[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by emellaich

In case you were wondering, this wasn't code for "I think that ...".

I didn't think it was. Most folks on MR aren't shy about stating what they think, as opposed to what others think.

It's just that I've read/participated in a similar thread a year ago, or was that five years ago, anyway it was sometime in the past. I can't remember who and where the conversation was. However, a few of the folks in the thread were 'purists' and anything like mind reading, magic, psi etcetera automatically pushed the book out of the SF category.

Noted. I just wonder what books they all agreed did fit the category.

My point was not to support their categorization, but to use an example to explain that I believe the only categorization possible is a personal one. Your definitions and mine will never be the same. More specifically, however we define the categories, I suspect that we would never agree on how a specific list of books fits into the categories.

Oh, I agree. It can't help but be a personal category. But the exercise of trying to provide a definition is useful in two ways: first, it lets us see where our definitions overlap and what traits we see in common. Second, and perhaps more important, it forces us to think through our premises, to be able to state just what our definitions are.

BTW, how would you categorize Dune [grin].

SF, where the science was ecology. It was certainly a product of it's time, and a strong piece of world building. But while I didn't agree, I could understand why SF writer and critic Joanna Russ once called Dune "carefully worked up third-rate". Among other things, Herbert was imaginative, but not a strong prose stylist. Think about how Dune might have come out had the same book been written by, say, Roger Zelazny.

Herbert did do some things unusual for galactic empire SF (which Dune in part was). For instance, he never bothered to explain exactly how those mile-long Guild Heighliners traveled between the stars. He just presented it as a given that they did. We only got told later on that the Guild Navigators used the Spice to let them see possible futures, and plot safe courses for the ships to travel.

And he gave us a galactic bias against advanced technology, with Mentats performing chores we might expect a computer to do. But somebody built those Heighliners, and an interstellar starship is hardly low-tech.

He also postulated a galactic empire based on Arabian feudalism. That stuck in my craw after the fact. I had a hard time swallowing the notion that such a thing could arise, let alone last as long as it had when Dune took place.

I first read it serialized in the old large format Analog magazine, when Conde Nast made a go at an ad supported book, in the standard 8.5x11 format for better newsstand display and because that's what the ads they wanted were designed for. Unfortunately, Conde Nast couldn't get advertisers to believe their demographics - mostly salaried scientifc, engineering, and technical types - and reverted back to digest format after about 18 months when the paper contract came up for renewal. But meanwhile, we got cover paintings and interior illustrations by the late John Schoenherr that were stunning, and defined the way a generation "saw" Dune.

The combination of Herbert's story and Schoenherr's illustrations created a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts, and I wonder in retrospect if I'd have liked it as much had someone else done the illustrations.
______
Dennis