The New York Times best-selling author Jeannette Walls was quoted in the Times this past weekend as saying, “I’m not a huge fan of experimental fiction, fantasy or so-called escapist literature. Reality is just so interesting, why would you want to escape it?” This kind of statement represents the kind of blindness that is all too typical of all too many “mainstream” writers and critics.
In fact, the best science fiction, fantasy, and other “escapist” literature puts a reader, in a real sense, “outside” the framework of current society and reality in a way that allows a perceptive individual to see beyond the confines of accepted views and cultural norms. Some readers will see this, and some will not. As a simple, but valid example of this, take my own book, The Magic of Recluce, in which the “good guys” are ostensibly and initially portrayed as the “blacks.” In western European derived cultures, as demonstrated by all too many westerns, where the good guys wear white Stetsons, and the bad guys crumpled black hats, in the United States, in particular, there is an equation of the color white with purity and goodness. But this is far from a universal norm. In many cultures, white is the color of death, and other cultures use other colors for purity. My very deliberate inversion of this western color “norm” was designed to get readers to think a bit about that… and then, when they’d thought a while, I started writing other Recluce books from the “white” perspective, in an attempt to show the semi-idiocy of arbitrarily ascribing “color-values” to people or societies, or values to colors themselves.
I’m far from the only F&SF writer to use the genres to explore such themes or to question values or concepts, and I could list a number of writers who do. So could most perceptive readers of F&SF. This fact tends to get lost because fiction is for entertainment, and if we as writers fail to entertain, we don’t remain successful professional writers for very long, and, frankly, if we’re extremely successful at entertaining, we tend not to be taken seriously on other levels. Stephen King, for example, is technically a far, far better writer than is recognized, largely because of the subjects about which he writes, and not because he writes poorly – which he does not. Only recently has there been much recognition of this fact.
Even with critics within the F&SF genre, there’s a certain dismissal of writers who are “commercially” successful as writers of “mere” popular escapism, as though anything that is popular cannot be good. Under those criteria, Shakespeare cannot possibly be good or have any depth. For heaven’s sake, the man wrote about sprites and monsters, faery queens, sorcerers and witches, along with battles, kings, ghosts, and ungrateful children.
Good is good; popular is popular; and popular can be anything from technically awful to outstanding, although I’d be among the first to admit that works that are both good and popular are far rarer than those that are popular and technically weak or flawed. And the same holds for so-called escapist fiction, no matter what the mainstream “purists” assert.
Then too, the fact is that all fiction, genre or mainstream, is “escapist.” The only question is how far the author is taking you… and for what reasons.