The British Fantasy Society just reviewed Our Child of the Stars warmly. I wrote it in part as a love letter to science fiction, but also to fiction in general. I really want to bring in a broad audience, and certainly the audience has been broad, if not vast.
I spent a lot of time worrying about whether I would manage to alienate both SF readers and general readers. But I had considered less the SF v fantasy argument. The marvellous pair Sue Tingey and Juliet McKenna who blurbed my books, and in Juliet’s case reviewed it for SF magazine Interzone, are fantasy writers.
Many people like both, and most people accept the boundaries are a matter of opinion. Attempts to produce rigorous definitions flounder, in part because some things like time travel machines and faster than light travel are not currently believed possible but look ‘sciencey’ enough to pass.
Ray Bradbury’s books are full of things which include star ships, Mars colonies, and time travel. Yet he claimed that all his work was fantasy except Fahrenheit 451. I’m amused to see genre powerhouse Forbidden Planet list Our Child of the Stars as fantasy, and I can see their point.
I think some of our choices are based on the aesthetic. Bradbury’s dreamy prose, and limited interest in the nuts and bolts, makes his work more like a fantasy.
Stories exist. Genres are helpful, by hinting what the ground rules are, and where to shelve it in the bookshop. Science fiction in particular is vast spanning books which are SF but also allegories, Westerns, Gothic horrors, war stories, satire and social commentary, detective stories, heist movies, dystopias and utopias, coming of age stories… and family dramas.
