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Saladin Ahmed at Salon on race and Game of Thrones:

But now, as our beloved genre finds its way into “normal” people’s hearts and minds, fantasy fans are increasingly confronted with an inversion of this notion – a question that I, as an Arab-American fantasy fanatic, have been wrangling with for years: If the mainstream doesn’t get fantasy, just how well does epic fantasy, with its lily-white heroes, get the multicultural real world of 21st-century America? As some of the most popular works in the genre’s history – works that shed any pretension of being children’s fare – A Song of Ice and Fire and its wonderful TV spawn are particularly useful springboards for this question.



Niall Harrison is an independent critic based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. He is a former editor of Strange Horizons, and his writing has also appeared in The New York Review of Science FictionFoundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, The Los Angeles Review of Books and others. He has been a judge for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and a Guest of Honor at the 2023 British National Science Fiction Convention. His collection All These Worlds: Reviews and Essays is available from Briardene Books.
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25 Mar 2024

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