For example, a 2013 article in The New Yorker advances the claim that Robinson is “one of the most important political writers working in America today.” I would agree heartily with this assessment and would suggest something similar for many (all?) of the writers and books listed above. Jemisin, and Cixin Liu-are being treated with new seriousness and respect by an ever more expansive and sometimes unexpected group of readers and critics. Secondly, writers long identified as practitioners of genre fiction-Kim Stanley Robinson, William Gibson, China Miéville, Ted Chiang, Allan Moore, N.K. ) This welcome change is borne out, first, by the fact that many significant works of “literary” fiction published in the first two decades of our millennium are examples of or draw deeply on SF and fantasy-among others, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) and its two sequels (20), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) and The Bone Clocks (2014), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011), Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2011), Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017), Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017), and Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte(2019). In Invoking Hope: Theory and Utopia in Dark Times, I touch on the fact that the older post-World War II MFA “Program Era” proscriptions against genre or “paraliterary” fiction have begun to loosen (although, of course, not without resistance from a few critics who might very well be operating under the slogan “Make Literature Great Again”. This has been reconfirmed for me just this past month with the publication of Jo Walton’s beautiful and affirmative novel, Or What You Will. It is a very good time to be a writer (and a reader) of SF, fantasy, weird, and other fantastic fictions-indeed, we might even say it is a golden age, if that term had not already been taken.

My Real Children by Jo Walton