Conference noted::sf

    Sounds interseting, I happen to have loved Lem's  'The Cyberiad'
    and am interested in that sort of writng.
    
    You're right though, I wouldn't call it Sci-Fi, but that type of
    material seems to appeal to Sci-fiers.  When I read Lem, I have
    seemed to put some books by Kurt Vonnegut into this same category
    of 'psychological fiction',  If you have never read any of his books
    I would suggest 'Player Piano' , Galapagos, and of course Slaughter
    House Five (although that certainly doesn't fall into this category).
    
    Thanks for the tip.
    
    Bruce Cohen
    

How about 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' by Marquez?  That has a
quasi-historical background, but it has a lot of the elements of
a fantasy (maybe a R. A. Lafferty fantasy, come to think of it).
Also, 'V' by Thomas Pynchon (all his works that i've read kind of
fit this category but 'V' was far and away the best--i remember
picking it up off the paperback rack at Zayre's when i was 13 because
it had a vaguely science fiction-ish cover and then reading it and
saying "what the hell is this book?" to myself).  Warning: this 'V'
is not related to the TV show that was apparently on a few years back.

    Yes, Borges isn't *quite* sf or fantasy, at least not as we are
    familiar with the terms. Speculative fiction might be a better
    name. It's more a question of ambience than something definite
    you can point to.
    	Each writer of this style of "literate" sf is unique, but
    if you like one, your bound to like the others. Most of them
    are European or Latin American (this may or may not be a signif-
    icant point). I'd second the votes for Gabriel Garcia Marquez
    and Stanislaw Lem. Another I'd recommend is Italo Calvino.
    
    --- jerry

    Most of Borges's writing always struck me as fantasy, pretty clearly.
    It wasn't the sword-and-sorcery kind that is commonest right now,
    but that didn't stop it from being fantasy.  I am thinking of things
    like "The Library of Babel" and "The Circular Ruins."
    
    G. K. Chesterton wrote at least one work that resembles Borges,
    called "The Man Who Was Thursday."  It starts out as a Victorian-
    vintage spy thriller and winds up as an epiphany or something. 
    In between, it's a very funny farce.
    
    In something of the same way, Agatha Christie wrote several murder
    stories featuring a Mr. Harley Quinn, a faintly supernatural figure
    that defies classification.
    
    Earl Wajenberg
    

    I tend to regard science fiction as a subdivision of fantasy.  Poul
    Anderson characterized both as fiction involving unreal categories
    -- not just fictitious places, people, and events, but fictitious
    KINDS of things like made-up machines (hyperdrives, anti-gravity,
    robots) and species (ghosts, elves, e-t's, gods) and powers (fake
    physics, psi, magic).
    
    Science fiction concerns itself with those unreal categories which
    MAY be real, or discovered to be real, someday.  That leaves everything
    else to be some other kind or kinds of fantasy.  The current fashion
    is for sword-and-sorcery and its close kin, but a lot of what is
    now marketed as "horror" also falls into Anderson's definition of
    fantasy, as would Borges's thought-experiments, though both may
    lack any clear magic.
    
    It's all a matter of where you want to draw the lines, of course.
    
    Earl Wajenberg

    re:.5
    
    I agree that science fiction is actually a subdivision of fantasy,
    though the term usually used for the union of sf and fantasy is
    "fantastic literature". Horror is very definitely considered fantasy,
    in fact is the primary (though not sole) interest of those who put
    on and attend the World Fantasy Conventions. They tend to refer
    to it as "Dark Fantasy", as opposed to "Heroic Fantasy" or "High
    Fantasy", or whatever.
    
    --- jerry
    

re: .5 and .6

I like to think of this genre division in biological terms.  There's a
genus, fantastic literature, and species: sf, fantasy, and horror.  As
time goes on, the species evolve into different, but related species.
One starts as adventure stories in distant lands.  They are initially
set in Arabia ("1001 Nights"), then in South America or Africa
("She"), then in Burroughs's Mars or Howard's Hyboria.  There's not
much resemblence to the ancestor by the time we get to crazed albino
swordsmen ("Elric"), but the family line is there. 

New species appear, and old ones also die.  No one writes lost-race novels
anymore.  For that matter, few people write Westerns anymore, and
no one has written epic poetry for centuries.  Is sf on its way out?
The ratio of sf to fantasy does seem to be dropping.  Tribes of the old
species can be found in certain locales (Sri Lanka, say), but little
new blood is coming into the group.

/jlr  

    re:.7
    
    A good way of looking at it. I like it.
    
    One quibble, though: there's a *hell* of a lot more Western fiction
    being written than you know. It's not easy to find out here in these
    parts (New England), and most bookstores have at most one shelf
    of it, mostly Max Brand and Louis L'Amour. But Western fiction is
    quite popular in other parts of the country. It's also very popular
    in England, where British authors inundate the stores with it (some
    of the UK-written Westerns are reprinted here as well --- J. T.
    Edson is one author who comes to mind).
    
    In fact, there's one hilarious example a friend told me of a British
    author (a well-known one, too, might even have been the late John
    Creasey) who made a big boo-boo out of ignorance. He wrote a scene
    off-handedly mentioning the coyotes circling overhead.
    
    --- jerry
    

    In case you hadn't heard yet, Borges died this weekend.
    
    (Not a very good weekend, was it? Benny Goodman, Alan Jay Lerner,
    Jorge Luis Borges, and Marlon Perkins.)
    
    --- jerry

    Thanks, Jerry for noting his passing. 
    
    It short, mildly macabre digression.  The Sunday New York Times
    has obituaries of Borges and Lerner on Page 1, Section 1.  While
    reading the obits, it occurred to me that between the two of them,
    they had only one good eye. (Borges went blind in the 50's, Lerner
    lost an eye in a boxing accident.)
    
					andrew