Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
However, SF has been a part of other genres for most of its lifetime, especially adventure, drama, horror and comedy.
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I would think those aren't so much
genres as
themes; while they are used for book labeling & marketing, they don't say anything about the tropes or expected plots. (Bear with me; I'm having a moment.)
SF maybe at some point had expected tropes or plots, and those expectations strongly color the mainstream reactions to it; they think it's "spaceships and squids." To those who read SF, it has several subgenres--we recognize Space Opera, First Contact, Future Dystopia, Time Travel AU, Steampunk, and so on. Each subgenre carries its own set of tropes and expectations... we expect space opera to fit within the adventure or drama theme, which is part of why
Hitchhiker's Guide was so innovative--space opera comedy is rare.
Mystery has its own set of sub-genres (about which I know pretty much nothing; I just know that "crime procedural" is only one type).
Romance, ditto. While romance *can* be a theme instead of a genre, there's also a genre with a specific expectation of plot and tropes. SF can have romantic elements but almost never fits in the romance genre--until we get to the new M/M book explosion, which crosses genres all over the place. (There's het romance/erotica in SF too, but it's always been around on the fringes so hasn't had the popularity burst that ebooks brought to M/M books.)
"Comedy" is not a genre. There are no classic comedy character archetypes, no common plot events, no way to say "this is a comedy book" and have the reader know what they'll expect or be surprised by.
(A lot of fanfic involves grabbing the characters & settings from one genre and reinterpreting the story into another genre.)
SF as genre (or rather, collection of subgenres, because they really are too diverse for just one) has expected character types & plot points. SF as <em>theme</em>, wherein the reason it's labeled SF is "this involves some aspect of speculative science which is crucially important to the story," doesn't have those, and could be skipped in the labeling/marketing of the book.
Which is how Atwood gets away with not labeling her books "science fiction;" nothing makes them *not* SF, but they aren't strictly within the Space Opera or Alien Contact subgenres.