Aw, no, another vocabulary moratorium.

What about "speculative sensibilities"?

You can have as many of those as you want.

What's the new vocab then?

Actually, I'm kind of hoping the whole concept goes away. I'd guess I'd like to see more stories, and more thinking about stories, and more thinking about how stories might be written, that don't treat speculation as if it's a bolt-on accessory. Even in cases where unbolting it would cause the whole thing to fall apart. What's the speculative element in "The Girl Detective"? What's the speculative element in Midnight's Children? These questions could probably be answered, but the answers are boring.

(Oh, and of course, what's the speculative element in "What I Didn't See?" Answer also boring.)

I totally agree, Moles san. I've reached a point where I don't even want to discuss stories in such a way. Wordsworth was right.

I guess I'm just missing the discussions of stories in that way. And I agree that it's not very useful as a way to talk about stories. Of course, I also don't find it especially useful to pretend that stories _don't_ have speculative elements (or whatever way you want to put it, to denote stuff that's nonrealist that's core to the story) -- that seems to be something I see most often in mainstream literary reviews where we're assured that something is allegory rather than SF, etc.

And I guess I do think it has limited uses in the critique circle, when someone's nonrealist stuff is not being fully integrated into a story.

Oh and one other thing:

--(Oh, and of course, what's the speculative element in "What I Didn't See?" Answer also boring.)--

Actually, while the whole context of that discussion was infuriatingly wrong-headed, I did somewhat enjoyed that particular part of the discussion, in the sense that it became a discussion of the different, quite interesting interpretations of a story that lends itself to many different, interesting interpretations. (And, of course, this mostly centered on the ending and "what it all means.") It was cool to see how other people* were reading that story, even when it was different than my way.

*Excluding Truesdale.

See, this is all very well for y'all genre-breaking New New Wavers, but what about us old fuddy-duddies who grew up with speculative elements and find them comforting, and don't want to let go of them?

To me, thinking in terms of speculative elements is useful (because it's deeply ingrained in how I think about and categorize fiction), as long as it's not the only way I think about things.

There is indeed fiction that I'm willing to label as speculative but that doesn't have speculative elements (or "spec elts," as I privately call them when I'm in a hurry) per se. See my old editorial "Where Does Genre Come From?" for my thoughts on that, or at least my thoughts from five years ago. And yeah, I still love the term "speculative sensibilities" (thanks again to Ellen D for that). And there are, of course, lots of great stories that not only don't contain speculative elements but aren't (by anyone's definition) remotely sf; mainstream literary fiction is cool too, as are other genres. Nonetheless, as a rough first-pass approximation, when I'm trying to decide whether to publish a given story in our speculative fiction magazine, it's useful to separate the stories that include space ships, magic, and/or the Future from the stories that are about two ordinary modern people doing ordinary modern things without violating any laws of physics.

To come at it from another direction, one reason it's useful to me to think in terms of speculative elements is that I think a whole lot of sf readers think in those terms. I'm happy to help expand readers' definitions, and to help point out that a story can count as sf even if it doesn't contain clear speculative elements (such as all the stuff that we consider part of the genre by convention, tradition, and historical accident), and to remind people that a story can be good even if it's not sf, and even to urge people to Evert All Perimeters!; still, I think it's useful to remember that, even if speculative elements are a social construct, they're a widespread social construct.

But maybe I'm just making excuses for the fact that they're a social construct I can't easily ignore in my own head.

I also don’t find it especially useful to pretend that stories don’t have... stuff that’s nonrealist that’s core to the story...

Me neither, Gwenda. And I’m trying to figure out how I screwed up and gave the impression that I did, because you’re, like, the third person to read this that way. Or is it just that so much of that — or the reverse, “all fiction is fantasy” — does go on?

But maybe I'm just making excuses for the fact that they’re a social construct I can't easily ignore in my own head.

