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Parker Settecase's avatar

This is a great piece! Thanks for the hard work. I love the idea of new categories, organizing books by themes instead of old tags. I do find myself loving the old tags though. SFF and even 'speculative fiction', but maybe that's because I love speculative philosophy and that term 'speculative' means something to me that it may not mean to others. It's hard to imagine being a book seller and totally doing away with the SF tag though. SF seems like shorthand that can tell the reader at least a little of what to expect without having to give too much of the plot away. Maybe I'm just too enamored of the old categories though.

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John D. Westlake's avatar

I once had a back and forth on reddit (which was my first mistake) about a completely fantastic story that had an excess of magical spells that happened to take the form of spaceships and a lot of gee-whiz about computers and virtual reality.

The redditors insisted that this was "more realistic" and more scientifically accurate because the author had a PhD or some such. (I know, I'm also stunned that redditors would behave this way.)

It was totally lost on them that fantasizing about the latest scientific finding isn't much different from fantasizing about the myths you read as a kid. Imaginative stories are imaginative stories, as far as I see it.

This is a long overdue correction.

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