“What we call ‘genre fiction’ … strips away the usual and familiar contexts of our lives and replaces them with radically simplified environments: a small crew on a spaceship, a detective trying to stop a killer before he can reach another victim … It is often said that such situations are unrealistic. This is incorrect; it conflates the unrealistic with the uncommon. People do confront such utterly decisive moments: A theater full of people in Aurora, Colorado confronted one quite recently.”