Life & Wisdom Quote by Sarah Zettel

“Booming” is a deliberately unromantic word for a supposedly escapist mode. Sarah Zettel isn’t talking about enchanted forests; she’s talking about an industry graph. That choice matters. It signals a writer watching fantasy shift from niche pleasure to cultural infrastructure, where the genre isn’t just tolerated but bankable. The “of course” is the quiet wink: we all know why it’s booming. Franchises, streaming adaptations, and an internet-fueled fandom economy have made dragons as dependable as detectives.

But the sharper move is the second clause: fantasy “stretch[ing] its range.” Zettel frames growth not as louder spectacle but as a widening toolkit. Subtext: fantasy is escaping its old marketing corral - pseudo-medieval settings, hero’s journeys, familiar myth scaffolding - and annexing new subjects and tones. It’s a claim about legitimacy, but not the dusty “is this literature?” kind. It’s about capacity. Fantasy can be political without cosplay, intimate without shrinking into “romantasy,” formally inventive without being exiled to the experimental shelf.

The phrasing is cautious - “beginning to,” “I think” - which reads less like hedging and more like professional realism. Genres don’t evolve in manifestos; they evolve as editors acquire riskier books, as readers reward hybridity, as marginalized voices remake the canon from the inside. Zettel’s intent is to register a turning point: fantasy’s commercial surge is now underwriting its artistic diversification. The boom, in other words, isn’t just volume. It’s leverage.