I don't think the distinction is nearly so clear as Brin makes it out to be. By his definition, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality would fall under sci fi rather than fantasy, but if you stocked it at a library that separated the two, this would probably confuse more people rather than less.
Science fiction and fantasy are just clusters of frequently associated tropes in the space of speculative fiction. I don't see why we should expect there to be a clear separation between them.
Title: [SEQ RERUN] Science as Attire Tags: sequence_reruns Today's post, Science as Attire was originally published on 23 August 2007. A summary:
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Guessing the Teacher's Password, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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