Hahahah, oh MAN now there is a great question!
Well, saying ‘fantasy’ covers a terribly broad area—it’s basically everything that doesn’t otherwise fit into a named literary category. I’ve been reading fantasy/sci-fi literally all my life, if you include fairy tales and mythology in there (and they are its direct antecedents, so I think that’s fair—in fact, you could say fantasy is just an uppity word for ‘fairy tales written since the 1800s’). So, all of the following are fantasy.
Serviceman is my shot at omegaverse, and it has turned out to be surprisingly fun, because I really love stories that screw around with social dynamics and deconstruct assumptions about ‘how life works.’ I love writers like Octavia Butler, Storm Constantine and C J Cherryh, who’re really good at building alien/alternative human psychologies and societies, and getting to try my hand at that myself, even in the little sandbox that is omegaverse, has been really darn amazing.
And OH MAN STEAMPUNK. <3 I will happily nom me some steampunk, oh yes, though sadly I’ve never gotten to write any. Yet.
Buuuuuuuut my absolute favorite is a tie:
The kind of fantasy where the world has magic in its bones and it’s is so much deeper and weirder than we can see. Magical realism, you might call it, but it feels so much older than that to me. I’m talking the magic of names, the magic of weaving words, the magic of blood and bone and earth and stone, where it’s the fabric of life and death, and maybe somebody can throw a fireball but that’s such a shallow way to use the breath of the world. To me, this is the defining characteristic of the fairy tale, and this is Barrow Wight.
And time travel. Oh, time travel. This is a thing I learned about myself in my mid-20s: I have been shaped in a more than minor way by Doctor Who. Memory of television: I can’t have been four yet, because we weren’t living in that house by the time I was four, and I was sitting through the Fourth Doctor’s end credits before being put to bed. I’d already been watching the show before that, because this was an established nightly ritual. All without my realizing, even at that age it wormed its way into my head to shape the things I like, the size of my questions, the span of my imagination…
So, time travel. Set Einstein gently to the side. Blow off the simplistic answer of ‘paradox.’ Give me non-linear causality and alternate realities and tell me what happens if I do travel back in time and change the future so that I live two lives, and tell me what it feels like to be in another time, and how it is to discover that doing laundry by hand is a survival skill, and what it’s like navigating the etiquette and social dynamics of a different time. What does it smell like? What does it taste like? How lonely is it? What does it do to your perceptions of the universe’s underpinnings to be in that position? Man Who Sold the World is my chance to get at…not all, but a lot of these things, plus a few more, which is why it’s one of the stories nearest to my heart.