Degrees of escape

We admit that dragons are more escapist than rocket ships.

In our last post we observed that the genre of fantasy has overtaken that of history in game-playing and of science fiction in writing, compared with the situation some decades ago.  We dismissed, as an explanation, an increase in escapism as such, since both sf and fantasy words represent an escape from the one in which we live.  But a perceptive comment on that post requires us to revisit the argument.

In simple terms, while dragons are as rare and unusual thus far in the twenty-first century as they were in the twentieth, rocket ships have gone from the stuff of dreams to commonplaces.  With the advance of science it’s getting harder to escape our world by simply going to another planet.  Fantasy, on the other hand, is as weird and wonderful as it ever was.  With the wave of a wand we can leave everything we’re familiar with for a land of enchantment and wonder.  But a rocket ship in one’s backyard that can take us to Mars is dismissed as just not how things work.  (You have to go to Florida or somewhere for that.)

So now our staff of consultants is prepared to believe that the twenty-first century, in its tales and games, is decidedly more escapist than the twentieth.  Why should that be so?  One expects escapism when the present world is intolerable and showing no sign (or inadequate ones) of getting better.  By any objective standard people are better off than they were.  Sometime around the turn of the century, for the first time in history, the majority of mankind was not a single harvest away from famine.  (This has got to be the most important fact that ever went largely unnoticed.)  Nuclear weapons are still with us, but the threat of immanent total destruction has receded (for the moment).  We know quite a few people of all ages that would not be alive today if they’d had access only to twentieth-century medicine.  And in spite of new problems that can seem overwhelming, there is at least the possibility of managing them.

But that’s not how many people perceive it.  In place of a handful of networks and the morning paper, we can get news and information from many, many sources, far more than we can pay attention to.  And the way to get attention (this is not new) is to exaggerate and make people upset.  Not for the first time in history, but maybe more intensely than before, rumor depicts the world as a dangerous place of many threats to me personally.  And though my ability to affect what happens is actually even larger than ever, my awareness of how big the world is has become even larger, so I feel helpless.  And want to escape.

That’s oversimplified, of course.  And it doesn’t even begin to do justice to the very high quality of much twenty-first century fantasy, about which we may comment on another occasion.  For now we’ll simply say that an afternoon’s escape now and then is far preferable to the rumor-inspired actions of some who did not.