I consumed about 800 pages of fantasy in the last...week? I think it was just in one week. It was mostly written on a young adult level, though one book was from the grown-up section of the library. When it comes to fantasy, I am a voracious reader. I am not such a voracious reader of theology. I don't read Bible studies for fun. Nor history either. Nor philosophy. Nor the classics. Though I did major in all those subjects (a Humanities major) and get my Masters in Theology, I never really read those for fun.
Why? Because they are dry and dull? Not really. Neither would I say that history or philosophy are inapplicable to life. They are probably more applicable to life than almost anything else. And I don't have trouble understanding any of those subjects. I am an expert in them. I was literally trained in them since I can first remember. The first time I said I wanted to be a theologian was in elementary school. Right along with wanting to be a scientist and a ballerina, I wanted to be a theologian. It is the only one of my childhood dreams which I have currently fulfilled. Yet I read very little theology these days.
I read fantasy. Why?
Some days because I need the world to be solvable. Things like the Syrian civil war eat holes in my heart and I want to go and fight the bad guy. So I read stories of worlds in which that would be possible. Worlds in which all the evil comes from one villain and if you kill him, then the evil goes away. I want the world to be like that. Desperately.
Ultimately, I read fantasy for more a heroic fix. I read it because I believe it shows something about the world that we have lost. In fantasy, people's beliefs change their world so directly that the impact is immediately evident. In our real world belief's matter too. It just takes so much time for their impact to be evident that we lose the connection.
In fantasy word has power. You can tell something to fly--and it does. Characters have a voice. And their voice with their conviction determines their reality. I want my voice to determine my reality. In the big real and ugly world, it usually just gets drowned to one insignificant whisper in a crowd. People toss hurtful words around and laugh your hurt like it was an accident--when they were the ones who generated the words. The power of words, of voice, has been lost in reality. We remember it only in the realm of imagination.
Fantastical worlds work on the premise of spirituality. Something lives in people that can trump the mundane material cause and effect chain. Some people have more of it that others, and some objects are more easily imbued with it that others. But it is there. The spiritual is alive and interactive. Sometimes it is good. Sometimes it is evil. It is present and dynamic. If you talk about things that way in the real world, people roll eyes at you for being religiously fanatical. Perhaps it is just an alternate way of explaining reality.
Because that brings me down to the reason I think fantasy has been such a big hit with my generation. Our lives are becoming fantastical. We live with every day realities that used to be the stuff of science fiction. And stuff that used to be described in spiritual or fantastical terms has been explained away in relentless marches of dull fact. Our lives have been stripped of wonder. We read fantasy to remember how incredible the world actually is. We read it to recover our sense of inexplicable beauty. Our sense of impossibility. Our sense of morality.
And fantasy offers opportunity. We live in a phantasmagorical world. The situations we face in our lives have never been faced before. Our world is filled with wonders and horrors greater than the ancient magicians could possibly have known. Nuclear disasters. Flights to space. Hollogram projections. Google glass. Self-driving cars. Automated houses. Genetic engineering. How do you make sense of it all? How do you hold a sense of right and wrong when there is no historical precedent? No clear commandment? There is no religion that can tell you what to do from day to day in the modern world. If we are to explore the consequence of actions, the ethics of our new world, we have to do it in stories that look detached from reality. Fantasy creates a realm that looks historical, that looks ancient. In doing so, it gives us a safe space to examine possibilities for the future. If this was magic instead of science, would it be black magic? Or would it be something the White Wizard did? Or perhaps the neutral ground shared by both, magic neither good nor bad?
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