Who wouldn't want to set a pack of fantastical, fire-breathing, firework dragons on Dolores Umbridge?
May We Be Forgiven by AM Homes (Granta), is a sharply observant, if slightly fantastical, satire on modern family life that made me laugh out loud.
But the notion that someone of my background growing up today would refer to themselves as black is, frankly, fantastical.
For the first time in human history, the most extraordinary and fantastical part of our lives had been subject to experimental observation.
The third part of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels describes the floating island of Laputa where fantastical science experiments take place, but they in fact parody the real world of ideas.
To me, it's not so much retro as it is the product of an alternate timeline, a fantastical vision of American popular culture between 1975 and 1985, dreamed up by two men who, in this life, were born a decade too late and several thousand miles too far east.
These futuristic confections are undoubtedly far-fetched, but they all make thrilling sense within Spider-Man's world – one that sits just beyond the bounds of possibility, yet just close enough to make these fantastical predictions irresistibly intriguing.
This production forms part of the Wells' increasingly imaginative strand of family-oriented works, and this season there is a Christmas rerun of Arthur Pita's marvellously funny and fantastical The Little Match Girl as well as Tiger Tale by Barrowland Ballet (a fine Scottish company whose adult works also deserve UK-wide exposure).
Though they would have been seen as objective and impartial at the time, in retrospect it is clear how subjective, ideologically driven, and, in many ways, fantastical they were.
Emily Berry's Dear Boy (Faber) fizzes with verbal inventiveness and fantastical, darkly comic storytelling; while Fiona Moore's pamphlet The Only Reason for Time (HappenStance Press) is full of elegant, gently piercing observations that build to a compelling portrait of love and loss and the overcoming of grief.
It's here that The Duke of Burgundy strikes an innovative note: the film is set in a fantastical world populated only by women, all of whom are rapt attendees of drolly dull entomology lectures.
