From: William T Goodall [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>On 24 Aug 2004, at 12:45 pm, G. D. Akin wrote: >> On another list a few months, we were discussing Margaret Atwood's "The >> Handmaid's Tale" snip > My question is this: what makes a book/story SF? > > Any definitions appreciated. <snip interesing definitions> Forced to choose one, I like this one: >Darko Suvin : "a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient >conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and >cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework >alternative to the author's empirical environment". I think Science Fiction has outgrown its name, sure its roots were in test tubes and ray guns and guys in white coats, but its slowly morphed into something less restrictive, more about a way to explore ideas within a new framework, be they science, philosophy, magic etc. Its certainly a broad church, with many rooms in it, one of which is 'Science' Fiction, senso-stricto. I prefer Speculative Fiction, we can keep the SF and include works like The Handmaids Tale, and 1984, and any other number of Hugo/Nebula award winners, and all the other things we identify as SF, but that dont actually depend on a lot of science. Books that depend on taking an idea, or a group of ideas, and exploring their possibilities, without the restriction of it all having to make sense, or fit into the universe we or our ancestors lived in. Ideas without limits. Of course, the futlity of stressing too much about definitions is highlighted by the semi oxymoronic nature of a term like Speculative Fiction, but I reckon the more good books we can claim as SF the better. Andrew
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