I'm interested in stories that are considered sci fi by most readers but are not really sci fi----or speculative fiction, if you'd rather, kind of like City of Darkness. Such as "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omerlas" by LeGuin, one of the all-time great short stories.
If you're not familiar with it, I expect you'll rather enjoy Russell Hoban's
Riddley Walker.
But is it sci fi?
Definining genres is a thorny issue in the philosophy of literature. At a first pass, I'd say that genres are characterized by clusters of conventions and features which are taken to be
standard for the genre, such that possessing these features counts towards the work's classification in that genre. So, for example, the fact that a story explicitly takes place on an exoplanet tends towards its classification as scifi (although of course this is not a necessary condition, and probably not sufficient, either!). At the same time, certain clusters of properties are taken to be
contra-standard, so that their possession tends to count
against classification in a particular genre--again, for example, the fact that a story explicitly takes place on an exoplanet tends to count against its classification as a biography or as historical fiction. And then a whole whack of properties are
variable for the genre; so, for example, 'takes place on an exoplanet' is variable for the genre 'mystery' (e.g. Alastair Reynolds's
Century Rain, or Mur Lafferty's
Six Wakes [although neither is actually set on an exoplanet, but you get the point]).
As a result, we can see that genres are fairly porous, and can overlap quite a bit, and individual stories will tend to deviate somewhat from expected clusters of standard properties (perhaps even introducing some typically contra-standard properties), all of which explains why it's so hard to classify so many stories. At the same time, of course, deviating too much from a genre's standard properties will land you in another genre--if you start with a cozy mystery but then turn up the violence and sex a notch or two, you end up with a noir, not a cozy.
And we can also get a sense of what the process of genre formation is like: an increasingly robust group of people, authors and readers alike, become increasingly interested in certain clusters of properties, which they take as standard for the stories they're interested in producing and consuming. Often, perhaps even typically, that's as a result of authors playing with the genres of their stories and diverging in some way from the conventions and properties taken as standard or contra-standard from the genre, and then interest starts to attach to new clusters of properties. That's how, for example, we go from the gothic to the female gothic, horror, and fantasy (if you'll forgive the crudity of that sketch).
So: is
Omelas science fiction? Sure, I think so. I think it fits neatly into the utopian/dystopian sub-genre, which we associate with scifi for reasons having to do more with history than content.
On the other hand, I don't think that
Frankenstein is (per your post in the other thread). To my mind, Frankenstein is a gothic novel, and predates scifi. It's certainly a precursor, and helped to establish some of the conventions of the genre, but like Lucian's
True History, it doesn't come out of a historical moment when there's a robust cluster of conventions and properties which are widely regarded as standard for a new genre. And to retroactively classify it as scifi is, I think, to do it an injustice. We don't need to do that to see its influence, or to show how it's related. And if we do, then we lose sight of its actual historical importance--which is as a gothic novel. (Incidentally, I think that the bulk of its association with scifi passes through the 1931 film and its many, many sequels, rather than the novel; that's where the mad science comes from, for example. But it's been a long time since I read it.)
I'm afraid I'll have to return to the technophonia stuff from the other post. I'm out of time for posting at the moment.
