: Re: Will science fiction as a genre ever go the way of the western? It is a fairly undisputed fact that the genre of western fiction has had a declining audience for decades. The Western Writers

@Murray165

Vote Up Vote Down

Science fiction has the advantage of being more loosely and broadly defined than the Western. Westerns are limited by definition to a narrow group of settings. But SF? As Nabokov said, "If we start sticking group labels, we'll have to put The Tempest in the SF category".

Now, maybe "space opera" will go away after we've been in space for a while, sure, or some of the other sub-genres. That in my mind is similar to Westerns going away.

We humans have always loved stories that deal with the nature of our world, the forces that control it, the problem of the future, etc. In ancient times the stories were about the Gods - the Iliad, the Odyssey. In later times we have, for example, the Divine Comedy - a work that falls squarely into the definition of modern fantasy! But now that our world is explicated by science and we've become a scientific people, we use science fiction as the fabric with which we weave our myths. I daresay we're always going to need myths.

(0)

Login to post a comment!