BETTER LATE… NOV./DEC. F&SF (2021) REVIEW
It’s post-New Year’s, and for the first column and review of 2022, Steve would like to bring you his final review for 2021 of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. (He liked it!)
Crossroads: “Literary” Speculative Fiction and Literary Sensibilities
As I mentioned last week, trying to draw general conclusions about the relationship between mainstream literary fiction and speculative fiction is difficult at best. For every “general” hypothesis, a slew of counter-examples can be raised which undermine its veracity. If, however, we think about both genres as falling somewhere on various probabilistic spectrums, then generalizations […]
Crossroads: Negotiating the Unreal in Magic Realism and Fantasy
Perhaps the most important insight I’ve gained from my research for my Crossroads series is that the borders between genres are very fluid, and the more one genre (or sub-genre) resembles another, the more contentious their relationship is likely to be. Gene Wolfe once condescendingly remarked that “magic realism is fantasy written by people who […]