I'm not sure I have a beef...

[viktor_haag]

... but I'm getting a bit tired of Hollywood categorizing yet another "paranormal" themed product as "science fiction". I mean, it's certainly fiction, but where the heck is the science?

Bah!

Comments

[thebitterguy]

A) Science Fiction is just a convenient shorthand for pretty much any modern or futuristic fantastical tale.

B) You used 'Bah!' in that post. Heee!

[maliszew.livejournal.com]

I think point A pretty much covers it. Hollywood prefers nice, simple -- and broad -- categories like comedy, drama, and science fiction. Ask them to be more precise than that and you get abominations like "dramedy" and that's too high a price linguistically for me to pay in order to get precision about supernatural/occult shows.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

"Supernatural" seems like a fine general moniker to me...

[doc-mystery.livejournal.com]

Yet it may not be for others. I'm not really keen on fiction or film that is tagged, "Supernatural", as this often includes things I don't want to see or read about; stories about erotic vampires, lecherous ghosts, vicious horror, etc.

Yet I enjoy horror novels written by King, Hutson, Lovecraft, etc., zonbie flicks, etc.

I guess what it goes down to is that persons are fickle and pervese in their likes and dislikes. Offer someone raw fish to eat, and they say "ewh!"; offer them sushi and they'll say "yum!"

::B::

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

stories about erotic vampires, lecherous ghosts, vicious horror

And with one stroke, the Doc wipes out most of HK Category III "cinema"!

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

Science Fiction is just a convenient shorthand for pretty much any modern or futuristic fantastical tale.

So, "Kindred: The Embraced" was a scifi show? Bah!

(There, I did it again.)

[waiwode.livejournal.com]

Part of the problem, viewable on many stores' bookshelves, is that Fantasy is lumped in with Science Fiction. The supernatural (and modern urban fantasy) clearly hooks into the mushily defined Science Fiction-qua-Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Similarly, Jim Butcher's Dresden Files books used to be in Horror, but are mostly in the SF section now.

Doug.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

Our clueless local Chapters (both of them) have recently bi-furcated "Fantasy" (meaning all the books that seem remotely like all the WotC game novels) and "Science Fiction" (meaning all the books that seem remotely like all the Halo and Star Trek licensed novels).

Quite often I find humour in the attempts of the shelvers to properly locate things. KJ Parker showing up in Sci Fi because the trilogy has the word "Engineer" in it. Butcher showing up in both Sci-Fi and Fantasy, but not duplicates (odd numbers in one, even in the other? who knows?).

[doc-mystery.livejournal.com]

If you change the abbreviation SF so it also includes "Speculative Fiction", would that help?

This isn't unique to Hollywood. The recent Charles Stross book I read, "The Family Trade" can found on the Fantasy shelves of Chapters, and not the SF one. While there is the fantastical element of the secret of the Family, everything else cannot be considered fantasy in the strictest sense (unless, of course, you frame SF as a subset of Fantasy).

::B::

[madmanofprague.livejournal.com]

Which, to be honest, is necessary whenever you start thinking too hard about the 'how much science do you need to be science fiction' question.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

To me the two are distinctly different genres and have not all that much to do with the trappings of setting in the books. To me, Science-Fiction is inherently questioning, warning, and constantly poses the questions "What if this happened", or "Kept happening", or "Did not happen", and so is "forward looking" and essentially optimistic. Fantasy, on the other hand is inherently nostalgic, reactionary, and conservative, and is thus "backward looking" even when it's set in the future (like much of Wolfe), and is quite often essentially pessimistic.

For me, this means that Horror and "tales of the Weird" are more fantasy than science fiction because of their reactionary, conservative nature.