Science & Tech Quote by Jean M. Auel

Auel’s quiet pivot from “fantasy” to “science fiction” is less about shelving in a bookstore than about claiming legitimacy. Fantasy, in the popular imagination, gets coded as escapism: invented worlds, invented rules, permission to handwave. Science fiction, even at its pulpiest, carries a cultural sheen of method - a promise that the imagination is tethered to evidence, systems, and plausible cause-and-effect. By placing her work “closer” to sci-fi, Auel signals that her prehistory isn’t a fairy tale with furs; it’s an argument built out of archaeology, anthropology, and biological constraint.

The phrasing matters: “Of the two” frames genre not as identity but as a choice between reputations. “I would think” softens the claim, a strategic humility that invites readers to see the scaffolding without daring critics to knock it down. And “closer” is the key hedge: she’s not pretending to write hard science, but she is insisting on rigor - on the painstaking reconstruction of how people might have lived, moved, bred, healed, and believed when the record is mostly bones and tools.

In context, Auel wrote into a landscape that often dismissed women’s bestselling historical epics as bodice-adjacent. This line is a preemptive rebuttal: her imaginative leap is not wish fulfillment but speculative reconstruction. It’s a way of saying the thrill in her books isn’t magic; it’s inference.