Fantasy 1

I love fantasy and SF literature, especially literature, but also films and graphic novels. To me the works of le Guin, Banks, Miéville, Stephenson, Moorcock.... I find that fantasy is the best vehicle for researching consciousness, language, ethics and politics. I love the quote from Miéville that he's only in it for the monsters, which is a lie of course. Oddly it seems that Tolkien and Harry Potter are the only fantasies beknownst to a large number of readers, and even more oddly it seems that while many people accept Tolkien and Rowling as cool, all other fantasy is dismissed as silly, childish and superficial. Of course, in many ways the case is that while Tolkien is amazing in many ways, he is a stuffy old reactionary Catholic, and Harry Potter, well.... more on that later.