Well-known (and highly regarded, and justly so) fantasy author Brandon Sanderson has a long talk on YouTube about epic fantasy and how J. R. R. Tolkien created it with The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings. (It’s the 2026 Tolkien Lecture at Oxford Town Hall, England, and it’s well worth the listen, if you are interested in epic fantasy and Tolkien’s works.) Early in his talk, while defining what fantasy is, he touches upon the distinction between fantasy and science fiction. One of his criteria is that science fiction has to be plausible, while fantasy must be in some respect impossible.

It’s not a bad distinction. (Although I’m not certain it is as clear as Sanderson makes it; but for now, that’s neither here nor there.) But let’s talk about this a little more.

There’s an argument that fantasy and science fiction are distinct genres, and an argument that they are subgenres of one. I’m not going to get into that right now. It’s not important for our purposes. But let’s start with recapping the beginnings of science fiction, generally attributed to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as the founding work of the genre, then going on to Verne and Wells, among others. And then we have the explosion of the Gernsback pulp era and the “Golden Age” of SF.

Throughout this evolution, but particularly during the pulp era, SF was almost universally regarded as fluff, trash, rubbish, escapist ripping yarns with no redeeming social value, not worthy of any serious comment or consideration. Since then, as SF authors like Ursula K. LeGuin and Vernor Vinge (and more recently Elizabeth Moon and R. F. Kuang, for example) have progressively brought up socially and culturally important issues in their writing, SF has gained a measure of often-grudging respect.

But fantasy is still overwhelmingly regarded as empty fluff.

Why? Does it have to be this way?

To be fair, there is an awful lot of utter drivel out there, in both genres (or subgenres, if you prefer). But think about this proposition for a moment: Fiction—ALL fiction—is a tool. You can use that tool just for the enjoyment of using the tool, to do nothing deeper than tell an entertaining story. Or you can use the tool to build an edifice that carries a message, asks a question that should be, if not directly answered, then at least thought about, with the hope of getting closer to an answer, or even just a way of thinking about the question and its implications. Consider Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1973 short story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, built upon a question first committed to literature by Fyodor Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov:

I challenge you: let’s assume that you were called upon to build the edifice of human destiny so that men would finally be happy and would find peace and tranquility. If you knew that, in order to attain this, you would have to torture just one single creature, let’s say the little girl who beat her chest so desperately in the outhouse, and that on her unavenged tears you could build that edifice, would you agree to do it?

Does the core issue raised in The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas have to be science fiction?

Clearly not, because The Brothers Karamazov is not science fiction.

Does it have to be fiction?

Also clearly not, given that philosopher and psychologist William James addressed it in his 1891 essay The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life.

If it doesn’t even have to be fiction… then why can’t it be fantasy?

For that matter, IS The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas science fiction, or is it actually fantasy in the first place?

And does that matter?

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas asks the same question whether you shelve it as SF or as fantasy. What is the important thing about Omelas? I argue that it is the manner in which it asks that question approachably. Omelas is a short story, much more approachable, much more generally readable, than Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, much less James’ essay, which most people have never even heard of. It was even repackaged as a Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode.

Can a fantasy novel be simply a ripping yarn with no purpose beyond entertainment? Of course it can. So can an SF novel—or cyberpunk, or general fiction, or a historical romance.

But can it ask a question that matters? Of course it can—just like all of the others. Whether you fit a drawr to a cabinet using wood chisels and a sanding block, or you use a router and an orbital sander, if the work is of equal quality, the drawer fits the same. As long as the tool is fit for the job, the deciding factor is the quality and competence of the work.

And this is true of fiction, as well. Some questions are uniquely suited to particular genres of fiction. It’s hard, for example, to talk about the effects upon social structure of relativistic time dilation in anything but an SF novel. Cyberpunk is particularly well tuned for discussing the impact of certain decisions about how we deploy technology and how we let it shape our culture. But questions about, for example, race, gender identity, inequality? We can raise those in SF, or in fantasy, or in a historical novel, or in general fiction, or… any genre fit for the task. George Orwell addressed deep political/sociological questions in an allegorical novel about barnyard animals. “All pigs are equal, except some are more equal than others.”

So no. No genre is necessarily empty fluff, unless that’s what you chose to write. Regardless of genre, a novel carries exactly as much, or as little, deep meaning as you chose to build into it. Any novel can be just a ripping yarn with no purpose beyond entertainment. Or it can carry a message, ask a question, shine a light into a dark corner. (Thomas M. Disch’s On Wings Of Song left me feeling unclean, soiled. And, I suspect, it was meant to.)

