#radical fantasy

If sf is the exploration of all the constraints thrown up by history – the web of counterŽnalities and anti-dialectics which human production has itself produced – then fantasy is the other side of the coin and a celebration of human creative power and freedom which becomes idealistic only by virtue of the omission of precisely those material and historical constraints. I propose to read magic, then, not as some facile plot device (which it no doubt becomes in the great bulk of mediocre fantasy production) but, rather, as a Žgure for the enlargement of human powers and their passage to the limit, their actualisation of everything latent and virtual in the stunted human organism of the present.