Are science fiction and fantasy just idle entertainment, or is it possible to think seriously about fantastic literature?

In my quest for weird I have arrived at the half-way point. I'm neck deep in the collective imagination of thousands of self-published writers, and working hard to separate the good from the bad and the great from the good. So what better time to take a step back from it all and think critically about fantasy literature.

Science fiction and fantasy may not seem like natural targets of literary criticism. The last thing anyone wants while trying to escape into a fantasy world is some clever clogs popping up to tell you the novel you're reading is a reactionary construct perpetuating an outmoded value system in the face of a post-industrial reality. So it will quite likely come as a surprise – not least to many ardent fantasy fans – that a considerable body of critical thought has accrued around fantasy literature.

The 33rd International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts took place in Florida last week and brought together many of the leading critics of fantasy, both practicing artists and academics. Its theme: The Monstrous Fantastic. A fitting one for guest of honour China Miéville, shortlisted this week for the Arthur C Clark award, and best known for his grotesque Bas-Lag novels that tinker with the conventions of fantasy writing in a self-consciously critical manner. Just a few of the other attendees included American editor and critic Gary K Wolfe, science fiction film specialist Mark Bould and hundreds of other researchers from the international academic community, each with their own unique interest in the fantastic.

Many of the discussions at ICFA will have referred to and used terminology from The Rhetorics of Fantasy by Farah Mendelsohn. There's nothing that most fantasy fans like more than a good argument over what is or is not a work of fantasy. Or science fiction. Or horror. Mendelsohn neatly sidesteps these arguments by introducing a classification system for the fantasy genre based on the relationship between the protagonist and the fantasy world. Portal fantasy, immersive, intrusive and liminal fantasy – the four key types identified by Mendelsohn – have become common parlance among critics of the genre since the publication of The Rhetorics of Fantasy in 2008. They are also increasingly evident in the work of young writers entering the field, who are consciously structuring their creative work around the critical discussion that permeates the fantasy genre, making Rhetorics an essential text for any writer or critic working in the genre today.

John Clute is best known for the Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction, now in its third edition and brand new incarnation as an online repository for the combined wisdom of the SF community. It is also a publication that anyone new to the field would do well to study exhaustively, there is no better overview of the science fiction genre. Clute has been one of science fiction and fantasy's leading reviewers and critics for over four decades, authoring six non-fiction collections and two novels: The Disinheriting Party, and Appleseed. His 2011 collection Pardon the Intrusion: Fantastika in the World Storm reflects on what I believe will prove to be Clute's most important contribution to the field, the introduction of fantastika as an umbrella term for all fantastic literature and, by extension, the consideration of all the genres of fantastic literature as one coherent literary and cultural phenomenon.

Clute dates his fantastika to the mid 18th century "because history begins then, because the contemplation of ruins and futurity as a single topos begins then", and perhaps because the gothic begins then, and the cycle of genres from the weird to horror and science fiction to fantasy that has rolled through the years begins then. It might be hard for readers trained to the expectations of genres as marketing categories to see what JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels have in common. But, as Clute argues, it's exactly because fantasy has become so identified with one very limited form of fiction that we require terms such as fantastika or speculative fiction to reunite all kinds of fantastic literature in our thinking.

If science fiction, fantasy, horror, and even relative new kids on the genre block such as steampunk are part of a centuries-long tradition of fantastika, then it's even more important that they are positive in their representation of issues like gender and race. While Margaret Atwood is likely to be the first writer many readers associate with the idea of feminist science fiction, Joanna Russ is perhaps a more genuinely significant figure in the representation of women in fantasy literature. Russ's 1983 non-fiction collection How to Suppress Women's Writing has become central to an ongoing debate about both the representation of women in fantastic literature and their representation in the publishing industry and fan community. With the sad loss of Russ in 2011 many in the fantasy community were prompted to ask how much progress had been made in a genre that still routinely casts female characters as helpless princesses, and if highly sexualised "kick-ass" heroines are really a step forward. Fantasy is also similarly guilty of ongoing problems with the representation of race, when even in 2012 a film such as John Carter continues to rely on overt racial stereotypes to establish the "otherness" of its alien characters. This argument exploded within the SF/F community in 2009 when the RaceFail debate revealed a tacit ignorance of race issues in the work of many writers in the field.

Do portal and liminal fantasies best define fantasy literature? Are apparently disparate genres such as SF and fantasy part of the overarching tradition of fantastika? Should creators of fantasy stories have the self-awareness to properly represent gender and race in their work? (I'm going to step out of rhetorical mode for just a moment to say, yes, they bloody well should.) As a writer and as a reviewer, and in my quest for weird, I find that those writers who make a critical understanding of fantasy part of their work create better stories than those who remain, sometimes deliberately, ignorant of it.