Re your mention of Kurt Vonnegut:
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Originally Posted by taosaur
We cease to see the work as sci-fi, the easy example being Vonnegut.
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Vonnegut's literary classification had far more to do with his accessibility and embrace of crossover status than his eventual subject matter.
Crap Artist didn't change Philip K. Dick's status as a science fiction writer, nor has Chip Delaney's later work changed his: Both felt at home with the idea of being consigned to what Wm. Gibson calls "the golden ghetto." Whereas Vonnegut was delighted to find his way out of a genre he seems to have considered intrinsically flawed and gaudy.
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[People] love to stay up all night, arguing the question, "What is science-fiction?" One might as usefully inquire, "What are the Elks?"
The lodge [called science fiction] will dissolve. All lodges do, sooner or later. And more and more writers in "the mainstream," as science-fiction people call the world outside the file-drawer, will include technology in their tales, will give it at least the respect due in a narrative to a wicked stepmother. Meanwhile, if you write stories that are weak on dialogue and motivation and characterization and common sense, you could do worse than throw in a little chemistry or physics, or, even witchcraft, and mail them off to the science-fiction magazines.
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-- Kurt Vonnegut, "On Science Fiction"