The thesis could be defended that fantasy is significant insofar as it is impure and fails to establish a superordinated maleficient world of its own, causing a grotesque tension between arbitrary supernatural phenomena and the empirical norms they infiltrate. … When fantasy does not make for such a tension between the supernatural and the author’s empirical environment, its monotonous reduction of all possible horizons to Death makes of it just a subliterature of mystification. Commercial lumping of it into the same category as SF is thus a grave disservice and rampantly socio-pathological phenomenon.
—
Darko Suvin, The Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (London 1979), pp. 8-9
