Re: Fantasy equivalent to the Hugo?

In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Evelyn C. Leeper <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Please sort these on one side of the boundary or the other.  No credit 
> will be given for partial answers.:

Um, if that last sentence isn't a joke, are you *really* saying that
one isn't entitled to have an opinion on the boundary unless one's
read everything that's anywhere near it?

>          Piers Anthony's "Apprentice Adept" series

Fantasy.  (The universe of the story contains both magic and tech;
therefore it contains magic; therefore fantasy.)

>          Marion Zimmer Bradley's "Darkover" series

Depends on the book.  <City of Sorcery> is what it says it is, but
some of the earlier books are solidly within the soft science 
fiction tradition.  I'm not convinced all of Darkover fits within
a single explanatory framework at all.

>          L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt"s "Incomplete Enchanter"
>              series

Fantasy.  I find the allegedly scientific method of moving between
universes in it difficult to distinguish from "Wishing makes it so",
and the universes in question are invariably fantastic in character.

>          Lyndon Hardy's "Master of the Five Magics" series

Vaguely remember the first as fantasy.

>          Julian May's "Pliocene Exile" series

Vaguely remember this as soft science fiction.

>          Anne McCaffrey's "Dragonrider" series

While in general I respect Konrad Gaertner, I'm disappointed to see
he's already plumped for these as fantasy.  I honestly *DO NOT GET*
what makes intelligent adults say this.

A case can be made for individual books in the series as fantasies -
this is particularly obvious with <Dragonsinger> and <Dragonsong>,
arguably with the other books for kids.  But I can't think of any
other Pern book in which the *search for knowledge* is not central
one way or another, and the knowledge in question is never magical,
gnostic, or esoteric; it's always either observational (and thus
unmistakably scientific) or from prior writings (and thus at least
potentially so).

>          Walter M. Miller's CANTICLE FOR LEIBOVITZ

Science fiction, though not hard, by virtue of its setting and
general subgenre.

>          James Morrow's THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS

With more difficulty, ditto.

>          Robert Silverberg's "Majipoor" series

Science fantasy, I cop out, at least the first one (all I've read).

>          Christopher Stasheff's "Warlock" series

Fantasy.  "Wishing makes it so" attacks again.

>          Lawrence Watt-Evans's "Three Worlds" series

Um, which is this?

>          Lawrence Watt-Evans's CYBORG AND THE SORCERERS and THE
>                  WIZARD AND THE WAR MACHINE

Fantasy.  Magic in use, trumping the tech.

>          Walter Jon Williams's METROPOLITAN and CITY ON FIRE

Just read <Metropolitan> for the first time; hoping to read <City
on Fire> soon (and I thought there was a third book, no?).  That
said, <Metropolitan> is clearly fantasy.  Aside from the fact that
the author told me so once (actually, what he said was more like
"Sheesh!  I start the book with a burning woman ten stories tall
and this is even a question?") - aside from that, the pseudo-tech
that would create the possibility of its being science fiction
is in essence "Wishing makes it so".

I concede that the setting being clearly in our far future makes 
things tougher.

>          Gene Wolfe's "Book of the New Sun"

Science fiction.  I know there's all kinds of stuff in it that can
be explained best via fantasy (e.g. Severian's family), but I don't
remember anything in it that requires fantasy, and the overall
setting is clearly science fictional.

>          (anything with faster-than-light (FTL) travel, time travel,

Likely to be science fictional, but depends on how these things are
accomplished.

>          parallel worlds/universes, psionics, or shoddy science)

Depends.

And since this sort of thread invariably brings forth participants'
oft-repeated views, here's my bit of repetition:  For all that there
are plenty of works people disagree on, there isn't much disagreement
on most works.

I acknowledge that if you take the most asinine purists as "much
disagreement" this is untrue; banning all FTL from science fiction,
for example, results in massive discrepancies from the rough
consensus.  But I've experimentally demonstrated in a previous
edition of this thread (and indeed a previous lal_truckee edition)
that the *average* book can be readily put into the right pile,
where "right" means "will be acknowledged as correct by most
people other than asinine anti-FTL-type purists".

Joe Bernstein

-- 
Joe Bernstein, writer                                  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
<http://www.panix.com/~josephb/>