Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> I don't call Harry Potter "science fiction" either even tho it's 
>> speculative and couldn't tell *quite* the same story without the magic.
> 
>   I thought Harry Potter falls into the genre of fantasy, not the genre of
> science fiction.

Correct.

I was making an analogy.  Bill said

 > These latter are both extrapolations of a real society given a single 
small difference in recorded history, again without any novel tech or science.

I wouldn't call that SciFi, but I would call it speculative fiction. I 
wouldn't call HP SciFi, but I might call it "speculative fiction", 
speculating on what it might be like if some people could do magic. But we 
already have a name for "speculative fiction about magic", and that's 
Fantasy. We already have a name for "speculative fiction about science and 
technology", and we call that "sci fi". :-)

I've also read speculative fiction like "Hopscotch", where the basic premise 
is that you can swap bodies with anyone who you touch, given their 
permission. Sort of like the "surrogates" movie only swapping between 
bodies. A group of kids grow up in the society, and this is about how their 
lives go. The artist hops into homeless bums, crippled people, etc to 
experience how they life and feel so he can make art depicting that. The kid 
who grows up to be a cop chases down the little old lady who won't give back 
the young healthy body she only contracted for an hour. The young girl gets 
sucked into a cult where everybody switches bodies about so much nobody 
knows who is in what body any more, etc.  Is that fantasy or sci fi or 
something else? They never explain how the swapping works, just that one day 
people started to be able to do it.

I don't rave about the terminology. I would just prefer people not put 
"alternative histories" and crap like that in the Sci Fi section. :-) It 
would be nice if bookstores actually distinguished the different kinds of 
fiction, so I could better focus on what I wanted to read.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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