Frankenstein, a literary classic and one of the most well-known horror stories, is also considered the first modern science fiction novel. Go back far enough and these genre boundaries, INCLUDING sf, fantasy, and horror, are either blurry or simply nonexistent.
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In the old days the stereotypical "science fiction B-movie" was a "monster movie", which is really, really inarguably a kind of horror movie In fact if you just say "monster movie" today it's impossible to really sort the ones that we think of as "the horror genre" vs "sci-fi"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @ToccoTrevor and
The Invisible Man is one of the "classic Hammer Horror monsters" but he's also, like, absolutely an archetypal "science fiction" story The most recent remake is as "hard SF" as it's possible to get (dropping the magic potion conceit for a creepily plausible "active camo suit")
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Replying to @arthur_affect @ToccoTrevor and
I mean come on the intentionally retro Rocky Horror Picture Show has "horror" in its own title but its introductory theme song is titled "Science Fiction Double Feature"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @ToccoTrevor and
Anyway the attempt to build a hard barrier between "science fiction" and "horror" came from within the SF community, a lot of whom were really ideological and snobbish This was a whole theme of Joseph Campbell's deliberate push to change the genre during his career at Astounding
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Replying to @arthur_affect @ToccoTrevor and
He was a chauvinist who wanted to harshly sever the ties between science fiction and fantasy (no more "planetary romances" and "space operas" with space swordfights and space castles and space princesses), even though that kind of shit is how the genre started
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Replying to @arthur_affect @ToccoTrevor and
People internalized his baleful gatekeeping glare at any and all corny, commercialized celebration of obsolete feudal values and aesthetics in "what SHOULD be a genre about the FUTURE" that you get people straightfacedly arguing *Star Wars* isn't science fiction
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Replying to @arthur_affect @ToccoTrevor and
"You should be calling it science FANTASY" Okay bitch then literally every single fucking thing they printed in "science fiction" magazines in the first half of the "Golden Age of Science Fiction" in the '30s was "actually science FANTASY" It all had swords and magic and shit
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Replying to @arthur_affect @ToccoTrevor and
The sheer audacity it takes to say that Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers and John Carter (which Lucas was shamelessly just ripping off) isn't "really science fiction" Come on guys
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Replying to @arthur_affect @ToccoTrevor and
Anyway it's the same with Campbell's disciples wanting to cut their genre ties with The Thing From Another World and Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and The Walking Dead and, yes, OG classics Frankenstein/The Invisible Man/Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
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They said that science fiction should be an OPTIMISTIC genre, a genre that was PRO-tech and PRO-futurism If the story talked about "Things Man Was Not Meant to Know" and showed humanity defeated and helpless in the face of new tech or aliens or whatever, it wasn't "really SF"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @ToccoTrevor and
They believed this so strongly, of course, precisely because at the time they were wrong "Science fiction horror" stories about new inventions going horribly wrong or about discovering something new and strange that kills us all have ALWAYS been bestsellers in the genre
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Replying to @arthur_affect @ToccoTrevor and
And so the snobbery of SF nerds was about really aggressive gatekeeping Back in the day when they said "I'm into *science fiction*, not schlocky 'sci-fi'" what they specifically meant was those "monster movies" the studios were cranking out all the time
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