Bookstores should group fantasy with horror instead of scifi. Both fantasy and horror are purely creations of the author's mind; scifi is tethered to factual information.
If you need to group scifi, I'd put it with mysteries and thrillers.
@Uair@bookstodon I think fantasy and sci-fi should be their own sections in bookstores and not grouped with anything. It annoys me that they're on the same shelves. Sci-fi and fantasy are split up in online bookstores. Mystery and horror also need to stay separate.
I do stand by "story comes first". I'm versatile; I think like a creator. I can enjoy a book that's just a montage when it's well done. Brautigan has his moments. Story is the engine of a novel, of a play. It's the framework upon which all else is draped, it's the reader's reason to turn the page. And the story is a lot easier to write in fantasy and horror than scifi and mystery. I've done enough composition to know.
@Uair@bookstodon What's easier to write differs between authors. I love horror, but find it difficult to write. Sci-fi, less so. I used to think the same of mystery, but that's not the case for me. Your theory is bunk.
@Uair@benetnasch@bookstodon I think it depends on the amount of world building for the story. If it’s just a story about a haunted house then not so much, but if that house then contains a parallel universe in which a child gets to confront her fears and question her place in the world as in a book like Coraline, then totally different thing to write.
Genres are there as shortcuts for readers but it doesn’t mean that the worlds can’t be original and challenge the tropes of that genre. Instead of having a rickety old haunted house maybe it’s a brand new apartment block in a city. Also doesn’t mean the characters can’t question the structure of society or experience complicated emotions. I think the key here it’s to convey a story as clearly and as simply as possible and that can be hard in any genre.
SF and F are grouped together because they are speculative - they answer the question 'what if?' - which horror can also do, and that's why it is already frequently grouped with them. But SF is not fundamentally more rooted in facts than fantasy. That's a mistake along the same lines as supposing fantasy can't be realistic simply because it contains the fantastic. SF's questions are rooted in science, but it's every bit as capable of becoming divorced from facts.>
@Uair@bookstodon >and the idea it's close to mystery is just damn strange.
This is just the weird, gatekeeping idea that SF is somehow 'superior' and shouldn't be sullied by fantasy. It's not just nonsense, it's harmful nonsense.
@Rhube@bookstodon
SF isn't superior, but it is harder to write.As is mystery. Fantasy and horror require the least skill of any genre to write.Any time you write yourself into a corner you can simply change the rules.Hell, zombie stories are like "the aristocrats" in that there's no actual story on which to hang the rest. They're a jazz riff.Far as I can tell, time travel is the hardest to do well.
Having managed a bookstore and worked in several bookstores back in the day: the categories are extremely arbitrary and permeable anyway, books are released with multiple categorizations, and placement in an actual store boils down to management preference.
There will never be a final decisive categorization because that's simply not the dynamic nature of human creations.
@_L1vY_@Uair@bookstodon And I would argue that most self-styled “science fiction” is as much “stuff we made up” as in fantasy. Telepathy. Faster than light travel. Aliens that look very much like humans and are sometimes (ahem) cross-compatible. “Gravity generators” and “antigravity”.
Sure, there are many authors who stick close to currently understood science, or make plausible predictions about future science. But they are in the minority.
@aprilfollies@_L1vY_@Uair@bookstodon A lot of science-fiction, literary science-fiction, is a variety of surrealism. That can manifest as space opera but also as dystopian critiques, meta-fiction, and various sense and nonsense. Science-fiction as fiction about scientific fact or speculation is a pretty narrow slice of the genre.
This was 25+ yrs ago now but I'll not forget it. Visiting a friend in grad school at Duke and we walk into a (mostly used) bookstore in Durham, NC. I was looking rebuild by my SF collection so I go straight to the SF section and there I find: Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species.
"authors who stick close to currently understood science" isn't the definition of Science Fiction in anything I've ever run across.
The difference AFAIK as I know is whether the science is understood by the characters in the book. If it's woo-woo even to them, then it's fantasy.
@deirdrebeth@alexlubertozzi@aprilfollies@_L1vY_@Uair@bookstodon I think the (accurate) point being made is that most people in the 'real' world don't understand the science and technology that make up our world. So it's a bit rich to ask fictional characters to do better.
Quick: explain any two of the following: magnetism, general relativity (or special, for that matter), replication of DNA, the operation of an internal combustion engine, what and escapement does in clockwork.
One need not fully understand relativity, though, to play with it as a plot device. I can't claim to understand it completely, but I do understand what it does if people travel at certain speeds.
So far I have not seen the term "Hard SF" in this thread, and that's the type of SF that concerns itself with scientific accuracy, and that strain appeared after the genre was established, in the golden age.
The idea of careful scientific extrapolation v wildly fantastic writing in a scientific vein actually goes back to Verne and Wells respectively. Yet Verne wrote stuff wrong at the time, and people are often wrong about the future. Hard SF isn't morally superior.
I think some context is being missed. OP: “Idea: Bookstores should group fantasy with horror instead of scifi. Both fantasy and horror are purely creations of the author's imagination; scifi is tethered to factual information.”
OK. It's Mastodon so I will be polite. That's a really poor take. It misunderstands fiction, it is unhelpful to readers and booksellers, and I hope the majority of SF writers would agree with me.
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