The science fiction community is global, committed and very vocal. But is there a fantasy community? And if not, why not?
Nick Cirkovic has a few thoughts, specifically, “It may be indeed that writers are by profession a solitary bunch: they sit alone in a room and write, lots. They each have a small number of writer friends and confidantes, some of them may not even be writing in the area of genre they themselves do. Again, generally a healthy thing. It may also be that there is such a wide and varied set of sub-genres with the tag ‘fantasy’ that such healthy cross-breeding precludes a concentration of the one ultimately self-destroying inbred strand.”
It’s interesting that science fiction is a smaller genre than fantasy in terms of book sales, yet fantasy essentially remains subsumed by science fiction in terms of community, booksellers and marketing, as it has done since the days when there were only two fantasy books on the shelves compared to a hundred SF ones.
Fantasy, the love that dare not speak its name. Of course, I can remember when nobody had read Lord of the Rings but everybody had read Dune.
I went to a university that produced petroleum engineers.