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Originally Posted by pdurrant
It doesn't include 'non-genre', 'mainstream', 'literary' fiction: Fiction set in the real world, with events and characters that could have existed but didn't. Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson, for example, isn't speculative fiction, and nor is Kim by Rudyard Kipling.
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Well, now I'm more confused as to what it is. I'll have to look up "Kidnapped" and "Kim" since I'm not familiar with them.
Also, another question. If a book tells a story, and it's complete in itself, (Not an 'installment' type where you have to read the next book -or more- to finish the story.) is anything taken away from it from having other stories?
Couldn't you just take the first in a series as a stand-alone if you wanted to? After all, I don't think any book can include the whole story of a person, planet or universe anyway. There can certainly be a lot of story-arc in a universe that can be hinted at in a first book that won't make the first story any less complete than a stand-alone.
For example, the first Harry Dresden book. Sure, it's the beginning of a long story-arc, but I think you could certainly have read the first book and just stopped there. You don't need the rest of it to complete the story in the first.