Settings vs Genres

It is common to class Fantasy fiction and Science Fiction as "genres" but is this right?

I don't think so, not that I expect my opinion to change the world, even though I'm sure that it ought to.

A setting is the type of arena in which a story is told: Historical is a setting (could be any of many different periods), and Contemporary is a setting. So why isn't Future (Science Fiction) a setting? And why isn't Fantasy which can be any of those mentioned so far, plus elements that couldn't happen in the universe as we understand it?

They are settings, that's all. And any one that classifies them as a genre (in my not so humble opinion) is wrong.

Let's take a genre: Detective. You can have:

• Historical detective (from Victorian back to Roman)
• Contemporary detective (from Poirot to Morse)
• Science Fiction detective (Dr Urth to Gil Hamilton)
• Fantasy detective (Randall Garrett's Lord D'Arcy books)

And you can do the same for any other Setting/Genre combination: SF/Western they exist, and the current best is Firefly/Serenity. Horror is usually a genre that has a Fantasy setting but it doesn't have to.

You can mix and match genres in a setting, but you have to be careful mixing settings. Fantasy has a very powerful flavour and adding it in any great quantity to any other setting changes it to Fantasy only.

Fantasy and Science Fiction are settings, not genres.