Department of English

Patricia McKillip’s works The Book of Atrix Wolfe, In the Forests of Serre, and “The Fellowship of the Dragon” - the first two of which are novels, the last being a short story - all demonstrate one of fantasy’s inherent tensions: the negotiation of certainty and uncertainty, of real and make-believe. McKillip shows us that fantasy can make important interventions in how we think of reality, and not simply by reflecting our world in metaphor or allegory. Not only does she make us question the parameters defining fantasy literature, she complicates our understanding of the definition of fantasy entirely. In the way she constructs layers of reality within her fantasy worlds, McKillip raises questions about our own reality. By de-hierarchizing what we would think of as real and fake worlds, McKillip’s work ponders what it means to be “real” and also what it means to be “possible.” McKillip’s works show how formula can be combined with subtle experimentation to pull on the power of convention while also introducing ambiguity, revealing what can be done within the confines of (or rather, the freedoms afforded by) the generic form in which she works. She demonstrates that story is the most important rule of fantasy, but in the end, it is less a rule and more of an outlook on reality.