Stephen posted a topic in Helicopter Reviews. Categorization, in this view, is not a passive registering of qualities intrinsic to what is being categorized, but an active intervention in their disposition, and this insistence on agency is what most decisively distinguishes the historical approach to SF from a formalist one. The freebooting columns, soon operating in broad daylight, scored spectacular successes as they sped into the Iraqi desert flying enormous Union flags to identify them to friendly aircraft. One cannot write the history of the western without including Cooper and Wister, of detective fiction without Poe and Conan Doyle, or of science fiction without Verne and Wells. These semiotic variations in what counts as significant to genre identification point to more profound differences in the social uses of narrative.
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