Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
I would argue that, if proven science was required for speculative works to be considered Science Fiction, then they should all be labeled Fantasy until all scientific speculation is proven!  |
I'll agree. And you can probably find people who will seriously propose just that definition.
Quote:
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Seriously, I don't think the disproving of a theory should automatically relegate all SF to fantasy. SF is scientific speculation for entertainment's sake, not an attempt to actually divine the future. And it is still different from fantasy, which has its own separate set of rules. (Anybody gonna start a "Rules of Fantasy" thread?)
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I didn't say "relegate all SF to fantasy". I was specifically referring to cases like the Burroughs novels, where they qualified as SF when written because we
didn't know better about what things were like under the clouds, but arguably
became science fantasy when we
did know what's under the clouds, and Burroughs proposed setting simply isn't possible.
If the difference between SF and fantasy is that the first
might be possible given things we don't know/can't do yet, and we know fantasy is impossible going in and agree to ignore that and say "What if it
was possible?", you can make a case that some things written as SF has been pushed over into the fantasy category as our knowledge has grown.
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Dennis