How can I really resist linking to an article at a blog delightfully named BookSlut? Right now it has a great peice by Paul Kincaid on “The History of Today” which looks at the ways in which novelty is critical to science fiction — hence the constant rise and fal of movements within the genre (e.g., cyberpunk) — and how discussions of the genre’s respectability or lack there of it actually deeply irrelevant to its narratives of difference and exclusion. If you’re interested in what we read, why we read it and how people try to market it to us, it’s a nice little column. Of course, this leaves lots of room to talk about fantasy literature — is it under the sci-fi umbrella and is it about something new even when it’s wraped in tropes of other times?
