[gmw]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

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.

Good point ... although I do find travel back in time a little harder to swallow, even/especially as a laymen. To me it always feels like fantasy.

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.

At the risk of starting a conversation already repeated elsewhere: I'd put the "Twilight" (and most other vampire) series up as an example of fantasy without magic (usually).

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.

I guess I was more thinking about my reader's interpretation of the author's intention - rather than actually asking the author. When I read Clarke, Niven, etc I get the very distinct impression that they want their story to be believable. When I read Moorcock, or McCaffery, I get the impression that the story only has to be believable while you read it, they don't really care whether it's possible or not, that's simply not relevant to their story telling.

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.

This is perhaps the one good reason for having this discussion. Describing Moorcock's dancers and McCaffrey's dragons as fantasy helps new readers choose what they may be interested in. Describing them as science fiction is quite misleading - it seems to me.