Gardner Dozois (ed), The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 21 (2008)

[tea_drinker77]

On the downside, the content of issue 21 is dominated by white, male authors (25 men to 8 women) and you can see that in 2008, women writers and writers of colour were not getting the same level of attention as white, male writers. As far as I could tell (without looking everyone up) there are only two writers of colour included in this anthology!

Comments

[animaltime]

Your summaries are sharp and have given me an idea of why you like sci-fi so much: its favorite settings and plots are fertile ground for exploring interesting thought experiments. Thanks for sharing this.

[tea_drinker77]

Much as I love literary fiction, I feel that science fiction reaches some places that literary fiction doesn't, as a rule anyway. Another thing that I love about SF and fantasy is the way those genres showcase the breadth of the human imagination. How far can we go?

[animaltime]

Yeah, I get that. In a way, sci-fi and fantasy concepts/tropes could serve as outlines for more ambitious literary fiction. It seems like both SF and fantasy could work as handy models on which to base unconventional literary fiction.

I guess that's the general kind of thing that the author of that article is getting at: hybridization across genres.

[andygrrrl]

Always happy to provide sci-fi support. :-)

[animaltime]

A friend just sent me this link and it reminded me of your post:

http://fantasy-faction.com/2012/hybrid-fantasy

[tea_drinker77]

Good article