Well, give it a shot and see what happens. :)

Jed, maybe this is the point I’m trying to make (and I should stop trying to be too cute about it): I think is-a relationships are a much more fruitful way to talk about speculation in stories than has-a relationships.

In fact I’ll go farther: I think the has-a way of looking at speculation and story is actively harmful. I think it tends to produce stories of inferior quality. I think if you’re going to write speculative fiction you shouldn’t be writing stories that afford decomposition into, and separate discussion of, speculative and non-speculative parts. I think stories knocked together out of disjoint parts tend to be breakable, and breakable stories tend to break. And while sometimes a broken story can be interesting, the way this kind of story tends to break is not.

(and I should stop trying to be too cute about it)

I think that might be a good idea, if you want to minimize confusion.

It's unfortunate when one has to reconcile conflicting goals.

Also, I’m not claiming I have this whole thing thought out. It’s a feeling, not an Infallible Method Adapted to the Meanest Understanding.

So, the new terminology then is the "speculative essence," "speculative core," or possibly "speculative load-bearing wall." Got it.

The way that can be spoken of is not the true Way.

Not unlike, if you have to ask how much it is, you can't afford it. I never believed that either.

Still true for a lot of things.

You still thinking through it makes me feel better. I thought I just wasn't getting it through my thicker-than-thick skull.

Interestingly enough, two forces for good, John Kessel and Jim Kelly talk about fantastic elements quite a bit in JJA's new interview with them about slipstream.

(Oh, and of course, what's the speculative element in "What I Didn't See?" Answer also boring.)

Off-screen aliens!

(What?)

On the actual topic: does this mean you don't think it's useful to talk about novums (in the Suvin sense)?

I think, guardedly, I'm with David.

Jed says:
"when I'm trying to decide whether to publish a given story in our speculative fiction magazine, it's useful to separate the stories that include space ships, magic, and/or the Future from the stories that are about two ordinary modern people doing ordinary modern things without violating any laws of physics."

Maybe as a first pass, when sorting umpteen million mss? I don't know, I'm not an editor.

But wouldn't it be more profitable, once you've done that sort, to ask "does this story pleasurably engage my faculties of speculative reasoning -- the ones that all those stories I read as a young'un about space ships, magic, and the Future so formatively awakened?"

In other words, isn't the interesting part what the story does in your brain -- leads it to speculate -- not what (supposedly counterfactual, or whatever) "elements" the story contains?

For instance, say someone submitted the New Testament, entire, to Strange Horizons. Does it have speculative elements? Is it speculative fiction?

The new terminology, by the way, is not "speculative essence", or "speculative anything" -- those are still has-a relationships.

The new terminology is "speculates" (posits, imagines, proposes, warns...)

Very well, then.

A story is a lie. It affords the possibility to instruct, to illuminate, to bore, to offend, to shock, or to entertain, the last being the most currently commercially viable.

If the story is about a lie that could possibly be true, it's what we currently call fiction. Depending on how the lie is told and what it's about, that could be broken down further into things like, lies about detectives, lies about romance, etc.

If the story is about a lie that is impossible, then it's speculative fiction. This category could be broken down a little further, into:

a) lies about things that are currently impossible but might be true someday (moon colonies)

b) lies about things that are currently impossible but will never become true (wizards slinging fireballs).

Does this make a difference in thinking? Or is it just shuffling deck chairs on the Hindenburg?

It's the "about things" that's the problem. Ben's right: verbs, not nouns.

The recursive nature of Gwenda's link makes me feel just a little bit strange.

Jon, according to your (familiar) taxonomy, if I submitted the New Testament to Jed at SH, he should treat it as b), fantasy.

Are you comfortable with this? Does it seem like a sufficiently powerful taxonomy?

Similarly, a *sufficiently* implausible detective story -- one in which the cops are simply insanely stupid, and coincidences occur that boggle the readers' mind -- and even has flat-out impossibilities due to accidental errors of continuity... that becomes fantasy as well, right?

