The sheer amount of material I disagree with here has overloaded what passes for my brain. I had originally written a long, fairly insulting screed that I have decided not to throw upon the pyre of this thread, but, honestly, while I'm always in favor of letting people have their own opinions, the debate tactics being used and the sheer incredulity that this thread induces in me make me want to grab the nearest blunt implement and go to town.

I may post the L,FIS on my blog, if I ever get motivated enough to actually turn the key on the damn thing, but the short form of it is: If you think you have a nice, concise, easily parsed definition of science fiction that has been written in such a way that _The Dark Knight_ is unequivocally on the "Not SF" side of the line, then I suggest you start running a few other works through that definition, including much of Ursula K. LeGuin, Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, the entire bloody New Wave movement, and three-quarters of European SF, as far back as Cyrano and Frankenstein. Let us know how you get on. I suspect you'll find that, without some fancy stepping (loosely speaking, including the phrase "But not _The Dark Knight_." in your definition), your definition may leave some commonly-regarded-as-SF-by-the-oxygen-respiring-world works out in the cold morass of General Fiction.

I believe my screed also suggested that the people who think it's a criminal offense to suggest that their definition of SF might not be the only valid one (apparently, a good third of the thread at a minimum) might also fit the another definition, that of a blivit (q.v.)

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Frankly, these arguments about whether or not something should be covered on io9 are tiring.

Face it, you write what you want to write about - science fiction, science, space, comics, fantasy, porn, pulp, architecture, ...

That's fine in my book. I like most of the articles.

I think the lesson you should learn here is to just say you write about geeky entertainment and related interesting things.

We get too bogged down in arguing what genre something belongs in.

So just keep writing about what you have been writing about without trying to argue them as belonging in one genre or another and embrace the geek!

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This argument also assumes all super heroes = science fiction. I'm not sure a reality where a guy bitten buy a radioactive spider fights side-by-side with the Norse god of thunder can really be called "science fiction." Yes, I know that's the Marvel universe, but it's a genre point I'm making.

There are many genres with reality-bending elements. Yes, both Sci-Fi films and Superhero films fall into that category. But so do spy films, most action movies, Tokienesque fantasy flicks, those Hong-Kong wire-fighting epics, etc.

It doesn't make them all "sci-fi." Every genre has it's own rules for the more-than-real, and "The Dark Knight" fits more in the tradition of action films than science fiction.

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This blog post is, despite the authoritative tone, nothing more than a rambling and convoluted opinion, not fact. The central theme of it seems to be that if an argument might be made that comic book superheroes can somehow be construed as sci-fi rather than fantasy than the same must be true of any movie based on a comic book.

This is faulty argument on a number of levels which illuminates a misunderstanding the author possesses of logic and the sci-fi/fantasy genre's. The only discussion here isn't about the film or how it should be classified but rather about the author of this blog post.

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As for the Batman movies being Sci-Fi, it makes it a movie with sci-fi elements, but not a sci-fi movie.

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Then the other compliant is that they gripe about the Tumbler smashing into Joker's semi. Even though it never happened. He smashes into a garbage truck (remember the garbage truck that knocked the trailing cop cars out of the way _before_ the semi even showed up?), but last I checked that's a distinctly different vehicle than a full-out 18-wheeler. And when he pulls out and does a 180 to catch up to the remaining convoy, you can see the garbage truck left behind, the cab crushed so much against the ceiling of the lower road that the driver can't even see out of the front windshields anymore. I'm just saying, is all. And it's somewhat ironic that they complain about that never-happened moment and completely failed to mention the whole flipping-of-said-semi by hooking it to streetlamps with a pair of tow cables.

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It's the well thought out analysis of things like this that keep bringing me back to io9. Keep up the good work.

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Setting the structure aside there are two main problems with this post. The first problem has to do with Dark Knight, the second has to do with this blog.

The comic argument (that these are essentially wacked out things we're talking about: a 'bat'-man, a 'penguin'-man, super-realistic gadgets) essentially, and sadly, misses the point of Dark Knight. The point is that the movie's connection to their "wacked-out" roots is tenuous. The drama arises in that these incarnations are denatured. They recognize their extraordinary roots, and are disdainful of them. The conflict, and ergo the pleasure derived through dramatic tension comes not only from plot elements (like lives being in danger) but also the structural struggle between extraordinary, and not extraordinary. Dark Knight does not say, "I contain science-fictional elements, and am therefore science fictional." Instead it asks the ironic question "How can I mean if I am science-fictional, and anti-science-fictional simultaneously?"

This leads me nicely into the final problem with this post, which is representative of this blog to a large extent, which is demarkation. What makes Dark Knight so great is what makes this nation, and postmodernism so great: (or terrifying and ineffectual depending on how you look at it) pluralism. I understand that these internets (and sci-fi blogs no less) are the realms of haters, and fan-boys, and trolls, and in such an environment it is sometimes necessary to say "this is who we are, and this is what we do." That's why I didn't have a problem with the post expanding io9's purview to include "urban-fantasy." The reason I didn't have a problem with this is two-fold. Personally, I think that "urban fantasy is science fiction" argument sensible enough. But even more, I accepted it because it tended toward inclusively. My problem with this post-even though it is arguing for the inclusion of Dark Knight-is that it feels utterly exclusive. In the attempt to place a work inextricably in the area of this blog, Charlie Jane's cut across media, misunderstood his own block quotes, and made sloppy arguments.

The problem is not that Dark Knight doesn't belong on this blog. Of course it does. The people that think it doesn't are splitting hairs even finer that Charlie Jane does in this confusing and over-long post. But the reason it belongs here is not because it is science-fictional; it's because it's science fiction-y. I know it's a fluid, hard to define area. But I think that most of the time we could all agree that something is-at least-science fiction-y. Sure that means that not every post will be something we're all interested in. But be an adult and skip it. Plus hopefully the disincentive of your not hitting the link to to full article will help weed out sloppy, credibility-stretching arguments like this one.

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"So there ya go - the biggest opponent of "scifi Batman" is saying that Batman is about as science fictional as the Predator."

completely misses the point

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I would give you TDK, but not Bond. Bond's gadgets are not beyond our technology, though they may be beyond our modest means.

Excellent post, CJA. As always.

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