[Happy Monkey]

The bias against science fiction in literary circles is often strong enough that if a book is good enough, people will try their damnednest to justify not calling it science fiction. Ironically (because the opposite is true in SF circles), the less fantasy is mixed into the science fiction, the more some will insist it's not SF.

Not that I mean to denigrate fantasy, that genre is also unfairly maligned. Probably since the Victorian era, fantasy has been considered a children's genre, even though the older a surviving classic is, the more likely it is to be fantasy.