Yes, I know you can tweak the has-a definitions to avoid such cases. And any other such edge cases that I bring up. I'm saying that if you don't attend to the real heart of the matter -- what the story makes your brain *do* -- then your taxonomic definition will get more and more baroque as you add more and more wheels within wheels (robots, check. Except not robots in Japanese factories, those are real. romance in space, check, except there was that one Russian couple on Mir, so not cosmonaut romance in space...)

Jon, according to your (familiar) taxonomy, if I submitted the New Testament to Jed at SH, he should treat it as b), fantasy. Are you comfortable with this? Does it seem like a sufficiently powerful taxonomy?

Actually, as a general nonbeliever, I am and it does. If I read a book on Scientology talking about Thetans and Xanu and all that, to me, a nonbeliever, it's clearly fantasy. But how will Tom Cruise describe it?

Similarly, a *sufficiently* implausible detective story -- one in which the cops are simply insanely stupid, and coincidences occur that boggle the readers' mind -- and even has flat-out impossibilities due to accidental errors of continuity... that becomes fantasy as well, right?

I would think it would just be poorly written. It struggles to be one thing and fails. It is a lie about the possible poorly told.

Yes, I know you can tweak the has-a definitions to avoid such cases. And any other such edge cases that I bring up. I'm saying that if you don't attend to the real heart of the matter -- what the story makes your brain *do*

To me what my brain does depends on what the original intent of the story was. Was it designed to entertain? to instruct? to shock? to enlighten? a combination of more than one? Excellent, except the effect on my brain may not be the effect on my wife's brain, or my nephew's brain, or my neighbor's. This seems a more questionable way of doing things.

then your taxonomic definition will get more and more baroque as you add more and more wheels within wheels (robots, check. Except not robots in Japanese factories, those are real. romance in space, check, except there was that one Russian couple on Mir, so not cosmonaut romance in space...)

Actually, science fiction is kind of classified by cases now. Robots working in Japanese factories are real, so a story with robots working in American factories are quite plausible. This falls into the lie about something possibly true. Robots working, say, in a doctor's office, not so much, so it's a lie about something currently not possible, but might be possible someday.

Does this mean that some stories have to be compared with the real world to know what category they belong in? Sure, and you see that now.

It is worth noting I'm also just trying to get my head around what David is suggesting. What's the alternative? Assigning specific verbs for each case? Speculates for sf, fabulates for fantasy? How do you take it further, without making up some new verbs?

There is also the distinct possibility I've missed something, but I've also said I'm trying to grasp David's original point.

If I read a book on Scientology talking about Thetans and Xanu and all that, to me, a nonbeliever, it's clearly fantasy.

Except it's not, unless you already presume the definition above. It doesn't work for you as fantasy; it doesn't do for you what fantasy does. You wouldn't say (except perversely) "I think I need a good fantasy" and pick it up, even if it were well written. You would never natually think of it as fantasy in an unconsidered moment in your real life (in ordinary speech, you'd be much more likely to use the word "fantasy" to describe Letters to Penthouse). You would only call it fantasy *after* recalling the definition that "fantasy deals with impossible events".

Excellent, except the effect on my brain may not be the effect on my wife's brain, or my nephew's brain, or my neighbor's. This seems a more questionable way of doing things.

I think that's a feature, not a bug. How it works for you is what's actually interesting. Having a categorization scheme we can all agree on because it is objective is comforting, because we can be certain about it, but not actually germane... because we actually pick books up (or surf to SH to find them) because of how we feel when we read them, not because of a checklist of elements.

Actually, science fiction is kind of classified by cases now.

And that's what I'm arguing against.

What's the alternative? Assigning specific verbs for each case? Speculates for sf, fabulates for fantasy? How do you take it further, without making up some new verbs?

Well, I was being a little bit flippant about the verbs. Though, yeah, I like fabulates for fantasy. Hmm... trying to come up with a clear-cut example of the difference...

