Thanks for the summary of the article, which is very interesting. Also, you're quite right - I meant to write 'Huxley' rather than 'Ballard' as being an example of someone Lerner would exclude from the SF community. I'll fix that in a minute.
This leaves me a with a couple of questions, which I'd be interested to know whether Lerner (or you) can answer. First, what about the founding writers of SF, who were writing before an SF community in the sense you describe it really existed? Does Jules Verne count as SF? Wells? (Any definition of SF that excluded these would pretty much rule itself out of court, I'd have thought.) Second, is SF a genre sui generis in this regard, or would Lerner apply analogous definition to detective fiction, romance, YA fantasy, etc? And if not, why not? Is there something about SF that makes it more communal in nature than other genres?
no subject
This leaves me a with a couple of questions, which I'd be interested to know whether Lerner (or you) can answer. First, what about the founding writers of SF, who were writing before an SF community in the sense you describe it really existed? Does Jules Verne count as SF? Wells? (Any definition of SF that excluded these would pretty much rule itself out of court, I'd have thought.) Second, is SF a genre sui generis in this regard, or would Lerner apply analogous definition to detective fiction, romance, YA fantasy, etc? And if not, why not? Is there something about SF that makes it more communal in nature than other genres?