Quote:
Originally Posted by OtterBooks
I do allow myself a bit of snobbery when people refer to Star Wars as sci-fi. It is not. It's Fantasy. Knights and wizards in space.
|
George Lucas himself said that Star Wars was a classical saga, but set in a futuristic environment. That sounds like a pretty good classification to me.
I started to write a long response to the issue along the lines that this terminology only exists to discredit novels by pigeon holing them and stripping them of authority by saying they're
only 'science fiction' or 'fantasy'. In the process of writing it, I realised that they do exist, it's just that there are many, many sub-genres of these types of fiction. Unlike music, it seems that noone has tried to force names and popular definitions on this multitude of sub-genres.
I think it's a shame that the term 'literary fiction' isn't challenged a bit more often. It's as though as soon as something is generally classified as literature, people respect it, even if they personally find it uninteresting or badly written. 'Genre fiction' is such a thinly-veiled insult. There are really only so many story-arcs available and of interest to us, and all of them have been used before.
Look at 'His Dark Materials': it's story-line includes talking animals, witches and fictional creatures, but those fictional creatures are another race, there are parallel dimensions and there are steam-punk type technologies in one of the novel's worlds. Thank-goodness, for the sake of ease, that we can take the easy way out and merely call it 'YA' fiction, rather than worrying ourselves about how to classify the novels.