No Dangerous Visions: The Failure of Fantasy Fiction

In the interest of full disclosure, let me say at the outset that I love fantasy!  Perhaps the first "Science Fiction" I read was the planetary romances of Edgar Rice Burroughs, particularly his Barsoom stories.  I was so enthralled with them I almost believed they were real!  I certainly hoped they were real!  I fell in love with Dejah Thoris and still think that's one of the most beautiful names in literature.  That's a testimony to the power of imprinting upon a young mind.

But, how does John Carter, the hero of the Barsoom novels, get to Mars in the first place?  By astral projection!  By wishing it were so -- and he wakes up on Mars!  Pure fantasy, all of it, from the dead sea bottoms of Barsoom to the hollow Earth of Pellucidar.  Yet, I still think the first three novels in his Barsoom series -- A Princess of Mars, The Gods of Mars, and A Warlord of Mars -- are the best things Burroughs ever wrote and I treasure my first edition copies of these novels.

I also love Robert E. Howard, whom some consider the founder of the Sword & Sorcery sub-genre of fantasy.  I have every Conan story he wrote -- including the fragments completed by L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter, Bjorn Nyberg, and others.  I have all the paperback editions published by the long-defunct Lancer Books, with their wonderful covers by Frank Frazetta.  I treasure my Gnome Press editions, which first published Conan in hardcover back in the Fifties.  I have a complete run of the classic Conan comic book first published by Marvel in the '70s.  I published my own pseudo-scholarly contribution to the Conan Canon -- a study of literature in the Hyborian Age -- in the journal Niekas several years ago.

And when I first tried to write fiction of my own, I emulated my heroes.  I wrote blatant imitations of Burroughs and Howard.  Even as a kid, however, I knew there was something lacking in these stories I wrote.  They replicated too faithfully the basic formula of all Burroughs novels, which is simply one chase scene after another, on and on, forever.  I knew that wasn't good enough.  So I went into a vacant field near my home, tore my stories up into little pieces, scooped them into a pile of fragments, and put a match to them so that no one could ever ever read such drivel.

Which brings us to the crux of this lovers' quarrel I have with so much fantasy, then and now.  We like to say SF is a literature of ideas, and at its best it is -- but how often is it, really?  We like to say fantasy is a literature of the imagination, and at its best it is -- but how often is it, really?  All too often it is reactionary and retrograde.  It is trivial.  In a word, it is junk. 

Before I tell you why I think so much of it is junk, though, perhaps some background and definitions are in order so we know what we're talking about. 

Up to the Scientific Revolution, virtually all Western literature was "fantasy," according to our current world view.  In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the first story humans ever recorded, the hero Gilgamesh literally goes to Hell.  In Homer's The Iliad the gods mingle and battle with humans.  In The Odyssey the hero confronts a witch, monsters, & battles the gods themselves to return home.  In Vergil's The Aeneid, the hero once more goes to Hell.  In the first English language story, Beowulf, the hero confronts and slays monsters.

Perhaps such stories weren't seen as "fantasy" by the ancient societies which told these stories.  In their world, gods and magic was reality.  Among the Iroquois, for example, the "dream world" was as much a real world as the waking world.  What happened in dreams really happened.  Perhaps stories of fantastic adventures, therefore, were the "mundane" stories of their time, stories of reality. 

"Fantasy," as we know it today, began to take shape at the end of the 18th century, an off-shoot of the Romantic Movement.  And what was this "fantasy" which began to emerge.  What is it today?  Is it Sword & Sorcery?  Planetary romances?  Weird fiction?  Scientific fantasy?  Dark fantasy?  High fantasy?  Heroic fantasy?  Epic fantasy?  Horror?  Ghost stories?  Fairy tales?  Allegory?  Satire?  Surrealism?  Magic realism?  There's really no consensus among critics as to what "fantasy" is.  It's all those labels I just mentioned and more.  So, I'll attempt only the most amorphous definition. 

Science Fiction is a type of fantasy in that it's not about the mundane world we see all around us.  But not all fantasy is science fiction.  At its most simplistic level, science fiction is about what could happen, based upon what we currently know about the natural laws of the Universe.  Or, as Samuel Delaney put it, based upon what is "known to be known."  But fantasy could never happen.  It's the basic difference between the possible and the impossible.

Even so, sometimes it's ambiguous which is which.  Fantasy & SF are almost inextricably mixed up with each other.  As we currently understand the laws of the Universe, for example, faster than light travel is impossible.  Time travel (one of my favorite concepts) is also impossible.  According to what is known to be known about the Universe, both are fantasy. 

Now, Star Trek & Star Wars are ostensibly Science Fiction, but faster than light travel is commonplace to both and time travel is a favorite Star Trek plot device. Are they Science Fiction or are they Memorex?

So, perhaps fantasy can't so usefully be defined by any rigid definitions, but instead by pointing to significant examples which we instinctively recognize as fantasy.  There's an old definition of Science Fiction as being that which I'm pointing at when I say the words, "Science Fiction."  Perhaps that's the best definition of fantasy, also.  "Fantasy" is what I'm pointing at when I say the word, "fantasy."

Some critics have denigrated fantasy as "escapist" literature.  It's trivial, they say, because it takes us away from the "real world."  But that's a small-minded view, not only of fantasy, but of all literature, even great literature, and fantasy, at its best, is great literature.  J.R.R. Tolkien, whose Lord of the Rings is the touchstone of all that fantasy can be at its best, -- but which has also spawned many pale imitations -- argued that one of the virtues of fantasy is that it does enable us to escape -- to "escape from the prison" of the mundane world, just as a Prisoner Of War escapes from his POW camp.  It is an escape from the "reality" which doesn't teach us the truth, a mundane reality which conspires to blind us and befuddle us.  It is an escape from such mundane reality to essential reality, the metaphysical reality of the universe.  It is an escape to the reality of the human soul, be it found in an orc, a dragon, or a wizard; escape to the more real reality of hope and tragedy, morality and evil.

