writing SF, labeled as such) but Kazuo Ishiguro (who did not); consider Doris Lessing's Nobel Prize. And yet these are troubling times for the genre, too: changes in publishing make it harder for new SF writers to earn a living, even as niche presses and Web-based journals make it easier for them to distribute their work.1 We hear claims that SF has lost its reason for being, because "mainstream" authors appropriate its techniques, or because the pace of real technological change has made SF obsolete.2 Within the academy, times are both good and bad too. SF has never seemed more important to critics and scholars from other fields: