Walled gardens

Fandom often has some significant blinders when it comes to adopting or authors and books

Walled gardens
Image: Andrew Liptak

I recently picked up the March / April issue of Asimov's Science Fiction. I really need to resubscribe to it: this was the magazine that I tore through when I was discovering science fiction, and some of those stories still really resonate with me. This one has a killer lineup of authors: Paul McAuley, Ray Nayler, Sam J. Miller, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Greg Egan, and more.

I just started reading it, but what caught my eye in this issue after that TOC was James Patrick Kelley's column, in which he talked a bit about Michael Crichton, which opened with "I wonder why Michael Crichton never got proper credit for his influence on science fiction. I suppose one reason is that, despite his impact on our genre, he was an outsider – never one of our community... Crichton probably did more than any ingle member of SFWA to thrust science fiction into the popular culture of the last century."

Boundary lines
Is that *really* science fiction?

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