At first glance, Dispelling Fantasies seems a fairly straightforward companion volume to Sanchez-Taylor’s 2021 book, Diverse Futures: Science Fiction and Authors of Color. It displays the same qualities of blending analysis with clever, enticing descriptions of the novels and stories it discusses and could very profitably be used as a good source for recommended reads from the last ten to fifteen years. Indeed, I have actually bought several of the novels covered on the strength of Sanchez-Taylor’s analysis. On this level, the book’s ambiguous title could be taken as a clever play on “spells,” which are of course one of the staples of traditional fantasy as the genre is typically understood by Western readerships. This association was so strong in my mind that, despite knowing what “dispel” means, I struggled to process the full implications of the title even after reading the book. Initially, I interpreted it as embodying a promise to dispel some misconceptions about fantasy stemming from Eurocentric bias. However, as I read on and found myself more persuaded by the argument with each successive chapter, I started to think of the book as a call to dispel the very existence of the genre itself, for being too bound up with false ideas and “habits of whiteness”—a term Sanchez-Taylor takes from Helen Young’s Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness (2015).

In her introduction, Sanchez-Taylor discusses different definitions of fantasy by critics including Farah Mendlesohn, John Clute, and Brian Attebery. Referring to the “fuzzy set” theory of the latter, which effectively situates The Lord of the Rings (1955) as the central text of the genre, she notes that

The fuzzy set of fantasy demonstrates how assumptions about what fantasy is (The Lord of the Rings) have caused fantasy critics to deify a mostly white, Western, heterosexual subset of the vast amount of literature that has the potential to be read as fantasy. (p. 4)

We could quibble with this argument in different ways. Indeed, Sanchez-Taylor cites Mendlesohn’s position that, while fantasy has become largely modelled on Tolkien, the work of Mervyn Peake was actually far closer to the centre of the set in the 1950s. Furthermore, it’s possible to read Tolkien in more nuanced ways than as simply reinforcing “Christian hierarchical values” (p. 7). However, as Sanchez-Taylor points out, such nuanced readings are all very well and good—but do we really believe that the vast majority of the readers and watchers of the work of Tolkien, and equivalent figures such as George R. R. Martin, are consuming this product with a sufficient level of critical distance to offset the basic affirmation of white, conservative, patriarchal, heteronormative beliefs that are central to it? The only honest answer to that question is no. And while, as discussed in James Gifford’s A Modernist Fantasy (2018), there are different Western traditions of fantasy—including writers such as Peake, Hope Mirrlees, and others—it is undoubtedly the case that most people do associate the genre with the violent, epic fantasies of Tolkien and Martin.

Therefore, it would be pointless for Sanchez-Taylor simply to offer another alternative tradition of fantasy. Moreover, her decision—as in the earlier book with respect to SF—not to provide an authoritative linear chronological account of fantasy by writers of color is in itself a key means of resisting Eurowestern patriarchal thinking. What she does instead is demonstrate a very different attitude to readers than that found in the traditional academic critical study: Rather than presenting us with a canon, she offers us instead a selection of readings that we are invited to consent to. In other words, there is a clear authorial recognition that Dispelling Fantasies should meet the needs of readers and fan communities of color and not reinforce the hierarchies that are often implicit to even the most radical criticism. One way that the book achieves this goal is by focusing on fiction that replaces the traditional lone heterosexual male hero by “a character of color and/or a gender-nonconforming character” and showing how “these characters, despite their powerful abilities, cannot enact change without kinship and community” (p. 25).

Through providing readings of books by authors including N. K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, R. F. Kuang, Nghi Vo, Tasha Suri, Marlon James, Samuel Delany, Fonda Lee, and others, the aim of Dispelling Fantasies is not to promote diversity as some form of commodity but to present a radically different ideology, moral framework, and understanding of reality to that found in traditional epic fantasy. It is this question of reality that means that Sanchez-Taylor can’t simply set out a more inclusive form of fantasy—because, as she notes, the genre is constructed in accordance with inherent Western assumptions of what reality is: “What is considered ‘fantasy’ in texts written by authors of color can be a slippery definition because the terms ‘real’ and ‘magic’ are often defined by colonizing cultures” (p. 10). More generally, the influential conception, in Clute and John Grant’s Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997), of works in the genre charting a route through a sequence of stages, such as “wrongness,” “thinning,” “return,” and “restoration,” depends in part on agreement on the rightness and fullness of the initial starting place.