Have you read Delany's "About Five Thousand Seven Hundred and Fifty Words"?

http://home.earthlink.net/~teluial/Delany-AboutFiveThousandSevenHundredAndFiftyWords.html

This is in the same direction. Stories do not have a theme, and then a plot to dramatize it, in a setting which may or may not have speculative elements, all that content then delivered in a prose style. These things are not separable. In a great SF story, the prose style is as ineluctably SF as the alien biology posited. Stories accrete, word-image by word-image. Plot, style, theme, idea, are all just different-scale snapshots of the same fractal.

It doesn't work for you as fantasy; it doesn't do for you what fantasy does. You wouldn't say (except perversely) "I think I need a good fantasy" and pick it up, even if it were well written.

Ah, but you don't know that. Hell, I don't know that. I haven't read it. If someone handed me the book asked me to read it and then describe it to them, what might I say? I might (theoretically) say, "it's a piece of crap." Or "it's brilliant." They then might say, "what's it about." If I say, "it's really weird and strange." They will almost certainly say, "but what's it about?" If I say, "Aliens," they'll stop asking me.

Having a categorization scheme we can all agree on because it is objective is comforting, because we can be certain about it, but not actually germane...

Speaking as a librarian, I disagree about it simply being a comfort. I think of it as a necessity. I deal with college students, who ask for help on their assignments and oftentimes can't even articulate what they want without a lot of poking and proding. Verbally, of course. And that includes looking for literature. They need a historical novel based on real events set in the British empire in the 19th century. They need a poem or a short story about womens' rights. Whatever.

It is likely these assignments are built because that's the way the system works. I work in a field where classification schemes are getting ever more precise. Before a book like Foundation would get the simple subject heading of "Science Fiction." They all fell into the same pot. Now it gets:
Seldon, Hari (Fictitious character) -- Fiction.
Life on other planets -- Fiction.
Psychohistory -- Fiction.

Or Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. It gets all sorts of subject headings! There's the general descriptors of:
Teacher-student relationships -- Fiction.
Magicians -- Fiction.
Fairies -- Fiction.
Then genre/form:
Historical fiction.
Fantasy fiction.
And then finally geographic:
London (England) -- Fiction.
York (England) -- Fiction.

Now, I agree that, as a writer, I don't think the classification scheme should enter my head while I'm writing something. Just write it, make it work, make it be the best whatever it is it can be. Then let others come along and decide how to find it.

I'm reminded of a Simpsons episode, where Bart and Lisa are discussing Poe's The Raven.

Bart: Lisa, that wasn't scary. Not even for a poem.
Lisa: Well, it was written in 1845. Maybe people were easier to scare back then.
Bart: Oh, yeah. Like when you look at ``Friday the Thirteenth, Part 1''. Pretty tame by today's standards.

Or alternatively, my reaction to reading something is going to be different depending on me. Age twelve vs. age thirty-six vs. age eighty. I guess my point is that everyone can agree on the nouns, but not necessarily on the verbs. I s'pose we could split the difference and just use gerunds.

Have you read Delany's "About Five Thousand Seven Hundred and Fifty Words"?

I have, although it's been several years. I will read it as soon as I can, although it looks quite likely I'm about to be a little busy.

Stories accrete, word-image by word-image. Plot, style, theme, idea, are all just different-scale snapshots of the same fractal.

Ben, I'd just like to remind you of something you said last year: you said that you could easily imagine a story that could either be mainstream or SF depending on whether a single word was changed. This was in the context of a discussion in which I criticized SF stories whose SFnal elements could have been the result of a search-and-replace operation performed on a mainstream story; you did not feel that was a valid criticism.

