SciFi elements in "Gravity's Rainbow"?

[Tom Beshear]

Changing times, changing tastes. The Science Fiction Writers of America, 
created in the 1960s, was renamed The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of 
America some years back. Fantasy is a more popular commercial genre than 
science fiction; the marriage is one of convenience. Thank the popularity of 
The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Neil Gaiman for the shift. Looking 
at lists of winners of the Hugo awards, one will see that in the last decade 
or so, more fantasy fiction is winning. George R.R. Martin started out as a 
science fiction writer, worked in TV for awhile (Beauty and the Beast and 
The Twilight Zone revival), then came back to writing and got wise. I read 
20 pages of The Game of Thrones and figured out it wasn't written for me.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <kelber at mindspring.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, August 21, 2011 12:38 PM
Subject: Re: SciFi elements in "Gravity's Rainbow"?


I've never understood why fantasy and sci-fi are lumped together.  They both 
fall under the "speculative fiction" umbrella, and there's sometimes 
overlap.  But what (in hell!) do Game of Thrones and books of that ilk have 
in common with science-based fiction?  I'm interested in speculations about 
where technology is leading us, the nature of intelligence and its place in 
the universe.  It doesn't follow that I should be interested in dragons and 
medieval-ish knights and battling elves.

Laura


-----Original Message-----
>From: Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
>Sent: Aug 21, 2011 12:27 PM
>To: kelber at mindspring.com
>Cc: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Re: SciFi elements in "Gravity's Rainbow"?
>
>On Sun, Aug 21, 2011 at 10:53 AM,  <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>
>> Are alternate history stories necessarily science fiction? Certainly, 
>> they're speculative fiction, but shouldn't there be something science-y 
>> in a sci-fi book? Ditto for time travel. By Robinson's definition, 
>> Slaughterhouse Five and Time and Again(Jack Finney) are science fiction. 
>> I guess I've automatically considered The Man in the High Castle to be 
>> sci-fi, simply because it's written by PKD, but there's nothing 
>> particularly science-y about it.
>
>... this is a valid, even a good, question, though do noite that,
>generally, time travel stories do in deed generally deploy some sort
>of fictional(ized? can there be "fictional" science is another valid,
>perhaps even good, question) science (e.g., The Time Machine), but not
>always (does A Connecticut Yake in King Arthur's Court count?  but,
>again, Time and Again)..  Atternate histories often (e.g., The Guns of
>the South) do so as well, but not always (e.g., Bring the Jubllee) do
>so as well (The Difference Engine as an example of an alternate
>history via an alternate/fictional science?).
>
>Does history (or, perhaps, more properly, historiography?) count as (a) 
>science?
>
>... this may the point @ which "speculative fiction" becomes the
>preferable term (though ithe is to beg the question, what precisely
>separate "speculative" from ":fiction"?) ...
>
>Meanwhile:http://www.uchronia.net/