Which brings us to the metaphysical function of fantasy, indeed, of all literature, indeed, of all art.  Metaphysics deals with "...speculation [about] the first principles of things...being, substance, essence, time, space, cause, identity," and so on.  Metaphysics deals with the true nature of the universe, of human nature, of the human condition.  And it is the function of art to explore that metaphysical reality and return to our mundane reality with the "Truth" about the way things really are.

And, "what is Truth?" to quote Pontius Pilate.  The truth is that life is contingent, open-ended, and sometimes the good guys lose.  The truth is that nothing is certain, that all things must pass, the only constant is change, and humanity lives in a possibly arbitrary universe whose patterns, if they exist at all, may be only those imposed upon it by human beings.  The truth is that evil is real.  The truth is that human suffering cannot be easily alleviated and the human condition cannot be glibly transcended.  The truth is that bad things happen to good people -- and we don't know why.

Art -- and fantasy when it is art -- asks you to face these metaphysical truths and, by doing so, become fully human.  Art calls you to be all you can be.  It scares you and makes you cry and makes you laugh and shout for joy. 

Now, fantasy tropes can be used by good writers to tell such hard truths about our mundane world -- but usually this is not the case.  All too often the escape is not from mundane reality to metaphysical reality, but escape into a warm, cozy, simple world where bad things happen only to bad people and human suffering can be easily alleviated.  All too often the imaginary worlds of fantasy tend to be conceptually static rather than dynamic, cyclical rather than evolutionary; the narrative form is usually a quest and characters are symbols, usually of good & evil.  The protagonists live in a determinist world, not a world of free will, they merely fulfill their destiny, something imposed upon them from elsewhere.

E. R. Eddison's classic fantasy "The Worm Ouroboros," published in 1922, is the template for such changeless adventure.  Once the battle is won, the cycle of threat, quest, and battle begins anew.  There is no aging in the book, there is no change, there is merely the eternal present, destined to recur forever.

In the main, Sword & Sorcery heroes, such as Eddison's hero, have no desire to change the social order and, indeed, nothing really changes in their static societies.  True, there's an ostensible change over time in, say, the Conan Saga.  He goes from thief, to outlaw chieftain, to mercenary, to king.  But, basically, his story is the same in all incarnations.  A lone Conan enters, stage right.  He fights demons or witches or gods or sorcerers or outlaw hordes and wins the girl and the treasure and rides off into the sunset. 

In the very next story, however, he's lost the girl and the treasure and has to win them all over again.  And, except for Belit in the story, "Queen of the Black Coast," we never do find out why Conan never seems to be able to hang on to a woman.  They just disappear.  So, the names change, but the story remains the same.  We claim fantasy is a literature of imagination, but this is really a failure to imagine. 

And, when fantasy tells us this story, it lies.  It's junk.  It may be as tasty and pleasurable as junk food, but it's reactionary and retrograde. It is autistic, as it insulates and isolates us from metaphysical reality.  Great myth and legend lead us toward the metaphysical truth of the human condition.  Junk food fiction leads us away from the metaphysical truth to a denial of the human condition.  Such fantasy is almost anti-fantasy, at least the kind of fantasy Tolkien praised and defended.  It is a cozy retelling of comfortable and well-worn narratives about elves and dragons, wizards and unicorns, ugly ducklings, dark lords, and mystic portals between worlds.  "Here there be no tygers."  Here there are no dangerous visions.

I repeat: The purpose of literature is to tell the metaphysical truth about the human condition.  Out of a thousand possibilities, I'll give you one example of great literature which tells such a truth.  Arthur Miller's play, "The Death of a Salesman," debuted on Broadway in 1949 and was quickly recognized as one of the great plays of the American theater.  Half a century later, in 1999, it was revived for another Broadway run.  I have no doubt that when yet another half century has gone by, "The Death of a Salesman" will still be enacted on American stages.

Why is that?  What is it about "The Death of a Salesman" which resonates in the human psyche?  What metaphysical truth does it tell us?  The truth it tells us is this.  Arthur Miller's protagonist, Willy Loman, wants to be great -- but he is not great, which he eventually comes to recognize, to his tragedy. He is literally a "low-man." That simple insight is what the play is about.  But the reason the play resonates so much is because each and every one of us wants to be great.  The metaphysical reality of the human condition, however, is that each and every one of us is not great.  That is one truth of the human condition that great literature teaches us.

Such metaphysical truth is movement from darkness into light, from sleep into wakefulness, from ignorance to knowledge -- knowledge of one's own true nature and the world's true nature.  The basic plot of all fantasy is "liberation" -- Tolkien's "escape from the prison."  But sometimes the slaves aren't liberated.  Sometimes the deal is rotten.  Sometimes the dice are loaded and the fight is fixed.  Sometimes the boat is sinking and the captain lies.  Sometimes the Salesman can never attain greatness, no matter how much he desires it.

But the metaphysical truth is also that the future is an open door -- a thousand open doors -- and we have the power to choose which ones we'll walk through.  Nothing is written in stone.  It's an open universe.  And the patterns of it are the ones we create.  The question is not, "What is the purpose of life?"  The question is, "What is your purpose in life?"  That purpose is the one you create in the midst of pain and suffering and injustice.

The world and the future are both horrible and hopeful.  And only when we know the horror, the horror, can we know the hope.  That is the truth of the human condition -- and the truth of all great fantasy.