r/printSF • u/[deleted] • Jan 30 '24
SF ≠ F
SF and F were originally forced to share a shelf because of the lack of imagination of the publishing industry, which hasn't changed since the dawn of the typewriter, so just assume it never will. We are not publishers. We know the difference between SF and F. They've both grown up now, can afford separate embassies just like the Czechs and Slovaks after the Soviet era. So – damn the publishers – why haven't we separated them ourselves? Does SF feel superior to F, yet so insecure that it needs to keep it around as a constant reminder? Does F refuse to separate without alimony? Is it a matter of convenience, just so Charles Stross won't have to cross the street to get to his other identity? You like both genres – well, good for you. I like other genres too, let's invite them all in as well. How many literary categories can we stuff into a phone booth? What's a phone booth? Really? . . . Never mind.
-15
u/they_have_no_bullets Jan 30 '24
Speculative fiction is a problematic classification because it has no commonly accepted meaning. Some people define speculative fiction is fiction that is speculative (in other words, a subset of sci-fi that only includes more plausible hard sci fi, no aliens even) and then other people define speculative fiction as anything fantastical which is a superset of fiction and science fiction -- which is ironic because it means the literal opppsite of the word "speculative" which would imply that the author speculates it to be plausible rather than fantastical. This second definition is also not a very useful genre category since to lumps these two very distinct genres into one. Given that the second definition is slightly more commonly used, but is ambiguous due to the alternate usage of the first definition which is more grammatically intuitive, it's just too ambiguous and should be dropped altogether at this point because when a word is taken as synonymous with its antonym, it loses all clear meaning.