[bksvol-discuss] Re: Building The Perfect Bookshare
- From: Rogerbailey81@xxxxxxx
- To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2008 21:30:12 EDT
There are most certainly sub genres in science fiction and with any field
there are lumpers and splitters. Any category structure that would satisfy the
splitters would undoubtedly be too unwieldy to use so the idea of tags just
might be what we need. However, I have not found the tag feature on Amazon to
be particularly useful. The problem is that individuals use many and varied
terms to mean the same thing and once a tag describes the book in question
excellently you will find that only a minority of the books that should be
tagged
that way indeed are.
Despite my comment about the unlikelihood of satisfying the splitters,
though, I do not think it is too splitterly to ask that fantasy and science
fiction be split. There is, of course some overlap, but there is overlap in
virtually any set of genres. There are romances that are also mysteries and
there
are mysteries that are also westerns. Science fiction and fantasy, though,
have
even less in common than those examples and they are lumped together only
because of the legacy of the fact that many years ago with the success of Lord
of the Rings a certain publisher wanted to publish a line of fantasy. At the
time there was an extreme paucity of fantasy available so that publisher
turned the job of editing fantasy over to its editor of its science fiction
imprint. That was Lin Carter, I think. It was a matter of there not being
enough
fantasy to justify creating a separate imprint with another editor so the
fantasy was published as science fiction. Anymore there is plenty of fantasy,
but
because of that early publishing decision they are still classified together.
Unfortunately, it is like classifying cozy mysteries together with techno
thrillers. In a message dated 9/27/2008 7:15:34 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
rhyami@xxxxxxxxx writes:
Roger, I see your point. The categories are supposedly going to be
changed with the new site. I think that will make things better for a
lot of people. I would really like to see tags implemented like thos
on the social bookmarking sites so people can add keywords so other
people could find books more easily. People who like cozy mysteries
could look for that tag and could avoid the noir subgenre of mysteries
if they prefer. I imagine there are subgenres in science fiction as
well that could be improved by having tags.
--
Monica Willyard
Visit my blog at http://www.scannersguild.com
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