Children's fantasy is children's literature with fantasy elements: fantasy intended for young readers. It may also mean fantasy read by children, regardless of the intended audience.
Zenna Chlarson Henderson was an American elementary school teacher and science fiction and fantasy author. Her first story was published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1951. Her work is cited as pre-feminist, often featuring middle-aged women, children, and their relationships, but with stereotyped gender roles. Many of her stories center around human aliens called "The People", who have special powers. Henderson was nominated for a Hugo Award in 1959 for her novelette Captivity. Science fiction authors Lois McMaster Bujold, Orson Scott Card, Connie Willis, Dale Bailey, and Kathy Tyers have cited her as an influence on their work.
The Mythopoeic Awards for literature and literary studies are given annually for outstanding works in the fields of myth, fantasy, and the scholarly study of these areas. Established by the Mythopoeic Society in 1971, the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award is given for "fiction in the spirit of the Inklings", and the Scholarship Award for non-fiction work. The award is a statuette of a seated lion, with a plaque on the base. It has drawn resemblance to, and is often called, the "Aslan".
Patricia Anne McKillip was an American author of fantasy and science fiction. She wrote predominantly standalone fantasy novels and has been called "one of the most accomplished prose stylists in the fantasy genre". Her work won many awards, including the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2008.
Elements of the supernatural and the fantastic were an element of literature from its beginning. The modern fantasy genre is distinguished from tales and folklore which contain fantastic elements, first by the acknowledged fictitious nature of the work, and second by the naming of an author. Authors like George MacDonald (1824–1905) created the first explicitly fantastic works.
Edward Frederick James is a British scholar of medieval history and science fiction. He is Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at University College, Dublin. James received the Hugo Award for his non-fiction book The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, and the Pilgrim Award for lifetime contribution to SF and fantasy scholarship.
Mythago Wood is a fantasy novel by British writer Robert Holdstock, published in the United Kingdom in 1984. Mythago Wood is set in Herefordshire, England, in and around a stand of ancient woodland, known as Ryhope Wood. The story involves the internally estranged members of the Huxley family, particularly Stephen Huxley, and his experiences with the enigmatic forest and its magical inhabitants. The conception began as a short story written for the 1979 Milford Writer's Workshop; a novella of the same name appeared in the September 1981 edition of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
Andrew M. Butler is a British academic who teaches film, media and cultural studies at Canterbury Christ Church University. He is a former editor of Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association, and was membership secretary of the Science Fiction Foundation. He is a former Arthur C. Clarke Award judge and is now a member of the Serendip Foundation which administers the award.
Science fiction studies is the common name for the academic discipline that studies and researches the history, culture, and works of science fiction and, more broadly, speculative fiction.
The IAFA William L. Crawford Fantasy Award is a literary award given to a writer whose first fantasy book was published during the preceding calendar year. It's one of several awards presented by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA) and is presented at the International Conference of the Fantast in the Arts each March in Orlando.
Fantasy is a genre of speculative fiction which involves themes of the supernatural, magic, and imaginary worlds and creatures.
Greer Ilene Gilman is an American author of fantasy stories.
A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine was an American pulp magazine which published five issues from December 1949 to October 1950. It took its name from fantasy writer A. Merritt, who had died in 1943, and it aimed to capitalize on Merritt's popularity. It was published by Popular Publications, alternating months with Fantastic Novels, another title of theirs. It may have been edited by Mary Gnaedinger, who also edited Fantastic Novels and Famous Fantastic Mysteries. It was a companion to Famous Fantastic Mysteries, and like that magazine mostly reprinted science-fiction and fantasy classics from earlier decades.
This is a timeline of science fiction as a literary tradition. While the date of the start of science fiction is debated, this list includes a range of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance-era precursors and proto-science fiction as well, as long as these examples include typical science fiction themes and topoi such as travel to outer space and encounter with alien life-forms.
A time slip is a plot device in fantasy and science fiction in which a person, or group of people, seem to accidentally travel through time by unknown means, or by a means unknown to the character(s).
Science-fiction and fantasy magazines began to be published in the United States in the 1920s. Stories with science-fiction themes had been appearing for decades in pulp magazines such as Argosy, but there were no magazines that specialized in a single genre until 1915, when Street & Smith, one of the major pulp publishers, brought out Detective Story Magazine. The first magazine to focus solely on fantasy and horror was Weird Tales, which was launched in 1923, and established itself as the leading weird fiction magazine over the next two decades; writers such as H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard became regular contributors. In 1926 Weird Tales was joined by Amazing Stories, published by Hugo Gernsback; Amazing printed only science fiction, and no fantasy. Gernsback included a letter column in Amazing Stories, and this led to the creation of organized science-fiction fandom, as fans contacted each other using the addresses published with the letters. Gernsback wanted the fiction he printed to be scientifically accurate, and educational, as well as entertaining, but found it difficult to obtain stories that met his goals; he printed "The Moon Pool" by Abraham Merritt in 1927, despite it being completely unscientific. Gernsback lost control of Amazing Stories in 1929, but quickly started several new magazines. Wonder Stories, one of Gernsback's titles, was edited by David Lasser, who worked to improve the quality of the fiction he received. Another early competitor was Astounding Stories of Super-Science, which appeared in 1930, edited by Harry Bates, but Bates printed only the most basic adventure stories with minimal scientific content, and little of the material from his era is now remembered.
Judith Clute is a Canadian painter, graphic designer, print-maker, and illustrator who has created cover art and illustrations for a number of well-known science fiction authors and magazines. Clute has British citizenship and works in London. She is also a tour guide with the Original London Walks.
Children's Fantasy Literature: An Introduction is a reference work by American author Michael Levy and British author Farah Mendlesohn, published in 2016 by Cambridge University Press. It follows the history of fantasy read by children over a period of 500 years. Events covered in the book include the collection of folk tales in the 16th century, the impact of world wars on British fantasy and the American response, and the emergence of modern children's and young adult fantasy.
Michael M. Levy was an American writer, critic and professor of English and philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Stout. He was known for his scholarly contributions to speculative fiction and children's literature, and for his book reviews in a variety of literary magazines and journals. His work as author includes chapters in the Cambridge Companion and Routledge Companion to science fiction. Levy also wrote Children's Fantasy Literature: An Introduction, the first work on the 500-year history of the genre, in collaboration with Farah Mendlesohn.
The year 1950 was marked, in science fiction, by the following events.
