And what's so great about reality anyway? With every fantasy, you expand your horizons, and your mind. And when you do that, you create room for more ideas and perspectives.
Also it's hard to want something better if you don't know what "something better" is like. A quote I love is "a revolution begins with a book and a sword"
The authoritarians and know-nothings don’t want us to imagine better futures, better worlds, and that’s precisely what fantasy does. In the words of Katherine Rundell, “The imagination is the primary and first site of resistance.”
It's why the one time I read an Ayn Rand "Novel" - Fountainhead, was it? It's been a long time... and I loathed the story and her and anybody like her forever after reading it, because in that book, her solution to civilization's problems was to extirpate the brain's 'center of imagination'.
There is a terrifying consequence of losing that fantasy. When you are no longer able to imagine a better world, you fall...into despair or...into something worse.
Either way, in my head, losing fantasy equals losing hope. Because even in grimdark, there is always a light.
I'm simply tired of the same old dystopian futures we keep hearing about.
That's why I'm writing a book where the future is one of learning from our mistakes—where progress is made by preserving strong borders to protect culture while sharing resources to improve life for all of humanity.
tolkien expressed a similar view. but being tolkien, he did it over a lengthy essay on the nature of myth, fantasy, and fiction. Ursula K. Le Guin was paraphrasing him in away that summed it up succinctly.
Well, Tolkien being Tolkien. Although I seem to remember that he did actually sum it up in some interview as well...or my mind made up hearing his actual voice saying it...
C. S. Lewis quoted Tolkien as follows:
...my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, "What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and hostile to, the idea of escape?" and gave the obvious answer: jailers.”
Comments
-Fruity
Either way, in my head, losing fantasy equals losing hope. Because even in grimdark, there is always a light.
That's why I'm writing a book where the future is one of learning from our mistakes—where progress is made by preserving strong borders to protect culture while sharing resources to improve life for all of humanity.
#6'Elon
There is no more revolutionary act.
https://thetolkienist.com/2014/01/03/not-a-tolkien-quote-fantasy-is-escapist-and-that-is-its-glory/
...my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, "What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and hostile to, the idea of escape?" and gave the obvious answer: jailers.”