Last weekend, at the British Library’s exhibition Fantasy: Realms of Imagination, I was struck by the diversity of fantasy as a genre of storytelling and its longstanding importance within our culture. Fantasy (and its close cousin, science fiction) are having a heyday after decades of being regarded as ‘too popular to be serious’. There is much fantasy that is pure entertainment, to be sure, but few would now seriously dismiss it as childish or irrelevant.
There are many stories that hold a place in our culture because of the truth they communicate rather than because they are true. To quote Victor LaValle, fantasy is ‘a chance to talk about something in our real world behind the screen of something impossible’.
Escapism and entertainment have value, but for fantasy these things are usually just the start. All stories also teach, they reflect, and they persuade. An audience does not consume a story passively; storytelling is a two-sided encounter. It’s the closest thing we have to mind control. A fantasy world goes further; it has us suspend our disbelief and empathise with characters in a world with rules different to our own. In this state, our minds are open to a range of possibilities and opinions to which it might otherwise be closed. Writers, of course, know this, and deploy satire and allegory with varying levels of openness and self-awareness: Gulliver’s Travels, the Wizard of Oz and His Dark Materials come to mind. Even when an author resists intentional allegory, their values and experiences are refracted through the work, as with Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings. And even fantasy stories can spread wrong knowledge: how many children, watching Disney’s the Little Mermaid, grew up to believe that an unfair contract cannot be broken once it is signed? (I recommend Malcom Gladwell’s great podcast on this last point.)
Fantasy and science fiction also prompt us to consider alternative paths, as a challenge, an aspiration, or a warning. It helps us explore what ‘good’ looks like in society, and suggests what might happen if we put our minds to one goal or another. Sci-fi and fantasy stories contribute to cultural and technological shifts: they can act as touchstones for communicating new ideas, inspire invention, make radical ideas commonplace, and shape what we find cool and valuable. In Star Trek, for example, the core idea of an empathetic society, driven by curiosity and collaboration rather than greed, remains relevant and inspiring, even if the earlier series now feel dated. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson’s 1992 ‘metaverse’ thriller, was written as a satirical dystopia but today is reportedly viewed as aspirational by our Silicon Valley overlords. Meanwhile, The Handmaid’s Tale seems to have been interpreted as policy ambition by the US Republican party.
I see a strong correlation between creativity and reading fantasy (and I’m not alone) and the connection is certainly important for me personally. We live in a world undergoing rapid change, that requires us to be imaginative and open to possibility. Today my work involves helping organisations transform to meet the needs of the future, for which the first step is always to agree (together) on what you think the future looks like. We find that often, to a great extent, we can decide what the future looks like; as Peter Drucker said, “the best way to predict the future is to design it”. A clear vision, once it exists, unlocks everything else. It’s a well-crafted fiction – a fantasy, if you will – that gets woven into reality, one thread at a time.