Caryn James, who I gather is a movie critic for The New York Times, recently compared and contrasted the current film The Children of Men with the P.D. James novel of the same title that the movie was based on.

Doing so, of course, required her to state, in her second paragraph, that The Children of Men "is not another of Ms. James’s famed detective novels, and it is not, as it has sometimes sloppily been described, science fiction." Sadly, the person being sloppy here is Ms. James. The Children of Men is a near-future thriller about a devastating change in society and the repercussions it causes: that is precisely what science fiction is and does. The book is and was SF, and so is the movie.

The Children of Men is not genre science fiction -- that is, it was not written and published as part of the self-identified publishing category called "science fiction" -- but it depends on second-hand ideas about science, society, progress and the future that came from SF and its subject is ineluctably SFnal. James's ignorance of SF in 1992 -- and the possibly even deeper ignorance of Ms. James today -- cannot change The Children of Men into anything other than a SF novel, no matter who denies it.

First Dave Itzkoff, now this: is the Times entirely devoted to hiring the incompetent?