guyelfkin speak with much wisdom as usual. It's sad when a once fine mind fossilises. (Benford's, not Lynch's.) All sf is a subset of fantasy. (As are mainstream novels, romances, whodunits, spy thrillers, westerns, historicals, horror books and political biographies, but we won't go into that.) You can't draw a line and separate the two. Well, you can, but you end up with a very small circle inside a much larger circle and it looks silly.

As for his predictions about the political future of the Western world depending on people reading sf and not fantasy, well, looks like we're doomed then. Can anyone remind me what's actually so bad about living in a backwater?