It’s all up to how you choose to use the tool.

What am I working on right now?

Well, several things, in fact. The furthest along at this time is Sparks and Tinder, a volume of short stories set in the alternate world of Fireborn, featuring both familiar characters and new ones you haven't yet met, and spanning close to two thousand years. It currently has six completed stories, and a seventh is in progress; I hope to have ten to twelve by the time I'm done with it.

Also progressing well is Soul Quest, a standalone novel set in the same world as Godthief, but not a sequel to it and sharing no characters with it. (I do have an idea for a Godthief sequel, but haven't begun it yet. I need to flesh out the idea more before I start writing it.) Soul Quest expands upon the pantheon of Godthief's world, introducing us to several more of its nineteen [remaining] gods. Soul Quest is currently in its fourth chapter.

Started, but not progressed very far yet, still in its introduction really, Across The Ocean Of Stars is a sequel to the Stardock Trilogy. Its events begin a couple of years after the peaceful resolution of the Khreetan Crisis. All is not well on Earth… but most of its events take place further from Earth than we have yet seen.

And, for something completely different, I'm revisiting Symbiosis, a standalone cyberpunk novel that I first started writing over thirty years ago. Symbiosis spent most of those thirty years metaphorically gathering dust on a shelf… and yet I never completely forgot it. Now, I think I have the tools to complete it.

Obviously none of these are going to be completed tomorrow. But rest assured I am working on them as much as time and inspiration permit, and will have them finished as soon as I can. Expect Sparks and Tinder and Soul Quest first.

To the anonymous reader who spotted four typos in A Line In The Stars and submitted them as corrections via Kindle:

Why are there so many updates on newly released eBooks?

The short version is, because the conversion process from Open Document Format to EPUB3 is imperfect and takes a lot of manual work. The conversion tries to change all double spaces to single, which means I have to manually change them back.

Yes, I am aware that style guides say that only a single space between sentences is correct. I maintain that the style guides are wrong. Consider the following fragment:

“[...] were you there anyway?” John said, [...]

Now, tell me: Is that all part of one continuing sentence, or is it the end of one and the beginning of the next?

With only a single space, you can’t tell, can you?

It’s not just that a double space after a period looks better on the page and is easier to read. It’s also that a single space is AMBIGUOUS. Replacing double spaces with single THROWS AWAY METADATA that can be important to meaning.

I’m a writer. Details matter.

I auto-re-insert as many as I can. However, there are many possible patterns, and ultimately it’s not feasible to rely solely on search and replace, it REQUIRES manual reading and fixing. And re-reading, and re-reading. Sometimes I have to go through the book two or three times before I’m confident I’ve caught all of them. Some errors escape me for more than a year. I recently spotted — and corrected — an error in A Line In The Stars, released in October 2024, in a line that said ‘destroyers’ where it sould have said ‘cruisers’.

And that is why there are updates. Every time a book updates after publication, it means that I have found and corrected at least one error.

Because you should have an error-free book, and you shouldn’t have to wait a year to get the book.

A quick note to say that I have just seen the almost final draft of the cover art for my upcoming novel In Flux. This cover artwork is by C.J Evelyn, and it is superb. I'm looking forward to being able to show off the finished version soon.

For reasons (one assumes) of readability (and not, one hopes, simple control-freakishness), Amazon Kindle Desktop Publishing overrides any fonts specified in an eBook, instead displaying all books in whatever preferred reading font face the Kindle user has chosen.

Now there are sound reasons to do that. I get it. Really I do. Some people pick ghastly text fonts. I have a particular hatred for Times New Roman, in my opinion one of the most horrible text faces ever designed, with its primary intention that of remaining more or less readable while jamming as many characters as possible onto a fixed-size page. I have my Kindle reader app set to one of the cleanest available (within Kindle, that is) sans-serif fonts. (I detest Roman serifs. They're ugly.)

But come on, KDP. There are times when a writer wants to set off a small amount of text in a different font for a specific creative effect. Godthief has a preface containing the text of the Prophecy of Tendarrion, and a brief excerpt from a discussion of prophecy by Sage Ryanon of Krent, both in appropriate font faces.

Kindle smashes them both flat.

