My contention here is not about genre boundaries; it is about exploding them.

If you were to ask the hypothetical person in the street what fantasy fiction is, there is a good chance that they will say it is stories about dragons and wizards. That’s not a bad first pass. After all, the two most famous fantasy worlds – George Martin’s Westeros and JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth – do fit the bill. Westeros is famous for its dragons, and Middle Earth for a wizard. But there are forms of fantasy that do not fit this definition.