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Originally Posted by WillAdams
Mercedes Lackey's ``Serrated Edge'' series has elves in a more contemporary setting --- ISTR that there's another series which has literally ``Elves in space'' but am blanking on the name.
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Maybe Tanya Huff's Valor MilSF series? One of the alien species gets nicknamed "elves", the same way that Brust's Dragaerans do. But no, you said literally, so that's probably not it.
As for Lackey, that series is very definitely fantasy with only mild vaguely tech elements which go away in the later books. I know this because it falls under the "inexplicably trashy taste" category of favourites I don't recommend, which I mentioned earlier.
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Originally Posted by WillAdams
There's also Patricia Kennealy's Keltiad series which is Celts in space.
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Yeah, that's definitely got the fairies on an alien planet. I used to read it until the author had this bizarre meltdown.
And now that I think of it, Diane Duane's
Stealing the Elf-King's Roses is decidedly sf-slanted, what with the parallel universe access technology and such. But then Duane often puts a lot of sf-ish actual-science-based technobabble explanations even in her fantasy works. Proverbially Clarkeian there.
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Originally Posted by DiapDealer
Some examples of recent works that fall into this perceived stereotype would be appreciated (let's leave Firefly out of it, for now). Either I'm watching the wrong westerns... reading the wrong SF... or both, but I'm not seeing an "abundance of it" in the genre.
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I actually haven't noticed many (but then I tend to zero in on the subgenres I favour and ignore anything else that isn't sufficiently interesting), but there has been a lot of steampunk in recent years, much of which seems to be set in frontier situations (Cherie Priest's Clockwork Century or whatever she's calling it).
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Originally Posted by DiapDealer
I think the genre is just as diverse and intriguing (if not more so) than it ever has been -- unless we're limiting the discussion to post-hegira type space saga's.
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Personally, I think there's actually much more variety available in SF/Fantasy these days then there seems to have been in recent decades. This, due to the accumulation of both substantial backlists of previously popular genre variants, and the new stuff coming out.
But where back in the 80s you probably had a selection that was mostly ye olde epic quest adventure, wagon train to the stars, cyberpunk, sword & sorcery, fairy/folk tale rewrite, galactic empire overthrow, near-future earth dystopia, magic in the big city, technology gone horribly wrong, and fun and games with time travel/parallel timelines, nowadays you've got all that and more besides to choose from once you get past the abundance of bandwagon-jumping latest-trend imitation books like the spate of magical/paranormal teens that follow in the wake of Harry Potter and Twilight.
Something for everyone, really.