In Rhetorics of Fantasy, Farah Mendlesohn has said that "the debate over definition is now long-standing and a consensus has emerged, accepting as a viable 'fuzzy-set' a range of critical definitions of fantasy" (xii). In fact, she argues that a combination of Brian Attebery's formulation of the "fuzzy set" (12) with a choice of critical framework chosen from Christina Brooke-Rose, John Clute, Kathryn Hume, Rosemary Jackson, or Mendlesohn's own Rhetorics is all the critical rigor necessary to analyze and understand fantasy. In many respects, she is right; however, there is one major flaw: the debate never happened.
[Note from the Editors: This article was published in the April, 2008 issue of NYRSF. We thought our readers might like to see it again, so we're posting it here in honor of Ray Bradbury.]
I.
The appropriate place to think about the notion of slipstream— and by slipstream I mean those works that fall between genre borders but that either insist on some kind of genre identity even so, or else have defenders as to their genre identity—is in the realm of the short story, for what I think are good historical reasons.
The shaping laboratory of genre fiction seems to be the short story, as lots of people are happy to point out. Many of the most able practitioners of genre fiction have shown their expertise in the shorter realm. In science fiction, that may be because a fiction of ideas is most easily sustained over a short duration.
Steven Erikson: Not Your Grandmother’s Epic Fantasy: A fantasy author’s thoughts upon reading The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature: 1
A.-P. Canavan: Calling a Sword a Sword : 1
Patrick L. McGuire: Wesley Allison—A New Kind of SF Writer: 9
Amy J. Ransom: Bridging the Solitudes: The Bilingual Canadian SF & F of Yves Meynard, Jean-Louis Trudel, and Laurent McAllister: 13
Ursula Pflug: This is Paradise: 19
REVIEWS
Another Earth, a film by Mike Cahill, reviewed by Ben Carver: 20
Drew Magary’s The Postmortal, reviewed by Darrell Schweitzer: 21
PLUS
An appreciation of an appreciation of Joanna Russ (14) and an editorial (24). Samuel R. Delany, Contributing Editor; Kris Dikeman and Avram Grumer, Associate Managing Editors.
Alex Donald, Web Editor; David G. Hartwell, Reviews and Features Editor; Kevin J. Maroney, Managing Editor.
Staff: Ann Crimmins, Jen Gunnels, Heather Masri, M’jit Raindancer-Stahl, Eugene Reynolds, and Anne Zanoni.
Weekly Crew: Josh Kronengold and Lisa Padol; special thanks to Arthur D. Hlavaty and Eugene Surowitz.
A PDF copy of the NYRSF issue in which this TOC first appeared is available for purchase at Weightless Books.
At this writing, we are freshly returned from the 2012
International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, where the
official theme (The Monstrous Fantastic) was vastly overshadowed
by the unofficial motto, “Too much to do, too little time!” All of
it good, I hasten to add, the largest such gathering of enthusiasts,
scholars, writers, editors, and artists, unleashing a veritable firehose
of brilliance on itself.
Among all of the hustle and bustle, David and I did get to meet
with Gavin Grant and formally agree to make Weightless Books
the new publisher of the electronic version of NYRSF.
Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
