Blurring the genre boundaries.

This week I've re-written another short story into a novella.  The original was fantasy, but the anthology I'm aiming it at doesn't take pure fantasy.  It needed to have some SF content added to stand a chance of acceptance.

That got me thinking about blurring the genre boundaries. There's long been a debate whether Anne McCaffrey's Pern books, with their telepathic, fire-breathing dragons, are fantasy or SF.  In the early books I would have said fantasy - until I read All The Weyrs of Pern.  

Pern has a feudal-type  society, and a low-tech setting in most of the books.  But in 'All The Weyrs of Pern' , McCaffrey introduces Aivas, a voice-address AI that's 2500 years old and came with the original settlers. Its discovery sets off a chain of events where the people re-discover all the scientific knowledge the original settlers had.  But they blend their new knowledge into their current society.  This story clearly blurs the boundaries of SF and fantasy.

Pern was uppermost in my mind when I started re-writing my novella.  It has huge Goldeagles instead of dragons, but I also added an internet, bioengineering, and drones.  Then I had to ask why, if there's an internet, anyone would pay a much slower courier service to carry things around the planet.  I came up with two answers.  First, hacking of the 'nets and data theft is so bad that many large corporations won't trust sensitive data to it any more.  And the second reason was that the rich and famous liked a discreet and exclusive service to deliver their holiday postcards.

I decided the Goldeagle Courier Service would cultivate that image of exclusivity, and the idea that it carried fripperies.  That way, most Goldeagles didn't get attacked.  But I invented smaller, faster black hawks that were also ridden.  They were used as military birds, had steel-tipped talons, and could outfly and menace the Goldeagles.

As in Anne McCaffrey's stories, I've blurred the boundaries of fantasy and SF.  The original settlers bioengineered the wild Goldeagles into the huge beasts that can be ridden today.  An SF purist would object that the planet's gravity and atmosphere probably wouldn't support such huge flying creatures.  But if I allowed the atmosphere to be dense enough to allow such creatures to fly it probably wouldn't be suitable for human-derivative settlers to breathe.  I blurred the genre boundaries.

I think Stephanie Salter's Gemsigns does the same. Her Gems are genetically modified humans.  But the big reveal at the end of the book shows a gem using an ability which it's questionable whether our atmosphere would support.  (I'm sounding cryptic because I don't want to spoil the book.  It's brilliant, go and read it.)

Even within books that are considered wholly SF we still have blurred boundaries.  The biggest one is the idea of travelling through space at FTL speeds.  We have no idea whether we'll ever be able to do that.  But everybody uses it, and I do too, because sending a ship through jump is just so damned convenient.  It opens up the galaxy to the writer.

In the end speculative fiction is about story, it's an entertainment.  I'm not writing a scientific paper documenting what is, I'm telling a tale of what might be.  "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."  Now that's the ultimate blurring of SF and fantasy.