XPost: alt.usage.english, rec.arts.books, rec.arts.sf.misc   
   From: hayesstw@telkomsa.net   
      
   On Sun, 1 Feb 2026 15:17:00 +1100, Peter Moylan    
   wrote:   
      
   >On 01/02/26 15:04, Titus G wrote:   
   >   
   >> My protest is principally with genre impersonation.   
   >   
   >Ah, yes. Like when the shelf in the bookshop says "Science Fiction" and   
   >all the books turn out to be fantasy. That's really annoying.   
      
   Authors are not necessarily constrained by the genres decreed by   
   publishers and booksellers.   
      
   Publishers & booksellers presumably feel constrained to choose a genre   
   for marketing purposes, but what criteria do you use to determine   
   whether any given work fits?   
      
   Booksellers tend to shove most works dealing with a hypothetical   
   dystopian future (or indeed any future scenario) with "science   
   fiction". Hence "The Road" being shoved in with science fiction. I've   
   even seen that classic of Dispensationalist theology, Hal Lindsay's   
   "The Late Great Planet Earth", on the SF shelves of booksellers.   
      
   Would you put Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov" in crime fiction?   
   It's certainly a whodunit, but it's also a great deal more.   
      
   Or take C.S. Lewis's so-called "Space Trilogy". The first book fits   
   SF, in that it deals with an envisaged means of space travel. It has a   
   mad scientist and an evil financier (probably modelled on Cecil   
   Rhodes). The second one has no science at all -- space travel is by   
   means of a coffin carried by angels. But it's shoved there because   
   it's largely set on another planet. The third one deals with a   
   dystopian future, and it has elements of science fiction, in the sense   
   of the science of keeping a head alive without a body, but it's much   
   more an exploration of the borders of science and superstition, and   
   academic ambition and rivalry, with which Lewis was most familiar, but   
   on the whole it is more fantasy than any of the other things. So where   
   does a bookseller put it?   
      
   What makes a "horror" story? Many books have one or more scenes that   
   could be described as "horror", but they don't seem to warrant   
   classifying the whole book as horror.   
      
      
   --   
   Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa   
   Web:  http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm   
   Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com   
   E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)