I want to take you away on a journey to Middle Earth. Or maybe Narnia. Or perhaps a galaxy long ago and far away. For a couple of hours, at least, you will escape the relentless pressure of bad news. You will lose yourself in adventure, magic, and play. You will forget your troubles. Right?
Wrong!
I have dedicated my life to speculative fiction (SF) - the umbrella terms that includes fairy tales, science fiction, fantasy, supernatural horror, and many hybrid sub-genres. First as an academic with a long list of books and articles and now an award-winning author of eight novels, I have written about impossible and non-existent worlds in other people’s fiction and eventually started creating my own. But for many, my passion is ethically dubious. The most common remark I hear from people who do not read SF is : “But it’s escapist! You avoid your responsibilities as an intellectual, a citizen, and a human being by reading/writing this stuff, while so many things go wrong in the real world.”
Some writers and scholars defend SF by pointing out that escape is not always a dirty word. All of us need some time to decompress. That was the point J.R.R. Tolkien made in his famous essay “On Fairy-Stories” (1947). Tolkien actually went further: as a believing Christian, he presented fairy tales as a route toward “recovery and consolation” through faith. But setting aside the fact that not all of us are religious believers, what kind of consolation do you expect to find in horror? And yet, not only is horror as a genre wildly popular, but the very fairy tales that Tolkien glorified as utopian are incredibly dark and violent, especially once you get over the sugar shock of their Disney distortions.
I do not believe that we escape into fantasy. I believe we enter fantastic worlds in order to understand our own. The key term to describe the effect of SF is “defamiliarization” or “estrangement”. Derived from the work of the Russian scholar Viktor Shklovsky, it literally means “making strange”. Estrangement is looking at what is familiar and acceptable from a new perspective and seeing it for what it is, not what we have become accustomed to believe it is. Imagination does not lull us into sleep. It wakes us up to reality.
In this bi-weekly newsletter, I will take you on a tour of imaginary worlds of speculative fiction. I will talk about my own writing of course, but this is not my focus here. I want to share with you my knowledge of SF derived from my years of reading, teaching, and scholarship. I want to offer you a map of the unlimited universe of fantastic fiction through discussions of some familiar and unfamiliar genres.
The first five instalments will be dedicated to fairy tales - the oldest and best loved of all SF genres. I will take you on a tour of the Neverland as you likely have not seen it before - populated by monsters, ghosts, talking trees, cruel fathers, and no “happily ever after” in sight. After that, it will be fantasy, and then science fiction and supernatural horror. Each newsletter will focus on specific stories, some familiar, some not, while also sharing my insights as a writer of SF.
So, next time, let’s talk about Cinderella, Briar Rose, Allerleirau (also known as the Coat of Many Colors), and what kind of dark forests and bloody chambers they wander in. And later on, I will talk about my own experience writing a fairy-tale-based novel.
It reminds me of Brecht's idea of "alienation," where the audience is made to see something familiar seem strange and thus see it in a new light. Really effective technique, and perfectly suited to fantasy and speculative fiction.
I took your course in English Lit at TAU (around a decade ago) and it was always extremely interesting and insightful.
Very happy to subscribe for this newsletter and looking forward to the next posts !