Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
A good example is Stephen Baxter's "Northland" trilogy, which describes a world in which the course of history in Europe and Asia (and ultimately the entire world) is completely different to that of our world, all because of a decision made by one woman around 5000 BC. There's no science in it; it's essentially a trilogy of historical novels - but not our history. Nonetheless it's published by Gollancz SF.
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Not familiar with it but I just looked at a plot summary.
I would guess that either:
1. It's SF because the people in the book developed comparatively advanced civil engineering abilities before they otherwise would have.
OR
2. Since Baxter is an award winning SF author, the publisher was going to darn well bill the book as SF if they could in any way sell the arugment, regardless of its appropriateness.
I mean, if someone wrote a book about a village of stone age people, their political struggles, love lives, adventures, whatever, which was rooted in historical research, but NOT alternate. Just a fictional story set in a stone age village, rather than in modern city, what genre would that be?
If merely being alternate history makes it SF, does that mean that any contemporary story where something happens that didn't happen in the real word (essentially ANY fiction, by definition) is therefore SF because the reality in the story is not the same as ours?