On the contrary, the Harry Potter books take an extremely mechanistic, engineering-oriented view of magic (if a spell doesn't work, there's either a kink in the machine or else the user doesn't have his degree yet) that I find very SFnal in spirit, contrary to the pure fantasies I know and love best.
Now, it's true that "SFnal in spirit" doesn't equal "SF", but there are people like Larry Niven who insist that all kinds of scientifically impossible things get unjustly swept under the SF reg, simply because they're so convenient to have: time travel, FTL, and the like.
So are those not really "science fiction"?
Hugo Gernsback, the founder of the SF publishing genre and the man for whom our awards are named, said in 1962 or so that only one of the stories that had yet received the Hugo was really, in his view, SF rather than fantasy. But he didn't say which one, and you can really scratch your head over the list, wondering which one met Hugo's sanction, remembering that if it did, all of the others didn't.
The border between "SF" and "fantasy" is far more treacherous and full of kinks than the border between "SF/fantasy" and the outside world.
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Now, it's true that "SFnal in spirit" doesn't equal "SF", but there are people like Larry Niven who insist that all kinds of scientifically impossible things get unjustly swept under the SF reg, simply because they're so convenient to have: time travel, FTL, and the like.
So are those not really "science fiction"?
Hugo Gernsback, the founder of the SF publishing genre and the man for whom our awards are named, said in 1962 or so that only one of the stories that had yet received the Hugo was really, in his view, SF rather than fantasy. But he didn't say which one, and you can really scratch your head over the list, wondering which one met Hugo's sanction, remembering that if it did, all of the others didn't.
The border between "SF" and "fantasy" is far more treacherous and full of kinks than the border between "SF/fantasy" and the outside world.