In Other World: SF and the Human Imagination By Margaret Atwood

Atwood has long been accused of literary elitism for refusing to align herself with the SF brigade.

This book, while being a rejoinder to her critics, is much more than that. A personal history of reading fantasy and SF as a child (she wasn't much interested in the "creepily ultra-normal characters" in Dick and Jane) is melded together with literary analysis of superheroes and dystopias, and she makes a nonsense of the clean dividing lines we give genre fiction by placing SF into a tradition that harks back to Greek myth.