Re: the "has-a" vs. "effects" argument... or to even go back to the "verbs" vs. "nouns" discussion... I keep thinking that Jon's still a little bit right when he insists on talking "about things." Fictional "effects" are fundamentally created by textual constructions; "verbs" have to be performed by "nouns." You COULD cheat and say: "The Story has such-and-such effect on my reading brain," but ultimately that's not useful for talking about HOW the story achieved that effect. And while I really quite liked Ben's fractal description... well, even coastlines and landscapes can be described by a single number, ie. their fractal dimension. And maybe a color scheme, and points of articulation. Those simple quantities might not do a very good job by themselves of telling you what the landscape (or in this case, the story) actually looks like if you were to see it in person (or read it), but they do a bang-up job of describing what the coastline/story does differently from another coastline/story. Which is a damn useful thing to be able to describe, I think.

That said, I think I can see what David's objecting to with Jon's "has-a" taxonomy... I read some "travel" fiction recently, where the settings and events were loosely based on things that actually happened to the author. So there was nothing really speculative about the plot points or the settings (China, or Pakistan, and Egypt) -- but the unexpectedness, the totally foreign cultural taboos and assumptions were just so amazingly alien to my experience. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that something like that could exist on Earth. As a result, I got the same satisfaction that I get from reading a good fantasy. Honeslyt, as far as I could tell, those stories were triggering the exact same neurological reflexes.

I guess if I were to have a problem with "speculative elements," it would be that they are so very often completely inert: they’re not affecting anything, not creating any sort of “good speculative fiction” response in my brain. They're just sitting there going -->look at me! I’m impossible! -- Their inclusion might be comforting to SF/F readers, or annoying to non-SF/F readers, and we can go back in forth on whether or not they’re justified when we maybe could omit them (Ted: I agree with Ben. Personally, I think that’s the author’s choice. There are any number of reasons why an author can choose to use soon-to-be-banned SFnal elements, only one or two of which make their SFnal nature “intrinsic to the story.” Mood is another; authorial whimsy should be allowed to be another. As long as the story still works, see above. Anyway, don’t let Ben distract you – go get David. He’s the one who has yet to a particularly good job explaining what got under collar. In fact... I’ll pay you $5 if you tackle him right now.) But... very often these elements aren’t what’s actually creating the “speculative” effect, if there is one. Or they are only barely tangential to it. But I don't think that's necessarily just a symptom of "bad fiction."

Still. I think when somebody manages to achieve a particular effect in a story, then it's absolutely worth talking about which combination of "elements" they used to pull it off. Can you really have a useful discussion about "verbs" without including the "nouns" doing the work?

Okay, all done.

Best of luck, Jon.

>> Stories accrete, word-image by word-image. Plot, style, theme, idea, are all just different-scale snapshots of the same fractal.

Ben, I'd just like to remind you of something you said last year: you said that you could easily imagine a story that could either be mainstream or SF depending on whether a single word was changed. This was in the context of a discussion in which I criticized SF stories whose SFnal elements could have been the result of a search-and-replace operation performed on a mainstream story; you did not feel that was a valid criticism.

Actually, although I grant you that this does seem paradoxical (and I await being flensed by the rigorous razor of TedReason(tm)!), I think that supports the argument that fiction is accretive. Delany actually makes the point, in that essay, that it's *because* stories are fractal and accretive that one word can utterly alter the meaning of everything that's gone before it. In fact, he argues, *each* word alters the effect of every word that's come before it -- because the story, rather than being a sequence of discrete things, is actually a single thing which is gradually built up in the reader's mind.

One of his examples:
"Did you kill her?"
"Yes."

But the latter line was dropped in the paperback edition...

You can easily see how that could shift a book's genre, as well as its meaning.

I don't remember the discussion last year (and, since it was a discussion with you, I expect my position changed during the course of it) but today I would say that the search-and-replace might *point to* a valid criticism, but isn't a sufficient criticism in and of itself.

Put it this way: every word in a story should do work, to have the story be what it should be. At least it should not distract, but in fact in a good story it should be vital, necessary.

So the problem with tacked-on spec fic elements is that they are tacked-on; not that they are specfic.

