1) arrangement in a bookstore for easy finding of books about similar topics

2) a supremely vague classification used to describe a book when a) recommending it to friends b) reviewing it in a public forum.

I won’t say anymore whether “The Road” is sci-fi or not, I will only say that I grew up buying books in the sci-fi section and if I picked it up there (unlikely) I probably would have put it down (as a child) because it wasn’t what I was expecting science fiction to be.

As for that quoted scene, the boy speaks twice because the father doesn’t answer. The father doesn’t know what they are going to do and is (perhaps) thinking about his gun, imo. Thus the silence because if they stop, they die.

He looked across the water to the country beyond.
What are we going to do Papa? he said.
Well what are we, said the boy.

Huh? Who’s talking to whom?

It’s only now that we’ve come up with all this additional genre terminologies that folks are trying to redefine SF to narrow it to require “tech” or aliens. SF, as I define it, may be broad, but “speculative fiction” is even broader. In fact, I think it’s too broad of a term. It encompasses SF, fantasy, horror and, arguably, fiction itself! Isn’t the term “speculative fiction” redundant?

Interesting point, Devin, about old SF novels that speak about a “future time” that has now passed. I’d still judge them by what they were at the time they were written though. (1984 is still SF).

Finally, To Kill A Mockingbird? SF all the way! (Okay, maybe not).

As far as the 1:17 goes, I knew there was a reason he was pointing that out but it escaped me at the time. It’s a book I’ll need to read over and over to get all of it, I’m sure. There’s also a point half-way through the text where he jumps to the boy’s POV for a mere sentence. I need to study that for meaning as well.

I also agree with Matt that this is one of the best books I’ve read in recent years. The only one I would give higher marks to is another McCarthy book, “Blood Meridian”.

-Devin

Also, does placing a story in the future automatically make it science fiction? I would say no.

I read somewhere online that the clocks in the novel stop at 1:17, a supposed reference to Revelations 1:17. Does that make it religious fiction?

The fact that nuclear weapons were used doesn’t make this SF, either, because we don’t know that is what happened. How do we know that is what caused this landscape? We don’t. Flashes of light and thuds traveling through the ground. That’s all we get. The main thing I love about the book is that we never know what caused this to come to pass. We can assume, but we never know, much the same way a person living through this would probably never know except through guesses and rumors.

I guess it’s up to the individual as labels are as contrary as the people who create and use them. I’ve read and watched a lot of Sci-fi, and not for one instant while reading “The Road” did it ever occur to me it was sci-fi. Speculative, sure, but never sci-fi.

All of that being said, I’ll ditto your sentiment that labels are unnecesarily limiting (though it is kind of fun trying to apply them).

But again, I think simple definitions, if something is in or out of genre, are too limiting. “1984″ is social commentary as much as “The Road” is, and certainly the former is considered more than just science fiction.

It’s interesting to know too that two nominees in the National Book Critics Circle are “The Road” and the James Tiptree, Jr. biography: “The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon” by Julie Phillips. Both “science fiction.”

http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/2007/01/and-finalists-are.html

“[Q]uite a lot of “science fiction” is not at all scientific in any rigorous sense (although it is all fiction). Nevertheless, “science fiction” is a useful common term for what might more accurately be described as “rationally-oriented speculative fiction,” and it’s been use for something along the order of 80 years, so it has a common currency.

“I would also note that science fiction doesn’t have to call attention to its speculative elements to be science fiction. One of the movies in the Canon, On the Beach, qualifies as science fiction because it speculates on the end of the world thanks to a nuclear exchange — but it does so in such a prosaic, no special-effects fashion that most people blink hard when you say, “that’s science fiction.” Well, it is — it’s the end of the world as we know it.”

Thank you, Scalzi.

I think here the broader question is about genre, that weird little classification system we use to describe books and to sort them on bookshelves. Do you think this book would get a larger audience on the science fiction shelves? I don’t. Yet science fiction fans have found it and are reading it. Genre fans are willing to venture out of their circle, but would fans of mainstream literature (perhaps a genre in its own right) be as willing to walk over to the science fiction stacks?