fantastic adj.

The Snake Mother[:] The Outstanding Fantastic Novel of the Year by A. Merritt.

For the sake of clarity, let me say that a number of science fiction fans read the fantastic magazines avidly, but the others, nurtured on fiction a trifle far-fetched though based on scientific fact cannot tolerate this bastard literature. Personally, the editor’s tendencies are toward these fantastic stories.

Any one who can enjoy the beautiful tales of Clark Ashton Smith can really appreciate fantastic literature.

‘The Final Struggle’ unfortunately impressed me as being very bad as a science-fictional, fantastic, or any kind of story.

Angarth, whose fame as a writer of fantastic fiction was already very considerable, had been spending that summer among the Sierras, and had been living alone until the artist, Felix Ebbonly, went to visit him.

Some of the more enthusiastic science fiction aficionados tend to overstate the claims of this medium. Modern SF definitely does not date back to the second century and Lucian of Samosata, or even to the Gothic and fantastic novels of the last century. It has roots there, of course, just as it has roots in all fiction, being a part of the greater main of fiction.

Many fantastic stories and novels these days are set upon another world inhabited by people, and if the author of a particular work was to start off by saying, ‘There is a world in space inhabited by people, and the natural laws of this world are somewhat different from ours, and they are magical,’ one could, generally speaking, say that this is a fantasy. But if he says, ‘Here is this world’,—and it is the same story—leaving implications that this is the result of a colonization experiment from Earth of a thousand or two thousand or ten thousand years before, then it would suddenly become a science fiction story, because the reader has got a basis for suspending his disbelief.

[in a review of Annihilation, a metafictional allegory by Jeff VanderMeer:] A clandestine government agency called the Southern Reach has sent 11 mostly failed expeditions into Area X, where an environmental catastrophe has created a nasty new ecosystem that may be encroaching on our own familiar world. [...] Area X stands for the domain of fantastic fiction. The biologist is the reader.