A convenient shorthand term employed and promoted by John Clute to describe the armamentarium of the fantastic in literature as a whole, encompassing science fiction, Fantasy, fantastic horror and their various subgenres; (see also Equipoise; Horror in SF). The term has long been used in Czech, other Eastern European and Russian discussion of genre; it is the title of Bulgaria's first sf magazine (formerly known as F.E.P.) and, as Fantastyka (which see) of Poland's. Clute discusses the term in his Pardon This Intrusion: Fantastika in the World Storm (coll 2011), where he advocates the use of the term primarily to describe works of the fantastic after about 1800, when the genres for which it serves as an umbrella began to take on conscious form, and began tentatively to use the planet itself (past, present and particularly the future) as a default arena (> Ruins and Futurity). [JC/DRL]
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