It hardly needs saying in 2026 that real-life conceptions of the lost “rightness” of life in Britain or America in the immediate postwar period have led to incredibly damaging fantasies of “restoration” infecting the politics and everyday culture of both countries. The rise of this form of reactionary politics has been mirrored by the rise of film and television fantasy based directly or indirectly on the works of Tolkien and Martin. While the more recent of these shows employ diverse casting to a greater or lesser extent, and may feature some queer and genderqueer characters, they nonetheless broadly adhere to a symbolic model that culminates in the standard climax described by Sanchez-Taylor: “the killing of the ‘Dark Other’ is used as a cathartic restoration of white, conservative, heteronormative beliefs” (p. 20).

The real test of these arguments lies in the readings that Sanchez-Taylor presents across her chapters, which are cleverly named after some of the key values that are most clearly foregrounded by traditional fantasy: “Virtue,” “Envy,” “Patriarchy,” and “Salvation.” For example, in the chapter on “Patriarchy,” which is subtitled “Reimagining Gender Roles in Fantasy,” she includes an extended discussion of Shelley Parker-Chan’s She Who Became the Sun (2021). This is an epic fantasy based on the Chinese legend of Hua Mulan—also the subject of the 1998 Disney film Mulan—perhaps the best known of a number of similar Chinese tales concerning a woman disguising herself as a man to become a soldier before eventually returning to her home town and resuming life as a woman. As Sanchez-Taylor explains, “because these female transgressors were viewed as loyal subjects who only stepped out of their gendered roles due to filial piety, any power that these women accumulated by transgressing becomes voided and depicted as in service to the patriarchy” (p. 89). She argues that what distinguishes Parker-Chan’s retelling is the way that it centres on gender nonconformity to create a “space of queer empowerment” (p. 89). The decision of the main character, Zhu—as implied by the novel’s title, to take over the empire for herself and create a new kind of world—means that the novel does more than just tell a tale of transgression but actively seeks to change our understanding of reality from the conventional view that there are two sexes, members of which behave in biologically determined ways. Furthermore, the fact that Zhu is asexual—as are protagonists of other writers of color, such as Vo and Vaishnavi Patel—allows Parker-Chan to emphasise the importance of connection rather than (hetero)sexual tension in driving narrative events. Because Zhu is not portrayed as heroic or moral by Christian standards but is prepared to lie, cheat, and even kill to achieve her ends, the novel has “the potential to create a new level of gendered self-awareness for the reader as they participate in the dismantling of Zhu’s patriarchal, heteronormative society” (p. 93).

There is a sharp contrast between the way in which She Who Became the Sun, and other texts Sanchez-Taylor discusses by the writers listed above, not only challenge but seek to rewrite completely the norms of hierarchical Western Christian society, and the way in which the novels of, for example, Martin tend overall to uphold them in the name of “historical veracity.” This doesn’t just apply to social organization but also to how everyday facts of life such as sex acts are portrayed. For example, discussing the fact that the central male-female couple in Thea Guanzon’s Hurricane Wars (2023) engage in mutual masturbation rather than penetrative sex, Sanchez-Taylor notes that this choice “places them on equal sexual grounds” (120). In contrast, epic fantasy literature often reflects the patriarchal logic that sex must involve penetration and thereby an implied active-passive, if not downright dominant-submissive, relationship. By arguments such as these, she compiles a strong case for abandoning the category of fantasy, with all its problematic tropes, and replacing it with a different benchmark for considering these types of texts, most of which have only appeared in the last ten to fifteen years.

What we don’t need, however, is some newly coined sub-genre for the purpose of grouping this work. As Sanchez-Taylor makes clear from the outset, authors of color “often write from a range of experiences and identities” and therefore can’t be shoehorned into one homogenous category (p. 18). In this context, she cites Jemisin’s argument that science fiction and fantasy are fundamentally intertwined and that attempts to categorize beyond that are unhelpful. This is obviously true of Jemisin’s Broken Earth series, which plays with the boundaries of science and magic, but also applies equally to works like Parker-Chan’s She Who Became the Sun, which is as ambitious a work of alternate history as any SF classic.

In her conclusion, Sanchez-Taylor discusses how the response of the Sad Puppies to Jemisin in the early 2010s indicates how authors of color can be subjected to harassment when they become the first person of color to achieve certain successes. That argument was settled by the success of Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy over three successive years in the Hugos—a success which could be seen, at least for the meanwhile, as collapsing the distinction between SF and fantasy and inaugurating the establishment of a broader category of SFF that has significantly helped the emergence of more authors of color writing fiction which breaks with patriarchal and heteronormative values, including many of those discussed by Sanchez-Taylor. Overall, therefore, I find that this book makes a compelling case for dispelling fantasy and I recommend both it and the fiction it discusses to readers who want to move on from the outdated norms of the past.