The South and Science Fiction. The South has played a strong role in American fantasy, but little in science fiction.
Southern settings seem, in the mind's eye, to have an almost automatic fantastic glaze.
We readily call up images of brooding purple ruins, green corpses, melancholy figures shrouding a dread secret that reeks of musty shadows. This dominance of fantasy is a bit curious, considering that one of the distinctive inventions of twentieth century American literature has been modern science fiction, a jury- rigged genre put together in the same era when the South was undergoing its own great cultural renaissance. But science fiction got nothing from the Southern Renaissance. That genre was and is dominated by what my grandmother termed Nawth'n Cult'ral Imperialism. The region's response to battle, defeat, and shaky Reconstruction spawned a myth-history which ennobled the great catastrophe.