Fantasy is crap. You heard me. SF, too.

A friend lent me her copy of The Time Traveler's Wife, the 2003 bestseller by Audrey Niffenegger that has been getting a bit of buzz. If you haven't already encountered it, the book is about (surprise) time travel and has a desperately "please don't call me sf, I'm literary!" cover: milky green, with sedate serif title font, a photo of a little girl from the legs down standing in her knee socks and maryjanes next to a pair of men's shoes placed neatly on what might be a picnic blanket. Friend and I then duked it out over the definition of fantasy... or, rather, about the level of quality for a book to be considered fantasy.

She identifies herself as a big fantasy fan. She loves Harry Potter. But her definition of fantasy (and science fiction, which she doesn't read much) is those stories that are formulaic and can be skimmed through because you won't miss much. Anything above a certain threshold on the (admittedly subjective) quality scale fails the test of being fantasy/sf. A "good" story simply isn't fantasy/sf.

I just had to get that off my mind. Nothing I haven't heard before, but it rankles, nonetheless.

Hand me my rapier

I just can't resist these when I see one in a friend's journal:


Category IV - The Musketeer

You have a small, highly edited social group, and you like it that way.


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(I believe that's a diagram of the remnant planetary system around the Catseye Nebula... or somethin'...)