The fourth chapter of my current work-in-progress contains the text of a brief handwritten letter. I went to a great deal of trouble to find and select a freely-licensed, clean, readable script font that looks like an elegant copperplate hand. I went to the trouble of finding out how to properly embed a font into an EPUB3 eBook, including figuring out a widespread documentation error. (See my previous post.)

To no avail. Kindle smashes them flat.

SUPPOSEDLY, Kindle honors and preserves embedded custom fonts in headings.

No, it doesn't. Not unless there is some undocumented secret to what Kindle will acknowledge as a heading. Certainly using an XHTML heading tag doesn't work.

Readability is important. But so is the artist's, or writer's, intention. Nobody would say that it was acceptable for Kindle to smash all book covers down to a plain white page with the title in black.

And it's not acceptable for Kindle to smash custom fonts used in strictly limited places for specific effect, either.

It's an old béte noire of Kindle publishing that Kindle makes it difficult to specify your own fonts. There are arguably sound reasons for this; it allows readers to make the decision of what (Kindle supported) font they find most readable for books.

Nevertheless, sometimes you want to override a font or force a specific font to produce a specific visual effect.

This is actually possible. I am told that even if done correctly, Kindle will sometimes still strip out custom fonts. But it will mostly work, as long as you do it right.

First, choose the right font type. OpenType (fontname.otf) is asserted to be best supported in EPUB3, followed by TrueType (fontname.ttf). You probably should not even try to use Adobe Type 1 fonts. And make sure that either you choose a freely licensed font, or you have a valid license to use it.

Second, your font needs to be embedded in your EPUB3 file. Try putting it under OEBPS/Fonts, and don't forget to add it to the manifest (content.opf):

<item id="oldlondon_otf" href="Fonts/oldlondon.otf" media-type="font/otf"/>

And here lies the crucial “gotcha”. I will not say all of the documentation, but at least, all of the reference CSS documentation that I have found and read says that the proper media-type to declare for an OpenType font is application/opentype.

This is outright WRONG. The correct media-type, the one that ACTUALLY WORKS, is font/otf.

Third, your CSS stylesheet must contain a correctly formatted @font-face record, like this one:

@font-face {
   font-family: "OldLondon";
   src: url(../Fonts/oldlondon.otf);
}

And then finally, when you use the font, you must reference that font-family:

.prophecy {
   font-family: "OldLondon", cursive;
   font-style: italic;
}

And that SHOULD work.

•••••

Note that while I observe here that OpenType (fontname.otf) is asserted to be the best supported vector font type in EPUB3, I have to date ONLY managed to get font embedding to work properly in a Kindle book using TrueType fonts. It is likely that the Amazon documentation that suggests OpenType is the best choice is either outdated or flat-out wrong.

Victory! After being served with a DMCA takedown demand by the intellectuAl property lawyer I retained, TikTok has finally decided they should pay attention to my impersonation-account complaint, found the offending account to be in violation of their impersonation policy, and taken it down.

My thanks go out to both said attorney, and to Coach Brent, the TikTok user who reported the impersonator to me.

A word of thanks to Scottish reader Iain Muir, who entirely correctly pointed out that I incorrectly described the late, great Iain M. Banks in Bearing Gifts as an English SF writer. He is of course a Scot. There is a difference, and details matter.

(Yes, I said is, not was. I maintain that Iain M. Banks did not die, he SUBLIMED. If you don't know what I mean by that, then you should read his books — in particular, The Hydrogen Sonata.)

I have located and corrected the error, and the correction is going live at this very moment, both for the eBook and the print edition.

Lessons learned today:

There are occasionally reasons for saving an ODT document in DOCX. Principally if you need to send it to someone who is unable to, or for other reasons does not, use ODT, or when using pandoc to export to EPUB. (As previously mentioned, it turns out that LibreOffice's EPUB export is horribly broken, because it is built on top of a piece of alpha-quality abandonware called libepubgen. It also transpires that pandoc's ODT reader plugin is also badly broken. The problem can be worked around by using LibreOffice to save the document as DOCX, then using pandoc to convert from DOCX to EPUB, and then running the EPUB through Sigil or Calibre for fix-up.)

However, if you then accidentally try to open that DOCX in LibreOffice for further work, edit it, and try to save back to ODT, the styles in the document will end up HORRIBLY buggered in bizarrely incomprehensible ways, and you'll be going crazy trying to figure out what went wrong.

So maybe don't do that.