Solar Flare: Science Fiction News

Jonathan McCalmont has posted an interesting read called How to define a genre… and why not to bother in which he looks at various attempts to define science fiction, and what if any help they have been.

A few years back I made a post The Definitions of Science Fiction in which I listed some worthy attempts to define the genre. I ended that with Damon Knight’s definition:

Science Fiction is what I mean when I point to it.

Jonathan also mentions that definition but points to a number of problems with it. The question is why are we so desperate to define SF. What purpose does it serve? We’re probably not all trying to correctly catalog the national library after all. Nor are we likely all involved in literary discourse which requires this sort of precision.

I think what we’re really trying to do is categorize people. Humans are clannish by nature and we tend to want to classify people as “them” or “us”. In order to do that we have to figure out what “us” is. So we need to define the things we like.

I’m not sure this is a particularly healthy hobby to have, but it is terribly terribly human.

A plus side of all this rampant naval gazing is that by repeatedly re-defining what science fiction means we do give more adventurous authors a chance to continuously push new boundaries.

Thanks to James at Big Dumb Object for bringing this article to my attention.