‘Science fiction and fantasy’ is the cover theme of Wet Ink. Not all the contributions adhere to it. Michael Welding’s essay on utopias and dystopias is a good introduction to the theory surrounding literary projections of both idyllic and apocalyptic futures. He notes that, before white settlement, the antipodes was often the subject of fantasy, referring to Robert Paltock’s The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1751), in which a mariner shipwrecked somewhere in the Australian and Antarctic region discovers that the inhabitants can fly. He also jokes that flying was regularly depicted in speculative fiction but that the banning of humour (at airports) is just another case of political realities outstripping the literary imagination.
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