LITMIR.BIZ

      And to Edward James in salutation of the first time we met.

      HEALTH WARNING:

      This book is not intended to create rules.

      Its categories are not intended to fix anything in stone.

      This book is merely a portal into fantasy, a tour around the skeletons and exoskeletons of genre.

      Taxonomy: Theory and practice of classification.

      Classification: Any method of organizing and systematizing the diversity of organisms, living and extinct, according to a set of rules (Penguin Dictionary of Biology, 9th ed., 1994).

      Taxonomy is no longer typological. It’s now systematics, consciously based in the axiom “The observer is part of the system.” —Richard Erlich, e-mail, 2003

      Formal critics all begin with a truth that ideological critics too often neglect; form is in itself interesting, even in the most abstract extreme. Shape, pattern, design carry their own interest—and hence meaning—for all human beings. What some critics have called “human meanings” are not required; nothing is more human than the love of abstract forms. —Wayne C. Booth, introduction to M. M. Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics

      Contents

       Acknowledgments

       Introduction

       Chapter 1: The Portal-Quest Fantasy

       Chapter 2: The Immersive Fantasy

       Chapter 3: The Intrusion Fantasy

       Chapter 4: The Liminal Fantasy

       Chapter 5: “The Irregulars”: Subverting the Taxonomy

       Epilogue

       Notes

       Bibliography

       Index

Acknowledgments

      This work has been a long time in the making. It began as an impromptu way to arrange a presentation on modern children’s fantasy at the Children’s SF and Fantasy conference organized by the Association for Research in Popular Fiction and the Science Fiction Foundation in January 2002, and I am indebted to Nickianne Moody for providing that opportunity. It continued because my audience showed immediate interest; this interest has been extended by too many other audiences to thank them all, but if you have been one of my interrogators in the past, I thank you. Every one of you has assisted in honing my thoughts. In the process of writing I rambled on to many people, but thanks are especially owed to Jon Courtenay Grimwood and Karen Traviss for their conviction that writing is a craft, to Craig Jacobsen (for his comment on “gossiping about theory”), Brian Attebery, Dave Clements, John Clute, Steve Cockayne, Stefan Ekman, Neil Gaiman, Elizabeth Hand, Nalo Hopkinson, Edward James, Greer Gilman, M. John Harrison, Roz Kaveney, Ken MacLeod, China Miéville, Justina Robson, Graham Sleight, Peter Straub, Steph Swainston, and Gary K. Wolfe—all listened to me as I tried to work out what I wanted to say, and all, at some stage, commented on some part of the work. One consequence is that this book has a great many references to conversations and e-mails. This book is intended to function as a jumping-off point for discussion; I consider it very important that the discussions that took place be adequately acknowledged, even if it is impossible for future readers to track them all.

      Many people helped me in small ways: finding definitions, checking references, making suggestions for further reading, or just asking the right question. I hope I have included them all here.