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Great Science-Fiction & Fantasy Works

Science-fiction & fantasy literature: a critical list with discussions.

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Some Musings: Index Page


“I couldn’t seem to get through, myself, to the things that were bottled up inside me.”

– Portrait of Jennie,
Robert Nathan

What These Are

Presented here are thoughts I think worth preserving, but which do not easily fit into any other particular place on the site. Some of them overlap the material presented in the Apologia, but are either expansions of or recastings of that material; others are, well, others. I hope you find at least some of these to be of at least some interest or utility.

(The entries so far are few, but one has to start somewhere.)

  1. Speculations on Speculation: what is or isn’t “speculative” fiction, and why.

  2. The Horror! The Horror!: the relation between horror fiction and speculative fiction.

  3. “Great Novels”: do such things even exist?

  4. Was That Fantastic or What?: can science fiction and fantasy be meaningfully teased apart?

  5. Hard SF and Hard Heads: what are “hard” and “mundane” sf, and why should anyone care?

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This page was last modified on Wednesday, 5 July 2023, at 10:27 pm Pacific Time.