[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by gmw

The best I can come up with is:

Science fiction is where the author expects the reader to believe, in any dispassionate assessment made looking back at the story, that the story and the world in which it takes place really is something that could happen in the future.

I don't think it's limited to the future. A time-travel story set in Shakespeare's time is still science fiction. Steampunk is science fiction.

I believe SF is comprised of elements that are supposed to be technologically plausible within at least a layman's understanding of math, physics, cosmology, etc. (SF that is easily refuted by anyone with a PhD in biochemistry is still SF.) And it can have elements that are disproven at the layman's level, as part of its "what if" premise, if they're clearly marked. ("As you know, Bob, after the nuclear wars, the earth's electromagnetic field was warped, and batteries no longer hold a charge. We're all pretty sure that's impossible, but with no working laboratories to figure out what's really going on, we just cope with it.")

Which leaves us with fantasy as those works that the author never expects us to (dispassionately) believe are truly possible, however much we may become involved in the story while reading.

I think I believe that fantasy needs to include magic, but not necessarily wizards or spellcraft. There's a blurry area where it crosses into folklore (I'm unsure whether I'd think a Life-of-Bigfoot story was fantasy or not), but off the top of my head, I can't think of anything I think of as "fantasy" that doesn't have some level of magical or inexplicable-mystical content.

The hard part, for me, is those stories that aren't specifically tech or magic based, but obviously in the "speculative fiction" range. Ellison did a number of these. There may be a thematic way to consider these stories, rather than a plot/content method; I'm still trying to figure out how I'd describe that.

A category by author's intention is not ideal but does get us past some difficult situations.

I refuse to base any definition on author's intentions, in part because pigheaded authors don't get to define how readers understand their literature. Non-pigheaded authors should be open to reader interpretation; their "intent" was "tell this story;" categorization might've been done for sales reasons but may not have been part of their concept at all.

With something like Michael Moorcock's wonderful "The Dancers at the End of Time" trilogy my instinct is always to place it as fantasy, where I put most of his work, but there's not a lot of reason why it couldn't be considered science fiction.

Distant future, dying earth, infinite-power rings based on technology the users no longer understand... science fiction. And like the Pern series, that label is fairly irrelevant to figuring out who'll actually enjoy the stories.