I think people are missing my point.
1) "It's still scifi!"
- I never said it wasn't. I have no problem calling it so and putting it on EP and the rest. My point was that it didn't *use* the speculative elements in any way that required them to be speculative; their planet colony was just like a remote farm in the American Midwest, their communications worked just like the Internet and phones, the spider-bear was just like a horse, etc. It's SF that didn't have to be SF to work just as well. Compare, for instance, something like, I dunno, "Blade Runner," which wouldn't have been nearly as interesting if replicants were just regular people who had stolen someone's identity. That's what I'm talking about here.
2) "It's good anyway!"
- I agree wholeheartedly. It's an excellent story and a good piece of writing, which is precisely why I'm not sure I see why it was an SF story. See, making something speculative means that you are of necessity limiting the audience; there are a lot more people who won't read genre fiction than who won't read plain fiction. Also, when you make something speculative, you have to expend precious wordcount either on explaining genre tropes that fans of the genre take for granted or else risk confusing people who don't know what those tropes are. For this story, the speculative elements were like the paper umbrella in a cocktail; they jazzed it up a bit, but didn't add anything substantive, and I'm left wondering why we would go to the extra trouble to make it speculative when it didn't need to be. It's a perfectly strong story in itself and doesn't need adorable spider-bears to be good enough to sell and receive considerable praise.