Polar Bears and Reality

[wingsmith]

Originally published at Tom Pollock. Please leave any comments there.

So, in a reply to Thursday’s post, Sumit said

“I’m grow­ing increas­ingly entrenched in my posi­tion that the real genre dis­tinc­tion is between “hard” and “soft” fic­tion. There are those who write to cap­ture the world, and there are those who write to escape it.”

Which, frankly, I thought was fas­ci­nat­ing enough to be the sub­ject of it’s own post.

Why?

Because it’s a god­dam beau­ti­ful para­dox, that’s why.

If you want to escape the world, it’s a whole lot eas­ier to cap­ture it first. (It’s a bit like a polar bear that way).



Utterly Gra­tu­itous Polar Bear Pic

Con­sider this argu­ment: the more wacky and cock-a-hoop your SF con­cept is, the more real your char­ac­ters need to be to get read­ers to sus­pend your dis­be­lief. Whether your story is set in Mid­dle Earth, Kro­nos, or Hack­ney, verisimil­li­tude works.

But there’s another, more inter­est­ing take on this theory.

I reckon that the genre I write in, Urban Fan­tasy, is escapism par-excellence. I love it for that. Noth­ing is more escapist than magic in your home town. (I wrote a whole thing on it here  wingsmith.livejournal.com/20826.html )

There has to be a rea­son, and I think it’s this: These are escapist sto­ries that con­sti­tute what is to be escaped. There’s a kind of psy­cho­log­i­cal flight response that grips me when I read the first chap­ter of Harry Pot­ter and The Philosopher’s stone.
The blank grey tedium of sub­ur­bia in the book chimes with my expe­ri­ence, I want to get away from it, and when the magic opens up, I dive right in. It’s the feint before the counter-punch. The stick before the car­rot. The cud­dly bear before the not-so-cuddly bear. The ordi­nary makes me want the extra­or­di­nary more, and embrace it harder. It makes the book work better.

If escapism’s about get­ting away from the world, then rep­re­sent­ing the world makes it eas­ier to know which way to run.

(There is another deeper rea­son. I’m the kind of per­son who deep down, really wants to believe in magic. And in the rich under­soil of the psy­che, desire and belief aren’t too far apart. Hence, when I read fan­tasy, its not just escapism, it cap­tures some way I think the world is, that isn’t given to me by my every­day expe­ri­ence)
Just for kicks, lets see if the para­dox is sym­met­ri­cal. Can you rep­re­sent the world with­out escap­ing it? Not in fic­tion, surely. Because all fic­tion is escape. All fic­tion says. ‘Here is some­thing that didn’t hap­pen’ Some­thing that isn’t in the world. It reaches beyond the world. That’s why I love it.

So, I guess I con­clude that all sto­ries both cap­ture, and evade real­ity. In a kind of spi­ralling, intri­cate waltz. Which when you get right down to it, is pretty awe­some for ink and paper.