genre fantasy n.

Writing genre fantasy is the way I earned my living for several years.

We would define genre fantasy, simplistically, as literature in which magic works, as opposed to science fiction, in which science is the operative principle.

It was, for instance, one of the factors involved in the dramatic displacement of genre sf by genre fantasy, because it is much easier for writers to construct in novelistic detail—and for readers to orientate themselves within—a Secondary World which is a straightforward Earth-clone than it is to create a world which is radically differentiated from our own along any of the axes typical of sf.

Although his last few novels seemed to be taking him away from science fiction (and perhaps even away from conventional genre fantasy) toward that vaguely defined territory that might be described as ‘American Magical Realism,’ or perhaps ‘Postmodernism,’ I doubt that he will ever entirely abandon the field—at least some of his short fiction remains solidly centered here, and, in fact, falls under the heading of rigorous and ingeniously worked-out ‘hard science’…and his new novel, currently underway, features time-travelers and some very hungry dinosaurs, core SF themes…although no doubt, in Swanwick’s hands, they are due to have some unexpected changes rung on them!

This search for a usable past and respectable relatives continued well into the 1970s when genre fantasy, now established as a viable market segment in the wake of the Tolkien craze of the sixties, began to seek its own roots: the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, edited by Lin Carter from 1969 through 1974, reprinted works by William Morris, James Branch Cabell, and George Meredith together with classic genre and pulp writers; surely one of the irreproducible moments of the lingering 1960s was discovering a mass-market prose translation of Book I of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso at the local newsstand in January of 1973.

We believe that the best-written fantasy can stand up in the long run by any useful literary standard in comparison to fiction published out of category or genre, and furthermore, that out of respect for the genre at its best we ought to stand by genre fantasy and promote it in this book.