Our SciFi cousins at Eos Books have a roundtable discussion with authors John Crowley, Jeff Ford, James Morrow, and Tim Powers:
It strikes me that fantasy and science fiction collapse as soon as some message becomes evident — our vampires and star-ships instantly become just tokens for the real-world things that the story’s really about. I’ve told this story before, but — once I was on a panel about vampire books, and one woman on the panel said, “Dracula is actually about the plight of 19th century women,” to which I said, “No, it’s about a guy who lives forever by drinking other people’s blood. Don’t take my word for it, check it out.”
