Science & Tech Quote by Terri Windling

Windling’s line is a quiet history lesson with a grin tucked inside it: “adult fantasy” didn’t arrive as a genre so much as it was smuggled in under science fiction’s trench coat. The business she’s describing isn’t hostile so much as administratively baffled. Publishers weren’t debating the artistic merits of fantasy for grown-ups; they were staring at spreadsheets and shelving categories, trying to decide which bin could absorb the weird stuff without confusing the sales force.

The intent is twofold. First, she’s staking a claim for a cohort of creators who worked before today’s neat genre infrastructure. Second, she’s exposing how markets manufacture “common sense.” Adult readers clearly existed, and fantasies for them existed, but the industry’s vocabulary lagged behind the audience’s appetite. If a thing can’t be easily named, it can’t be easily marketed; if it can’t be marketed, it’s treated as marginal. So fantasy gets treated like a spice, “a little bit” sprinkled into the respectable main dish of science fiction, which had already built a distribution pipeline and a critical apparatus.

The subtext lands sharply for anyone watching current genre cycles: categories aren’t neutral; they’re power. They determine advances, cover design, review attention, where books are placed in stores, and which stories get normalized. Windling, an artist who’s also been a key tastemaker in the field, is pointing at the moment before “adult fantasy” became a brand. The irony is that fantasy’s supposed escapism is, here, a story about gatekeeping by filing system.