More Meme Therapy elsewhere

[mrissa]

And here's the second Meme Therapy question I answered: "Is it worth maintaining the thin red line between Science Fiction and Fantasy?" Oh, just guess what the gist of my answer was. C'mon. You can do it. I believe in you.

Comments

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

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.

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

So, Star Wars: SF or F?

[evangoer.livejournal.com]

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

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

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.

Star Wars

[(Anonymous)]

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.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

That's easy. Different media have different genre boundaries. For example, comics fans don't consider superhero comics to be either sf or fantasy; in written-words-only stuff, any superhero fiction which isn't a tie-in is sf if there's a pseudo-scientific rationale for the unusual powers, fantasy if it's magical. (Unless, of course...)

So, which category Star Wars falls into is a question for movie buffs. And since I'm not a movie buff (for some time, the most recent Elizabeth Taylor movie I'd seen was "National Velvet"), it's not my problem to figure that out.