Re: Fiction or non-fiction?
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If analogy is allowed then it's non-fiction and fiction isn't on the same planet. Is 'Godel, Esher and Bach' non-fiction? for example.
luckyme
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I'd say definitely fiction. All fiction books have some non-fiction in them (chairs really exist, the city of London really exists, and so on) but non-fiction books cannot have large segments that are entirely fanciful and do not directly relate to real persons or events. The little stories at the end of each chapter alone put GEB squarely into the fiction category.
Obviously there is some grey area, and as you say, many "non-fiction" books operate primarily by analogy, so it would be hard to say they aren't somewhat fictional.
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