X!"

I would estimate that 90% of the complaints I hear about fantasy as a genre are from people who are clearly extremely poorly read in the fantasy genre. Maybe I ought to see myself as a potential ambassador/instructor in this regard, but mostly I think it's more helpful if I don't beat people to death with my copy of The Fox Woman, just for example.

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You'd go through a lot of paperbacks that way, to say nothing else.

I've noticed that the say "(genre) is always X" people frequently have extremely high (even unrealistically high) opinions of some other genre that is generally considered to be competing in some way, like your commenting friend who is obviously a rabid SF fan.

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I've never understood why certain fans think that SF and fantasy are "competing" -- until ten years ago or so, that idea never even occurred to me.

More than once, I've heard purist fans of SF cite the figure that "fantasy outsells science fiction 2-1". Maybe the appeal of this purist mindset is that you get to be an aggrieved minority within an aggrieved minority?

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Maybe. I don't really understand it myself, but I have *noticed* it. Sci-Fi vs. Fantasy, Sci-Fi vs. Horror, Fantasy vs. Horror, mystery vs. romance, etc.

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Maybe it has something to do with perceived lines that are easy to blur. Sci-Fi and fantasy aren't that different, so the people who want there to be a separation patrol the border fanatically. Same can be said for horror (when does scary sci-fi become horror? When does supernatural horror become fantasy?) and for mystery (how much snogging makes a detective novel a romance?)

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I don't think snogging is the difference between a romance novel and not-a-romance novel, but the point remains: some people want impermeable boxes. Others are fonder of membranes.

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Yeah, yeah. :)

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I think that genres are really just "tags", in the sense of flickr tags or whatnot. They're a handy way for authors and bookstores and libraries to point readers to particular books. If I've decided I'm looking for a book tagged "horror", I'll have good luck finding one on the "horror" shelf. The amazing thing is that even though physical libraries and bookstores can't afford to place books on three or four or seventeen shelves, the system still works okay-ish.

The *real* downside to the system is that certain people have decided that their tag is objectively better than the other tags. This confuses me.

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Oh, sure, make an lj and don't friend me.

But yah, I think that some fans are addicted to being the aggrieved minority, and they don't know what to do when surrounded by like-minded folks except subdivide. I believe there's a joke about nearly every religion this way, to the effect of "if there are X [members of religion] on a desert island, they will form X+1 [places of worship for that religion]."

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Oh, sorry! I just created a lj ID this very morning -- *just* so I could drop in and say hi on you livejournal! (And the livejournals of my two cousins.) I'm still figuring out this interface thingy...

As for that quote, I have always heard something similar, "If you put 40 Jews in a room to discuss a subject, you'll get 41 opinions."

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I wasn't actually offended, as I hope you understood.

I've also heard, "If you put 40 Frenchmen in a room, they'll form 41 political parties," but all of it except the opinion format really seems like a piker job of it to me now that I think of it -- combinatorics allows for many, many more! You could be members of three or four political parties at once!

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Fantasy used to sell rather worse than sf; enough so that some people think it wasn't published at all before LOTR was published in the US. SFWA (among others) counted it as a subset of sf.

And if I could figure out why fantasy began to outsell sf, I could probably figure out what other genres and subgenres will take off, and find a way to make money with that knowledge. Lots and lots of money, not pocket change like best-seller advances and royalties.

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And by "unrealistically high," you mean, "Wow, that person was unrealistically high when they came up with that opinion of SF; I love SF, but I still didn't know there were that many drugs in the world"?

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Obviously :)

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I'm again reminded of the collesium scene in Life of Brian where the Judean rebels harshest critics are other Judean rebels.

I'm Jose one of the usual suspects at Meme Therapy. The person who you are referring to is Rosie and he just doesn't like Fantasy. It's not a rational dislike in my opinion but there you have it. I've tried to turn him on to China and Gemmel but he won't have it.

Jose, www.memetherapy.net

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"Splitters!"

Ahem. Anyway, I think that when the stated reason is that fantasy novels always do something they don't, yah, it's a pretty irrational dislike. Not all dislikes are required to be rational -- but at that point I think it's okay to just say, "I don't like fantasy; it's not my thing."

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scottjames.livejournal.com

I'd be afraid that the lesson learned would be "don't argue with Marissas abbout the difference between F and SF," rather than extrapolating to something more general.

And then you have dead people and damaged books for nothing.

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I don't know; more broadly interpreted as "don't get stupid with Mris about things she considers important," that can be a valuable life lesson for many, many people.

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zalena.livejournal.com

I think the dividing line between fantasy and science fiction continues to exist primarily as a marketing tool.

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mkille.livejournal.com

I think it's fine to have a dividing line but it's also fine to label any given work "both" or "neither."

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callunav.livejournal.com

Of *course* we need the distinction! We would be many, many hours of infuriating and circular argument the poorer without it.

Ahem.

As long as the distinction exists in people's heads, it's useful to have language for it. The key here is to recognize that the distinction is different in each head, sometimes subtly sometimes not, that it's created by any number of things other than or in addition to what actually exists on the page, and very few people are able to fully articulate the distinctions they have in their heads, and most people aren't fully aware of how inaccurately they're representing their own impressions.

So say I, who recently wrote a wildly shapeless and impressionistic exploration of the subject. I think as long as we call them 'explorations' rather than 'definitions,' we canhave a lot of fun.

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Yah, I even think that the words "fantasy" and "SF" have meaning. They just don't have precise meaning: there is no guarantee that you can decide with absolute confidence whether a specific book is one or the other. And that's okay.

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Add this: The boundaries change. Currently (that is, the recent past and so far this week), anything with spaceships in it is probably classed as sf even if the spaceships are run by magic. In the 1950s, anything with both spaceships and magic was usually classed as science fantasy.

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scottjames.livejournal.com

So, Star Wars: SF or F?

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Good question. Or for that matter, Accelerando: SF or F? :D

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Science fiction. It's got spaceships in it! And there's no magic in it. Yes, a lot of stuff looks like magic; but it's given a scientific rationale, so of course it's not fantasy.

Now: What if there's what looks like fantasy elements, but the readers and the author agree that this kind of magic is part of the real world? Examples: Some New Age novels and the Left Behind series.

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Technicaly it's SF but you could dust off the old tag "Science Fantasy" I suppose but first and foremost Star Wars is pulp. In other words its the same genre as most comic book universes. For example you can't describe the DC or Marvel universe as Science Fiction or Fantasy, it simply exsists in a different category.

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