"The Celebration of the Fantastic" reaffirms the wide range and validity of the subject, treatment, and approach that the fantastic demands. Twenty-five essays, selected from among the more than 230 presented at the Tenth Anniversary Conference of the IAFA, consider writers as diverse as Stephen King, Doris Lessing, Rudyard Kipling, Loren Eiseley, Mary Stewart, Bernard Malamud, Orson Scott Card, Toni Morrison, Henry James, and Ray Bradbury as well as television personalities, film directors, and German and Hungarian visual artists. Also included are essays on science fiction writers Robert Silverberg, Joe Haldeman, and Greg Bear. Some of the more provocative work is on "Feminist Fantasy and Open Structure", "The Greatest Fantasy on Earth - the Superweapon in Fiction and Fact", "Virtual Space and Its boundaries in Science Fiction Film and Television", "The Fantastic in German Democratic Republic Literature", "Csontavary - The Painter of the Sun's Path" and "The Shaman in Modern Fantasy".
The essays illustrate the essential theme of the fantastic - the testing of the limits of civilization and the questioning of commonly accepted values and ideas as writers and artists explore the hidden and the repressed.