Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
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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To me, a major part of a story is the context... in the case of older SF, the context is the state of science and understanding at the time it was written. If the story is SF under that original context, it should stay SF, even if the context--the time period in which it was written--has passed, and therefore is no longer valid.
IE, I don't consider The War Of The Worlds fantasy, because we now know there are no living evil Martians and no Martian civilization. I don't consider any old SF to be fantasy, if the dates presented in the book have passed and some of the technology hasn't arrived by then. In the given context, if it was SF, it is still SF.