The world is not enough

This is for muggles. The ones whose eyebrows disappear into orbit around Tau Ceti if you label SF&F as literature (don''t call it sci-fi, please. That''s as antiquated as hi-fi). This is also a Cinderella story. Long before J K Rowling found the glass slipper, and made the crossover from fantasy to mainstream with her seamless merging of the classic children''s school story with the classic sword-and-sorcery story, there was this genre sitting in the ashes.Looked down on by the "mainstream", it was for kids, geeks, and the occasional weirdo.
SF&F has traditionally never received an invite to the literary ball. But instead of waiting around for a fairy godmother, it went ahead and created its own parallel universe; spawned sub-genres like comedy, satire, crime, romance, historical, thrillers, political, and social commentary. So shucks to Nobels and Bookers. For those in the know, a Hugo or a Nebula is as prestigious. For those in the know, it''s what we call ''the literature of ideas''. In the pre-world war years, SF believed that science would eventually catch up with it. Science hasn''t: no anti-gravity, no spaceship and sun empire. But society and politics have. Clash of civilizations, euthanasia, artificial intelligence, gay marriage, flat worlds. Oh yes!
Go read Dune, which is almost entirely about the impact of an Islamic-type messiah on a backward, feudal society in a desert landscape. Did anyone say Taliban? Not then. SF writers have logically and imaginatively taken socio-political trends to their often illogical conclusions.
Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 long before George Bush discovered Iraq or R R Patil discovered dance bars. In 1969, Ursula Le Guin wrote The Left Hand of Darkness, even then considered a classic in the right circles. If you don''t ''get'' gay marriages, or the line between male bonding and homosexuality, a stint on the planet Winter may help. Connie Willis takes the feminist movement through a hilarious sub-routine with her Even the Queen, where a mother and two grandmothers ''freed'' from menstruation thanks to science try to convince their rebellious grand-daughter that reversing the biological change is taking feminism too far. Catherine Asaro looks at a woman-dominated society through the eyes of the ''weaker'' male sex.
Isaac Asimov is about the only name most people have heard of—he used up a lifetime''s scientific and academic reputation to gain respectability and dignity for his first love, SF.
Muggles, like muggles, refuse to see the magic in the pages around them. For years—through the ''30s to the ''70s—the best work in SF and fantasy was published in shortlived magazines, with the rare oddball publisher like Del Rey and Tor risking their pages for a dream. The best work is still published in magazines, mostly on the net and more oddball publishers are signing up. And it''s years before they make it to Indian bookshelves, where English fiction trends are dictated by the same junta who can''t tell a Calcutta Chromosome from a Castafiore Emerald.
Ask Salman Rushdie. His first book, Grimus, totally F&SF, and his best according to some, sank without a trace. He had the good sense to set the magic of Midnight''s Children in a strong cultural-political-historical milieu, instead of putting his characters in another space-time dimension. If he''d left it at that one, he may not have had to spend a decade underground—the kind of people who issue fatwas usually don''t read SF.
Like Cinderella, the prince who ''rediscovered'' SF was Hollywood. By the way, this would be a good time to bone up on C S Lewis and Douglas Adams. Hollywood is making movies on Hitchiker''s and Chronicles of Narnia. If you''d rather ''wait for the movie'', you can spend your time with a book on how to repair an automobile in the Namibian desert. Me, I got a ticket to a parallel universe, where unicorns and vampires dance with cyborgs and quasars. See you some other space-time.