Fantasy Fiction and Reality

Guest post by author, A G Rivett.

Fantasy, Sci fi and Speculative Fiction

In a recent piece in The Author, the journal of the Society of Authors, Nadia Attia made good points about the importance of writing about the issues that press on us at the present time. Unfortunately, in writing about fantasy fiction and reality, she seemed to dismiss sci fi and fantasy as escapism, even though she writes speculative fiction herself. I have to say, as another writer of speculative fiction, that the charge of escapism is no more true of sci fi and fantasy than for any other genre. Often, we need to step back to see more clearly. The fantasy I read, and try to write in my Isle Fincara Trilogy, steps back from our present world in order to reflect it. A reviewer of my first book, The Seaborne, makes this clear, describing the book as one that, “asks thought-provoking questions about what modern humans have given up in terms of community, faith and honor in favor of always grasping the new.” (Read the full Blue Ink Review.)

Sci fi as prophesy

One of my favourite writers, Ursula le Guin, wrote fantasy and sci-fi, but preferred to see these as simply labels attached to what she was writing – novels about people. What motivates her stories is not the outer surfaces of strange planets, nor alternative worlds inhabited by mythical beings. Rather, it is the human response to the issues she saw pressing on us here and now. In The Dispossessed, a future interplanetary ambassador from Terra (planet Earth) describes our planet as Le Guin imagines it may become, many centuries in the future: “My world is a ruin… We controlled neither appetite, nor violence; we did not adapt… There are no forests left on my Earth. The air is grey, the sky is grey. It is always hot… ” The Dispossessed was published in 1974, showing how Le Guin saw the outworking of the climate challenge we now facing decades before most people became aware of it. Through her fiction, she issues a warning. This is where fantasy fiction and reality come together.

Writing from the collective unconscious

When we write best, we are writing from some deep recess of collective consciousness. It is not too grandiose to say that we become the voice of humanity, speaking to humanity. Never can we fully express this, but sometimes, at our very best, we draw near, and to do this we have to stop the small self from getting in the way. In his book, On Mysticism, Simon Critchley describes writers who ‘decreate’ the self in writing. Critchley quotes this wonderful image in which Flannery O’Connor writes of glimpsing God: ‘you are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon.’

Fantasy as prophesy – reflecting a deeper truth

As with seeking to glimpse God, so with aspiring to good writing, says Critchley. It is the writer’s self which is in the way, and is also trying to clear the way. An approach which works for me in such a dilemma is not to think of a ‘decreation’ of the self, but rather to see my self as an agent, a factor (in the Scottish land sense): a steward, serving not my self but the purpose of the story. If that purpose is, as I try to make it, in line with the greatest good, then my story may be good. Then the writers of fantasy – or of any other genre – are not the escapists. On the contrary: it is we who are, or who at least try to be, the realists. Fantasy fiction and reality are powerfully related when one is used to prophesy – in the sense of telling the truth – about the other. The author’s job is to be the agent of the message.

_______________________________________________________________

Bryn Glas Blog posts are usually written by Gillian Paschkes-Bell

Editor, Pantolwen Press

Pantolwen Press is the literary imprint of Bryn Glas Books

Vu by Kenneth Sinclair, published in the UK on 19 DECEMBER 2024

What Kind of Experimental Fiction is Vu?

Order direct from Gwales, the on-line shop of the Books Council of Wales

Fantasy Fiction and Reality