It did its job, ensuring that serious people no longer think there's a single story to tell, a single conceptual breakthrough, a single scenario or set of scenarios which enable particular cadre to float. In spite of Varley and others, I must say that 90 percent of science fiction is still First-World SF, the old kind of stuff, nostalgic writing. I find that intensely admirable. They must somehow become tricksters, bouncing balls, floating buoys. It is perhaps more surprising to think of fantasy as a literature which has come to maturity and is significantly mired in this century.
Fantasy says that the twentieth century is wrong.
Science fiction, on the other hand, says that the twentieth century can be made to work. In fantasy, there is none. I've worked up a four-stage model in the Encyclopedia of Fantasy . Recognition follows, the moment of turning when the story or memory or land is recovered. That world is the world out of which great fantasy novels offer a form of transformation.