Some stories can truly be equally well told on Jupiter or in Manhattan. If so, I don't think there's an implicit preference for Manhattan. But if the story is told on Jupiter, Jupiterness should inhere in and inform and shape and mean and matter in every word, every image, and every scene of that story -- just as Manhattanness should inhere in every part if it's set in Manhattan.

So the problem with a search-and-replace moving a story from Jupiter to Manhattan is precisely the same, no more and no less, as a search-and-replace moving a story from Manhattan to Iowa. It's theoretically possible that the other words of the story just happen to work equally well to produce a story that means deeply about Manhattan (or Jupiter) and one that means deeply about Iowa (or Manhttan). It's just not very likely; it would be a lucky hit.

But the problem isn't one of a particular setting or genre or mode needing to be specially justified as against another. The problem is that the story should densely hold together, all of its pieces mattering.

Jon, the

Seldon, Hari (Fictitious character) -- Fiction.
Life on other planets -- Fiction.
Psychohistory -- Fiction.

way of categorizing fiction makes a lot more sense to me than putting it all in a pot marked Science Fiction. And that's in those contexts where you need predefined taxonomies at all. On the internet, there turned out to be a better way to search than Yahoo! Directory. Your students do not need a categorization scheme which assigns a text exclusively to one category. They just need to find stuff.

I am not arguing for no has-a relationships! Clearly, the Foundation series has psychohistory. A search for things that have psychohistory should yield Foundation. The question here is the more narrow one of if you a good way to think about SF works is as stories that are stories, and then also, separately, have a set of enumerable, discrete, speculative elements.

Nick, in typically ornery fashion, has an interesting and tangentially relevant rant here:

http://nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com/768869.html

I like what he says about the "one-drop rule" for fantasy. If we insert a paragraph on some page of Foundation where a character recalls seeing a ghost as a child at their grandmother's house, is the trilogy now fantasy?

Ben, I agree that everything in a story should be integral to that story. However, the example you cite from Delany is not a good basis for making an argument; the word "Yes" in that context is hardly a typical word from that book.

If you don't remember the discussion we were having last year, I won't try to reconstruct your argument; I'll just say that you had a much more generous reading of a certain story, and its use of speculative elements, than I did. Given a sufficiently generous interpretation, any given speculative element, word, etc. can be seen as integral to a story, in the same way that Pierre Menard's Don Quixote can be seen as a wholly original work.

If I was saying you could change a story from SF to non-SF by changing any arbitrary word, not some crucial word, I was spouting hogwash. :-)

It seems to me that all the words should be integral, in the sense that another word there would be worse; but many of the words aren't particularly laden with genre information, nor do they define the crux of the plot.

Do you agree that a Manhattan->Jupiter shift-by-search-and-replace of a story poses essentially exactly the same issues as a Manhattan->Iowa shift? In other words, that the "speculative elements" are not in a special holy category -- they are just more parts of the story that need to work?

There are definitely stories that are utterly setting-specific, stories which can't be moved out of Manhattan, or out of Lawrence, Kansas. But I don't think all stories are like that.

I think there's a set of stories which can be set anywhere within a certain set of locations. For such story, you don't actually need to identify where it's taking place; you could say it's set in Seattle or Chicago or New York, but it doesn't really matter which one you choose. I'd say that it's possible for a story to be very good and still have this property.

However, if you decide to say that the story is taking place in Ulan Bator, you probably raise questions that aren't raised if you had chosen one of the cities mentioned above. Maybe you just like Ulan Bator, and think it'd be fun to set a story there. Maybe you want to suggest that people in Ulan Bator are just like people everywhere. But there will definitely be people wondering, "Why is this story set in Ulan Bator if it's not really making use of Ulan Bator?," and they wouldn't have been asking that question if you had set it in Cleveland.

