If Stewards of the Flame won a 2008 bronze IPPY medal, why isn listed among the science fiction IPPY award winners for that year?
Because it won in the Visionary Fiction category. According to one website I stumbled across, “Visionary fiction is fiction in which the expansion of the human mind drives the plot.” It states, “Visionary fiction is not science fiction, yet if a skeptic needs scientific proof of the reality of the visionary landscape, it can be connected to the new neural sciences — neuro-biology, neuro-psychology, neuro-physics. All visionary fiction is driven by new and uncanny experiences (mystical, spiritual and paranormal) in the neural web. The new sciences have shown us over the last three decades how vast and limitless is the increasing power of the human mind. As in so many eras of human life, where our science goes our literature follows. A new genre is developing, one that parallels the new neural sciences, and helps to chart the vastly uncharted human mind.” This description excited me because I thought I’d at last found a genre into which my novel might fit; certainly it deals with some o
