Hunting through my ill-organized library of books last week, looking for something I wanted to re-read, my dangerously idle mind was pondering the limitations of genre and the shortcomings of genre names in fiction as description. Specifically, I was thinking about the grey area between “traditional” science fiction and “traditional” fantasy - an area of work which struggles under a variety of unwieldy labels, such as (depending on the book) “steampunk” or “urban fantasy”. This weekend, I had another thought on the subject - why is it that certain tired cliches of the fantasy genre never seem to make it over to the science-fiction side?

I should warn you, what follows is probably kind of geeky…
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