While I'm more accustomed to seeing "genre" used as a way of hinting at broad categories of stories. Calvino certainly used it as such when writing his forward to his Italian Folktales.



Ha! So SF/F=porn/obscenity?



It's a workable definition, but the last part isn't as true, or at least for the stories I tend to read. As I'm reading stories for Best American Fantasy 4, I don't think there's been any stories that I've considered for inclusion so far that take place in a wholly-fictitious "world" or which have fantastical creatures appearing in it. If I had to write my own definition, I'd add that SF/F includes stories that focus on an estrangement of character and sometimes setting, with a dream-like, surreal effect occurring. Or perhaps that is what I'm reading for more than anything else at the moment.



I like Darko Suvin's definition of it, which parallels some of what I said above: "SF is a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment."


Interesting that you reference Ada, as one of my favorite authors, Jeff VanderMeer, took the narrative form of Ada and tinkered with it to create a story, Shriek: An Afterword, set in his imagined Ambergris setting, that I think is one of the finer fantasies written today. The city setting is odd, twisted, and vaguely threatening, yet the characters have so much depth due to how VanderMeer gave a new twist to the narrative style that Nabokov developed (should note that VanderMeer is a huge fan of Nabokov and cites him as an influence). In fact, I think that novel would have made for an interesting discussion in parallel with Ada, not just for the similarities and differences in style, but also for certain thematic elements.

And something tells me that you wouldn't be able to classify authors such as VanderMeer strictly in one field. Whether or not you'd find his writing/stories to be among the best, that's another matter, but I doubt you'd find him to be derivative, outside of the most surface-level similarities to Nabokov and Angela Carter.