Loremasters and Libraries in Fantasy and Science Fiction

David Dean Oberhelman (1965-2018) was a librarian and scholar with wide-ranging research interests, who had a long association with the Mythopoeic Society. He was an enthusiastic supporter of other scholars, a gifted editor, and an outstanding teacher. The core concept of this collection developed from panel discussions in which David drew together a group of fantasy, science fiction, and comics scholars to discuss libraries, librarians, archives, research, writing, and related topics as depicted in these genres. In this collection, his friends and colleagues explore the enduring importance of the historical record in its many forms, the concept of writing as a creative gateway to other worlds, the otherworldly geometries of the interconnectedness of information represented as what Terry Pratchett called “L-space,” and the depiction of learning and scholarship in invented worlds. There is something recursively satisfying in books about books, research about research, writing about writing, the librarianship section in a library.