[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

Sorry for the confusion, my remark about Susanna Clarke being filed in Fantasy was in response to HarryT's naming her as a possible example of a successful mainstream-crossovered writer; I certainly didn't meant to imply that she was engaging in the same silly genre-denial that the other authors mentioned before her were.

I think I need to learn to multi-quote better (or at all).

I didn't really think you were. I just wanted to clarify that she wasn't engaging in denial.

As for Mr. Bradbury, he has apparently in recent years been claiming that the Martian Chronicles are in fact fantasy, not sf, and while he does have a point that they're more representatives of wishful/made-up portrayals than plausible/known facts-grounded speculation, it's not like the two are mutually exclusive. Oh, and that Fahrenheit 451 is his one and only science fiction book (no idea how he counts short stories).

Here's a link to a B&N customer discussion re: Bradbury's stance on e-books, technology, and writing NOT REALLY SCI-FI, KTHNXBYE!

Bradbury has always been a master of creating a mood, and simply uses SF tropes in the process. I've encountered hard core SF fans who don't really think that what Ray does is SF, and by their standards, it isn't.

If you want, you can blame Ray Bradbury on the late Henry Kuttner. Ray credits Kuttner with the best advice he ever got. Kuttner told him to shut up.

Kuttner and Bradbury were both members of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society in the '40s. Bradbury was going on about these great story ideas he had. Kuttner told him his problem was that he spent all his energy in talking them out. He needed to keep his mouth shut, put them down on paper, and submit them to places that might buy them. All else followed from there...

I think it may not just be the sense of immediacy, but also the perception of prerequisite knowledge.

A lot of people think that science fiction has to be "science-y" and it'll have lots of hard figures and technobabble and make them do the math. Which admittedly the ability and knowledge helps for certain kinds of hard sf, and probably increases one's enjoyment if already so inclined.

And has some truth if the science involved is something like physics, but gets rapidly less true as you go farther afield.

Whereas fantasy, by comparison, looks easy. All you have to do is clap your hands and believe in fairies, and whenever you see something, a wizard did it.

Well, it looks easy. But if you postulate a world where magic works, said magic obeys rules, and you have to think about what the rules are and what the implications are for your story to do it well.

I was tickled by Rick Cook's "Wiz" Zumwalt stories, where a California programmer got transported to a world where magic worked. Part of the local's problem was that they didn't know the rules. They had simply learned by trial and (sometimes fatal) error that if you stood just so, made these gestures, and said those words in that tone of voice, something would happen. Get it the least bit off and the results were unpredictable but unlikely to be pleasant.

My personal pet crackpot theory is that it's no coincidence that the times when SF seemed to be at its height of popularity and public acceptability were during the 50s-60s when the Cold War was on at its height and science education seemed to be better due to wanting to reap future recruits for the space/arms race, and also during that Jules Verne to H.G. Wells period when it was rather rare, but the entire Victorian/industrial Better Living Through Scientific Advances meme was in play and there were new significant inventions (telegraph, telephone, railway transit) coming out practically every decade.

I think you can make a good case for it. You can also make a case that SF took one of two directions: a belief that science and technology could bring about a better world, and postulated possible utopias, and a belief that science and technology could be misused, with a variety of dystopian "If this goes on..." results. You can have more fun if you postulate that the two directions stemmed from underlying beliefs about humanity, with one camp assuming we'd make good use of our new toys and another assuming we wouldn't.

And there's the surprise switch books like

Spoiler:

Meredith Ann Pierce's Darkangel Trilogy

, where it turns out that the angels and the witches are the descendents/engineered creations of space colonists. I'd say good luck categorizing that one, but happily for the librarians, it can be safely placed in the YA section.

The librarians might not care in either case. In the library and in the bookstore, SF and fantasy gets shelved alphabetically by author name in the same section.. Some fans can get passionate about the distinctions.

One of my examples is Anne McCaffrey's Pern series. It's straight up SF: the people on Pern got there by starship, and the dragons are the result of genetic engineering applied to the indigenous fire lizards. Civilization was knocked back to a pre-technological state by the parasitic Thread, and the colonists forgot their origins. People encountering the series in the middle see a medieval level of technology and social structure and fire breathing dragons and say "Aha! Fantasy!" because those the the visible tropes, but it's not the case.
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Dennis