dirty little secrets

[rone]

In the Other Place:

ROGER BURTON WEST: [William] Gibson has said [...] that not only is he not an SF writer, he has never written SF.

REBECCA ORE: It's a career move. People do have documentation that he not only used to go to cons, he costumed.

Comments

[eagle]

The speculative fiction thing has been around for a long time; the first time I heard it, it seemed to be a back-formation to answer the question "what does SF stand for if it's not just science fiction"? In order to include all the fantasy literature into the same category, you know.

I can argue with all of the terms in different ways. These days, I mostly use "SF" without expanding it, making it one of those acronyms that just is, rather than standing for anything any more. (I do think that fantasy and science fiction, while quite distinguishable at their extremes, blur together in the middle in ways that make distinguishing them not always that useful -- for example, what's Pern?)

Apparently (per a Baycon panel discussion), "science fantasy" is not unheard of in the UK. Not sure what I think of that, but it's at least not any worse than the terms we use in the US.