FANTASTIKA

Fantastika are those abundant modes of telling the world that open out beyond myth, legend, prophecy and tales of horror. Science fiction can be seen as the natural voice of a persistent Apollonian pressure to reshape the unruly into spandex. Yet Dionysian fuming and glee will burst into this rationalized sf world. Suppressed elements of our human experience seethe up as horror tales and fantasies that expose the lure and fear of cruelty, of desire, of wish-of the unconscious that powers the Apollonian dream. The essays in this book-the third Wildside volume drawn from Van Ikin's journal Science Fiction: A Review of Speculative Literature-are responses to fictions at the boundaries of reality, the fences abutting these landscapes of fantastika. Some explicitly survey examples of the fantastic, the utopian, the dystopian. Others look at fiction that twists realism to the breaking point. Terry Pratchett's teeming Discworld, moving through space on the back of an immense turtle, A'Tuin. Asimov's hyper-rational Foundation universe caving in under the pressure of mind-readers and the planetary consciousness Gaia. Roger Zelazny's worlds always halfway between light and dark, reason and unreason. Doris Lessing's Sufiesque hidden histories of this world and others. The sci fi of Star Wars set against the rich fantasy of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. The many worlds of Fantastika await!