I feel a Genre Discussion of Doom coming on, but by this definition The Lord of the Rings is SF.
Except I'm not defining sf -- I'm offering a number of things that I think are characteristic of sf. The more of those things any given story has, the more likely it is to be sf, but that doesn't mean a non-sf story can't also have some of those characteristics, because these are not impermeable walls we're talking about.
I understand this point. Both Doctor Who and Farscape smell and taste a lot like SF, albeit implausible SF.
However I would argue that in both cases this is not their primary goal - they are at heart rompy action-adventure-comedy-character pieces that happen to have chosen the trappings of SF because they're pretty and go boom a lot. They're often little more than a slightly more irreverent and psychological take on Flash Gordon. In both cases the fun factor and the characters excuse the flimsy disregard (or contempt) for anything resembling internal consistency or the known laws of physics. Didn't Farscape have the characters diving in magma with the help of some silly device?
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Date: 2006-12-26 07:55 pm (UTC)Except I'm not defining sf -- I'm offering a number of things that I think are characteristic of sf. The more of those things any given story has, the more likely it is to be sf, but that doesn't mean a non-sf story can't also have some of those characteristics, because these are not impermeable walls we're talking about.
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Date: 2006-12-26 08:08 pm (UTC)However I would argue that in both cases this is not their primary goal - they are at heart rompy action-adventure-comedy-character pieces that happen to have chosen the trappings of SF because they're pretty and go boom a lot. They're often little more than a slightly more irreverent and psychological take on Flash Gordon. In both cases the fun factor and the characters excuse the flimsy disregard (or contempt) for anything resembling internal consistency or the known laws of physics. Didn't Farscape have the characters diving in magma with the help of some silly device?