Myth, Monsters, and Understanding a Frustrating World: Why Everyone Reads Fantasy | Fantasy books

FThe runner does not need to defend. It’s one of the great cultural forms of the moment, and it’s everywhere. Maybe even the The dominant form of writing now, in keeping with the bookseller’s joke that contemporary publishing is divided into A: romance and B: everything else.

But it may need a little explanation, for those who do not understand its enjoyment; who still regard it as the fulfillment of desires, or as a lowly form upon which the literary imagination can look down upon it or extend bewildered tolerance. As a writer of literary fiction who has borrowed and delighted in fantasy tropes for years, and has now written full-fledged fantasy, I’m not embarrassed. I’ve been reading and loving fantasy my whole life, and for me the best creators stand comfortably alongside the greats of any genre. However, I still encounter a faint sense that there is something to consider in writing fiction. I have to have reasons for wanting to do such a thing with dragons, no matter how culturally common it is.

None of what I have to say will shock my fellow fans of this type of music, even if it is a bit necessary. We can only assume its joys, assume that it, like any form of writing, features solid goodies, great works, and also extruded polystyrene product—and then we move on to the details. Portal fantasy or epic? Urban fantasy or morality fantasy? Romance or Grimdark? Comfortable or terrifying? And then, in what line of descent do your tastes lie? Are you part of the endlessly branching Tolkien clan, or is feminist fiction descended from Ursula K Le Guin a genealogy that interests you? Are you in this place for NK Jemisin’s decolonial innovation, Catherine Addison’s LGBT affection, Guy Gavriel Kay’s remixed history, Jeff VanderMeer’s surrealism, China Miéville’s political savvy, and Tamsin Muir’s eccentric gothic? For any of these, there’s a conversation waiting to be had, a corner we can head to together, chattering excitedly to each other.

But for everyone else, this is a case of fantasy rehearsed from scratch. Imagination, in the first place, is true to the experience of the human soul. Specifically, this is true of what is unruly in him, which is not what the reasonable, consensual, self-limiting world of daylight expresses easily, but what everyone feels. Children and teens are very intense, for a variety of reasons related to the conflict between dependency in their lives and how big they feel they are, and what mysterious forces they see in themselves. Also, how the evils of the world seem so vast and recent to them, that dragons and monsters are natural. But this is also true, for different reasons, for everyone of all ages at times. To use philosopher Charles Taylor’s term, we all live within the constraints and assertions of a “buffering self.” We find the world reliably depressing; We consider there to be a safe line between our inner self and everything else, which neither ghouls, demons, fairies, visions, spirits, or forces, malevolent or benevolent, can cross.

This keeps us safe, but it also cuts off or minimizes what is wild and creative in us. It makes us uncontrollably long for the magic it excludes; It makes us want to let the magic mount sometimes.

Or maybe it’s a matter of need rather than desire. A completely disillusioned world, where nothing but physical processes can be described without metaphor, and even consciousness is merely a physical problem waiting to be solved, can be a dry place. It keeps the heart and mind on inadequate rations. This is the point Philip Pullman makes in The Rose Field, the final final volume of The Book of Dust, where he makes Lyra think about the human need for the kind of things we can’t prove, but would suffocate without. Imagination above all. “Perhaps imagination is a kind of wind that blows through all worlds… It shows us things that are real.” For Pullman, of course, the enemy of imagination is religious doctrine more than narrow science—but there are plenty of different ways of knowing what is dying in the modern world, just as there are other ways of naming the unpredictable winds that blow across all the worlds, showing us things that are real.

However, much of what we have removed from the world by disenchanting it, we do not really want to take back. At least, not seriously. There is a compelling origin story for fantasy as a genre – which you can find brilliantly and subtly analyzed in Adam Roberts’ recent book Fantasy: A Short History – in which it functions as a kind of organized return for the repressed. Partial haunting. With its kings, its quests, its elect, its battles, its forces of earth and air, it gives away all the things we miss in the world of lore, contract, employment, and regularity, but do not want to go back all the way. Roberts identifies the turning point as World War I, which gave a generation of young people like Tolkien and C.S. Lewis the experience of modernity as sheer mechanical barbarism, and instilled in them a desire for a literature in which the stories of ancient myth—with the room in them for individual human agency—returned, remixed, in modern form. We like to dream of having huge muscles like Conan, when office life makes us all weak; We like to think of ourselves as the unique and special chosen one, when in reality we are a pixel in a crowd. But having achieved these dreams, we want to safely put them aside again, rather than deal with a world where unaccountable kings and barbarians who do not control our impulses truly shape our destiny. Hence (so this argument goes) our encapsulation of fantasy into trilogies that end, and books that end.

But there is another fairy tale that needs to be told. In this book, it is not just a wonder book for our motives, or a structured nostalgia for a more romantic world. It is here because it is (paradoxically) a kind of necessary realism, which arises in response to characteristics of the contemporary world that we have not been able to properly attend to, and cannot account for in any other way. I argue that in addition to expressing our frustrations with a dispiriting world, it is also the best way we have of capturing the ways in which the world remains enchanted, despite all our painstaking buffering. I read and write fiction because it is literature that sees the recurring ambiguities in the human experience. This teaches that we are hopelessly metaphorical creatures, finding meaning by associating patterns of similarity that might as well be talismans. This teaches that there are some conflicts where the stakes are truly enormous, and good and evil in something like their pure forms are truly centered around human choices. Imagination recognizes that taking the risks of love is an adventure beyond safety, into landscapes foreign to you, on journeys perilous and wonderful.