Is Lord of the Flies SF or is it not? (and related matters)

[Venusian Broon]

Yeah, but they weren't members of a choir.

They did come from a strict catholic school.

Real-life Lord of the Fliesâââwhat Happened When Six Boys Were Marooned for 15 months

The true story of a group of teens who were stranded on a remote island for over a year

medium.com

But perhaps being nice to each other and re-building civilisation is the only step after the depravities of catholic school?

 

[hitmouse]

Very, very technically, I think it is SF (it's set in the future during WW3), but I wouldn't shelve it as such. If anything, it seems like allegory with a slightly fantasy feel, especially in the moment where the pig's head (which, IIRC, is either a hallucination or the actual Devil) starts to talk. I think @hitmouse makes a good point.

A genre-agnostic approach to this sort of fiction seems appropriate. Then we can all stop the needless worrying and head off down the pub.

 

[BAYLOR]

It just doesn't fit into category of science fiction . If anything , it verges toward the Genre genre

It also has shades of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness

 

[Swank]

If you use "SF" in an inclusive way, LOTF is clearly SF. It uses two unique factors - deserted boys, and that the boys are aware that a potentially world ending war is going on. And then it speculates that those two factors might lead to a social shift of an unexpected nature. And that's really not terribly different than LeGuin writing about the social implications of different gender arrangements.

The most potent reason for SF to exist is that it creates a world for the reader, and that world is built on a rational prompt from our own. I think the kinds of SF that don't earn their place on the SF bookshelf are books with another priority - like the social commentary of LOTF or 1984, or the exotic adventure of Tarzan, or the mystery of Sherlock. If LOTF was presented as something less horrifying and weirder, it would have been embraced as pure SF.

 

[paranoid marvin]

The book is very similar in many ways to the Twilight Zone episode 'The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street', and demonstrates how quickly civilised communities can descend into fear and paranoia.

The Twilight Zone episode is definitely science fiction, but - for me - the elements present in LOTF are not enough to categorise it as a work of science fiction. I agree that 1984 is science fiction, but that has lots of elements of the genre present, as well as being a social commentary.

 

[Bick]

No, nothing SF about it.