Singular visions

Abstract

Singular Visions is deeply seated in both the realist and fantastic modes. Its most realistic stories contain their dollop of the fantastic and its unnovelized aesthetic, and the most unnovelized show their share of the novelizing influence. There exists in the current day and age a societal hunger for the fantastic at both the popular and high cultural levels that has grown steadily since the resurgence of epic and romance in the form of the genres/marketing categories science fiction and fantasy (hereafter SF&F) in the first half of the twentieth century. This growth in the acceptance and prestige of works in the fantastic mode is due to the work of two forces, the novelizing influence of the novel proper on all other genres as cited/predicted by Bakhtin in 1941's "Epic and Novel," and the postmodern insistence on a decentered, unknown, and unknowable universe. The result of the interaction of these two competing forces is a tremendous increase in volume of the middle of the spectrum of novelization that runs from the critically/academically dominant traditional novel in the realistic mode to the nearly unnovelized extended fictional narratives of SF&F, a middle I will call the novelized fantastic. While individual stories within the collection may lean heavily toward one aesthetic or another, Singular Visions as a whole embodies the middle ground of the novelized fantastic.