Brian Attebery

Attebery was born in December 1951,^[1][2] and received a doctorate in American Civilization from Brown University in 1979.^[3] He is professor of English at Idaho State University, and the editor of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts.^[1] He is known for his non-fiction works on fantasy literature, such as the 1980 book The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature: From Irving to Le Guin and the 1992 book Strategies of Fantasy. Attebery suggests that fantasy is a "fuzzy set" with no easily discernible boundaries, in contrast to the genre of science fiction.^[4] Critic John Clute has praised the book as displaying "very considerable [...] critical acumen".^[4]

He retired from Idaho State University in April 2022 and was named an emeritus professor in the Department of English and Philosophy.^[5]

In 2022 Brian Attebery won the Mythopoeic Award (given by the Mythopeic Society) for his book Fantasy: How it Works (OUP).^[6]

Attebery is the recipient of the 1993 IAFA Award for Distinguished Scholarship, and the 2009 Pilgrim Award for lifetime contribution to SF and fantasy scholarship.^[7]

He has won the Mythopoeic Award and World Fantasy Award for individual works of nonfiction, as detailed in the following table.

• "Fairest", Strange Horizons (September 11, 2006)

• The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature: From Irving to Le Guin (1980)
• Strategies of Fantasy (1992)
• Decoding Gender in Science Fiction (2002)
• Parabolas of Science Fiction (2013) editor with Veronica Hollinger
• Stories about Stories: Fantasy & the Remaking of Myth (2014)
• Fantasy: How It Works (2022)

• The Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960–1990 (1993) editor with Ursula K. Le Guin
• Reading Narrative Fiction (1993) editor; written by Seymour Chatman
• Le Guin: Hainish Novels and Stories, Volume 1 (2017) editor, Library of America
• Le Guin: Hainish Novels and Stories, Volume 2 (2017) editor, Library of America

• Fantasy as an Anti-Utopian Mode (1986)
• Women's Coming of Age in Fantasy (1987)
• Science Fantasy and Myth (1987)
• Tolkien, Crowley, and Postmodernism (1990)
• Fantasy and the Narrative Transaction (1992)
• Godmaking in the Heartland: The Backgrounds of Orson Scott Card's American Fantasy (1992)
• Response to John Kessel's "The Brother from Another Planet" (1993)
• Letter (NYRSF, May 1993) (1993)
• Review: Peake Studies by G. Peter Wilnnington (1994)
• The 1995 James Tiptree, Jr Memorial Award Shortlist (1995) with Ellen Kushner and Pat Murphy and Susanna J. Sturgis and Lucy Sussex
• The Politics (If Any) of Fantasy (1995)
• The Closing of the Final Frontier: Science Fiction After 1960 (1995)
• Androgyny and Difference in Science Fiction (1997)
• Science Fiction and the Gender of Knowledge (2000)
• Myth and History: Molly Gloss's Wild Life and Alan Garner's Strandloper (2001)
• "But Aren't Those Just... You Know, Metaphors?": Postmodern Figuration in the Science Fiction of James Morrow and Gwyneth Jones (2002)
• The Magazine Era: 1926–1960 (2003)
• Science Fiction, Parables, and Parabolas (2005)
• High Church versus Broad Church: Christian Myth in George MacDonald and C. S. Lewis (2005)
• The Conquest of Gernsback: Leslie F. Stone and the Subversion of Science Fiction Troupes (2006)
• Special Section (Extrapolation, Spring 2009) (2009)
• C. L. Moore (1911–87) (2009)
• The Nobies' Story (2010)
• Science Fiction Parabolas: Jazz, Geometry, and Generation Starships (2013)
• The Fantastic (2014)
• Introduction: Messages from an Alternate Reality (2020)

• Brian Attebery at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Brian Attebery at The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

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