MemeTherapy latest Brain Parade is about The Line Between Science Fiction and Fantasy (and by the way, if you're reading them in a feed reader you should check out their lovely, sparkly new site.)
The question is "Is it worth maintaining the thin red line between Science Fiction and Fantasy?"
Funnily enough I've just read the latest issue of Matrix, the BSFA news magazine, in which Sean Timarco Baggaley argues that Science Fiction is not a genre, it's a setting. Interesting idea.
So can I tell the difference between Fantasy and Science Fiction? I think so. Although there are times that I struggle, does Christopher Priest write Science Fiction? Is 9 Tail Fox Science Fiction? Is Magic For Beginners Fantasy? With all those stories, and others I love, I tend to just forget about the category and search for more work by the author.
But what struck me the other day is that Fantasy and Science Fiction are categories, or maybe even folders. In the computer world (both web and OS) labels have tags have become the now defacto method of classifying things. That's because an item can be described as more than one thing. We now happily tag our photos as "summer" and "raining" or our emails as "important" and "friend", why can't we tag our literature the same?
A SF book could be "near future, high tech, quest" and a Fantasy book could be "heroic, quest, magic", or whatever, not great examples but do you get my idea? There's an overlap. You could tag it "Science Fiction" if it is SF in your opinion, but someone else might disagree. In fact browsing All Consuming or Lists Of Bests to see what people have tagged books as is an illuminating exercise.
And if the argument of maintaining the silos is purely a marketing one, then surely if Amazon switched to tags instead of categories the question would go away with a resounding "no"?
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