Science & Tech Quote by Terri Windling

Fantasy prides itself on being “timeless,” but Windling slips a needle under that cozy claim. She starts with a provocation: if fantasy isn’t “about technology,” then technological acceleration shouldn’t matter. It’s the kind of genre-purity argument fans love to make, the insistence that dragons don’t need Wi-Fi. Then she swivels the camera away from the page and onto the paycheck. Technology may not rewrite the medievalism on the surface, but it rewires the labor underneath.

The subtext is a quiet dismantling of the romantic myth of the solitary fantasist. Windling points to the invisible infrastructure of culture: email chains, digital manuscripts, transatlantic scheduling, the frictionless portability of editorial work. The genre can cosplay premodern worlds while being midwifed by thoroughly modern systems. That tension is the real subject, and it lands because it’s personal, almost breezily so: “I get to live in England and work for a New York publisher!” The exclamation isn’t just enthusiasm; it’s a small victory cry about mobility and access.

Context matters here: fantasy’s boom years tracked with the internet’s maturation, when niche communities became global markets and editorial pipelines stopped being geographically local. Windling’s line also hints at who benefits. Remote work sounds liberating, but it’s also a privilege shaped by passports, time zones, and the economies of big publishing hubs. The quote works because it doesn’t sermonize; it lets one bright, practical detail expose the bigger truth: even genres devoted to escaping modernity are built inside it.