Basterds

[ninebelow]

Since we do this every year around Hugos time:

Poll

You may wish to reference this, then again, you might not.

Comments

[ajr]

Disclaimer: I haven't, you know, actually seen the film yet.

[andrewducker]

I wouldn't let a little thing like that get in the way :->

[lil_shepherd]

But then, I don't think that Jo Walton's Small Change trilogy, though alternate history and rather good, is either SF or fantasy. More to the point, neither is Fatherland.

[drakkenfyre]

But Fatherland is alternate history. Do you not include any alternate history?

[lil_shepherd]

I only include alternate history when said alternate history involves either an sfnal/fantasy mechanism as an explanation of the changes (such as in Bring the Jubilee) or the alternate history is, in itself, an exploration of an SFnal idea(The Difference Engine) or where the science of the world is plainly different from this one (i.e. worlds where magic works.)

There are hundreds of thousands of books with very slight changes in history, like Fatherland or Farthing that use the alternate history format to make a (usually political) point that has nothing to do with SF. Both are detective stories which do not use any sf or fantasy tropes. Caves of Steel is an SF detective story not because of it is set in the future, but because the murder relies totally on the SF setting for its motive, method, and solution.

Take any book that changes history as SF and you have lots of bad historical novels and even worse thrillers co-opted into a genre does not need them. Is Shakespeare in Love SF? Is Black Adder. Is MoonrakerI may include

[drakkenfyre]

That's a great answer.

I would say that Moonraker, as awful as it was, could easily be called SF. I'd call it science fantasy, though putting it in the same category as Star Wars irks me, too.

But do we get to exclude the bad works just because they suck? Maybe there needs to be one, blanket genre for all suckitude.