Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
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context, it should stay SF, even if the context--the time period in which it was written--has passed, and therefore is no longer valid.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.
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Okay, that's fair, and I think I agree.
But it raises another question. Jules Verne and H. G. Wells are both considered SF writers. They were writing before the genre existed as such. (War of the Worlds", for example, came out in 1898.) Verne thought he was writing adventure stories for boys.
Given the "context is king" thesis, are Verne and Wells works SF?
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Dennis