What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy

by Jo Walton

In a science fiction novel, the world is a character, and often the most important character. In a mainstream novel, the world is implicitly our world, and the characters are the world.

After all, there’s a definition of tragedy as a story where you know the end.

You can tell different stories about human nature when you can compare it to android nature, or alien nature. You can examine it in different ways when you can write about people living for two hundred years, or being relativistically separated, or under a curse. You have more colours for your palette, more lights to illuminate your scene.