Setting a story on Jupiter is even more likely to raise questions. Some readers will say, "Jupiter! Cool!"; some readers will assume that the choice of setting was carefully made, and read every sentence as carrying subtle implications of the Jovian setting. But some readers will say, "this is a 'call a rabbit a smeerp' story," even if they might have enjoyed the story had it been set in Cleveland and published as mainstream, and I think they'd have some justification for feeling that way.

There's something to what you say, Ted, and I'm sure that in practice, many "call a rabbit a smerp" stories irk me just the same way they do you.

So, let's say exoticism in stories is like violence, sex, death of a sympathetic character -- any attention-grabbing kick to the reader's head. Since it jumps out, since it's salient, it attracts reader notice. Thus, if it's arbitrary, a reader is more likely to be put off by its arbitrariness. The more striking it is, the more arbitrariness may irk.

On the other hand, I don't think there's anything wrong with thinking "I just want to write a love story. It's about this lonely, poor trucker who falls for this girl from a rich, powerful vaguely-mob corporate family, and hijinks ensue. But now I want to set it in interplanetary space." If you do then sit down and carefully consider the implications of it *being*, in fact, in interplanetary space, you get C. J. Cherryh's Merchanter's Luck, which is a lovely book and good SF. But in some sense "that story could be told" with a trucker and a Kennedy. Not with a search-and-replace operation, no; but without changing the sequence of main events or the main emotional arcs. Yet the story is wonderfully SFnal, particularly in how the SF ideas mirror and enhance the characters' emotions (the lonely trucker has the voice of his dead brother built into his computer, etc).

I'd argue that moving a story, any story, from New York to Seattle requires a similar rethinking operation, tiny though it may be in comparison. You have to think through the consequences -- Seattle had no 9/11, no Broadway, not the same immigrant story, what does that mean for this scene? For a given story, the shift is likely to be much less significant, and in fact for some stories, Menard-like, no word may change. :-) Then again, in a story like that, you may think no word needs to change, but the story might be ruined for a native Seattleite by some local detail being off. From a writerly perspective, though, the operation is the same -- moving the story causes you to rethink it. If you are honest and not lazy, no detail is arbitrary; every detail has to "requalify" for the new setting.

Given this, I'm not sure if we actually feel differently about setting a story in Ulan Bator or on Jupiter, or if we are just framing the problem differently.

Say you want to write a straight-up love story set in Ulan Bator. If it's *exactly* the same words as a love story set in Manhattan, the problem is not "why is this set in Ulan Bator?"; the problem is "THAT's not Ulan Bator!" If you do actually set it in Ulan Bator (no surnames, arranged marriage presumably common, uneasy relationship to China, or whatever), then would you really ask "why is this set in Ulan Bator?" I mean, aren't you a little *tired* of love stories set in Generic American Big City? Wouldn't you *rather* read one from Ulan Bator? Even if it's two Seattleites who happen to be falling in love on vacation in Ulan Bator -- that's still more interesting than another damn remake of Singles.

Why is the future any different?

So I'd argue that the smerp problem is not actually, as it's traditionally framed, one of "justification" -- "imagining the future isn't the primary, driving concern here, so you're not allowed to write this story as SF." That way lies an unnecessarily narrow SF. Rather, the smerp problem is one of shallow or lazy thinking. The future is NOT just the present with smerps; Ulan Bator is NOT just Seattle with funny names. Failing to fully imagine setting produces an irritatingly thin world.

If there is nothing reimagined, reworked, re-envisioned about your fantasy world, just rabbits called smerps, then the problem is not that you have failed to accumulate the proper thematic justification tickets to be allowed to set your story in a non-real world -- that you have failed to have the officially approved fantasy motives of speculation, or allegory, or reified metaphor, or whatever. The problem is only that I don't buy it - my ass, there's a world just like ours that calls rabbits smerps.

I think we agree in principle. It's just that, in our discussion last year, we disagreed over whether a particular story had anything reimagined in it.

Crap! Agreement!

Dave, can you come up with something else for me and Ted to argue about?