Sci-Fi/Fantasy

[DiapDealer]

I read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy. I can't remember the last time I used either of the terms to try to search for books (or browsed by category at an online bookstore). I have zero beef with the way things are.

[Apache]

Originally Posted by Apache

I would prefer that they were separated, but it doesn't bother me that they are grouped together.
Apache

I intensely dislike when the metadata is blatantly wrong. Hard Science Fiction listed as both Science Fiction and Fantasy are just one of many example.
Apache

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

You really need to tell me where to look again.

Here you go.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by Uncle Robin

I do actually know how how to search subcategories, despite your apparent assumption that I do not.

What assumption? If anything, my mistake was believing your words:

Originally Posted by Uncle Robin

...I just hate having to scroll through 50 pages of "SF/Fantasy" at Kobo to find 5 actual SF stories.

If you were engaging in puffery, that's not my problem.

When I select "Science Fiction" from the sub-category list at Kobo, these two are both on the first page of results:

Neither is SF to me, despite labelled as such. I did not go past the first page since my point was proved thereon. To find SF even in the subcategory so labelled, one still has to to scroll past Fantasy books.

It sounds like you answered your own complaint here:

Kobo's labelling is awful...

Maybe shop or at least browse elsewhere.

None of your complaints stems directly from Sci-Fi and Fantasy being lumped together into one larger category. As you mentioned, books that do not have this 'problem' (regency romances) are also tagged as non-fiction. I do think there's a problem with authors/publishers being able to tag books themselves.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

Here you go.

Wow, I didn't even know those were there.

[ZodWallop]

Incidentally, I just went to Kobo again, clicked Science Fiction and Fantasy, sub-category Science Fiction to see how much fantasy I would have to wade through to find so-called 'real' science fiction.

The top book is Alexis: Alien Surrogate Agency #3, which looks like shit, but still falls under science fiction (and romance), I guess.

But below that I got Logan's Run, a novella collection by Roger Zelazny, an anthology called Someone In Time, Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey and Eyes of the Void by Adrian Tchaikovsky. All of it seemed fair to me.

[ZodWallop]

I feel like I killed the conversation

[hildea]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

I feel like I killed the conversation

I can try to revive it I have a tendency to draft long answers and then never getting around to posting them. I wrote this some days ago:

The bookstores could fix this by having a few employees do spot checks of tags now and then, increase a publisher's "sloppy tagger" score every time they found an obvious mistake, and make it easy for customers to exclude publishers with a bad score from their search results. If a few big stores did this, we'd quickly see an improvement.

I've never seen a bookstore with a good interface for searching or browsing, oddly enough. I'd think it would be worthwhile to make it easy for customers to find something they want to buy.

There are some good implementations of search outside stores, though:

• Storygraph (a Goodreads type site) lets you both include and exclude genres, ie. show me books which are tagged with "science fiction" and are NOT tagged with "fantasy". It also requires you to add one or more "moods" to your search - adventurous, dark, hopeful, etc.
  
• Smart Bitches Trashy Books (a book review site for romance) has a book finder which lets you filter for genres, tropes, and character archetypes, for instance contemporary romance with an enemies-to-lovers story arch and a single parent as one of the protagonists.
  
• Archive of Our Own (a fan fiction archive) has the most extensive tagging and searching interface I've seen, with options to include and exclude works on more than 20 different criteria. Since anyone can publish there with no quality filter, the need for good tools to sort through the multitude is high. Authors can add any tags they want, without any restrictions, and volunteer "tag wranglers" do maintenance, like fixing tags with typos, and marking synonyms, so if you're searching for the tag "doctors without borders" you'll also find works tagged with "Médicins Sans Frontières | Doctors Without Borders" and "kinda like doctors without borders". (Yes, those are real tags.) It's run by fan volunteers with a passion for what they do. I'm guessing this would be too labour intensive for a commercial site which needs to pay people for their time.

There should be a market for a good book finding site! The search results could link to several book stores, and it could make money on affiliate links and paid supporting membership. I'd gladly pay to keep a site like that alive!

[Cyclops]

Originally Posted by jhowell

I have always been fine with both together since I enjoy both genres.

How about relabeling the shelf Speculative Fiction.

An early name for what we now call science fiction. If it had been adopted we would probably be saying SpecFic rather than sci-fi

[hildea]

Originally Posted by Cyclops

An early name for what we now call science fiction. If it had been adopted we would probably be saying SpecFic rather than sci-fi

In Norway, some pioneers tried to establish "fantastisk litteratur" (fantastic literature) and "fabelprosa" (fable prose) as names of "science fiction + fantasy + horror", but neither of them stuck, unfortunately.

[hobnail]

Originally Posted by Cyclops

An early name for what we now call science fiction. If it had been adopted we would probably be saying SpecFic rather than sci-fi

Some people get upset when the term sci-fi is used; in their rule book it should always be science fiction. I think that they think that sci-fi cheapens the genre while science fiction makes it sound better; say what?

[Cyclops]

Originally Posted by hobnail

Some people get upset when the term sci-fi is used; in their rule book it should always be science fiction. I think that they think that sci-fi cheapens the genre while science fiction makes it sound better; say what?

I'm normally of the opinion that sci-fi is the stuff you see on TV with its bad science and whooshy sounds in space, whereas SF is found in books, best written by those with a scientific background.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by hildea

I've never seen a bookstore with a good interface for searching or browsing, oddly enough. I'd think it would be worthwhile to make it easy for customers to find something they want to buy.

Good, bad, or indifferent... I don't think online bookstores have any real incentive in making it easy for customers to find things they want to buy. Seems they're more interested in getting customers to buy the things they want them to buy. I'm not crazy about it myself, but neither do I get too worked up over it. It's not like I'm in danger of not being able to find lots of titles I want to read (and have a pretty high expectation of enjoying).

Believe me: if it was monetarily in their best interest to have interfaces that allowed customers to quickly and easily find the type of books they're looking for, I'm pretty sure they'd have invested in them by now. *shrug*

[hildea]

Originally Posted by Cyclops

I'm normally of the opinion that sci-fi is the stuff you see on TV with its bad science and whooshy sounds in space, whereas SF is found in books, best written by those with a scientific background.

I've always seen "science fiction", "sci-fi", and "SF" as synonyms. Is it usual to see "sci-fi" as a different subgenre than "SF" in English?

I don't see scientific background as important in SF, though it's probably important in the subgenre called "hard SF" when I was a teenager. (Not sure if that term is much used now.)

[Cyclops]

Originally Posted by hildea

I don't see scientific background as important in SF, though it's probably important in the subgenre called "hard SF" when I was a teenager. (Not sure if that term is much used now.)

I would say its definitely important. By definition Science Fiction is determined by advances brought about by scientific endeavour.