Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Can you give an example of this? I can't think of anything that might be "too good" to be considered SF off the top of my head.
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They get considered "too good to be SF" by people who claim they don't like SF.
The Hunger Games, AFAIK, isn't specifically denied as science fiction, but the media blitz about it certainly seems to be avoiding the label.
Margaret Atwood insists that her novels are spec fic, not science fic, because "Science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen."
The Cliff Notes for Flowers for Algernon say "To define Flowers for Algernon as a piece of science fiction only limits its appeal for many readers who choose not to read that genre."
Rushdie's
Grimus won an award for best science fiction book of the year--which the publisher refused because they didn't want the book to be classified as science fiction. (Info from wikipedia with a ref link to a
Times article that now requires a paid account; sorry.)
Arch Oboler's play, Night of the Auk, is about the returning crew of a Moon rocket, learning enroute that nuclear war is raging on Earth.
He insists that what he’s writing is not really science fiction.
Several other books that publishers believed had mainstream appeal were deliberately
not marketed as science fiction.
That's all separate from the debate about this-or-that-work is "not really science fiction" because of some personal definition by the person making the claim: Star Wars, The Martian Chronicles, Stranger in a Strange Land.
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FWIW, I'm in the camp that doesn't care about differences between "Science Fiction," "sci-fi," and "SF". I know that it matters deeply to some people, and when I'm directly conversing with them I try to remember what term they prefer, but the rest of the time it's all scifi in my head. It'd be SF, except I work in downtown SF, and that just gets confusing.