When fantasy and other speculative fiction takes us away from the world, it's more than just escapism in the bad sense.  It returns us to our own lives with a new sense of wonder.
 

     People often ask me, “Why fantasy?”  What is it about speculative fiction that draws me, as opposed to more realistic works?

     Part of it is that for some reason I’m simply drawn to the weird, whether it’s something genuinely part of creation, like a jellyfish or the okapi (a bizarre-looking relative of the giraffe), or something that’s part of the imagination.

     There’s more than that, though.  I’m leery of any universal claim of what fantasy is or what it does, but when I’m forced to explain how it affects me, I keep coming back to the story of Arnie*.

     Throughout my college years, I worked as a counselor at a youth camp, an experience that has had as much influence on who I am today as anything else.  Every summer we’d have one week set aside for a special-needs camp.  Most of these campers were older, long past the point where they could be successfully mainstreamed, and had been attending the camp for years.

     One of these older campers was Arnie, who’d been coming since the first year the camp had offered a special-needs week in 1955.  He’d been a camper for more than 40 years when he ended up in the group of the lowest functioning adults I cared for with two other counselors.

     Arnie was a sweet man with Down syndrome.  By the time I knew him, he had also had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.  The result was that everything was new to him.  Mornings were a wonderful, exciting, new thing to enjoy.  So were green beans.  So was the second helping of green beans.

     A simple “Hello, Arnie,” would bring a beautiful smile to his face, because each person he saw was new and wonderful, a gift to him from God.

     That was Arnie’s last summer at camp, but his nature stayed with me.  I gave talks around campfires and recalled him for others.  I wrote a poem to capture that sense of wonder and newness.  And when I wrote a paper analyzing fantasy and the way it works for a college literature class, I retold his story once again.

     You see, for me one of the things speculative fiction does is it restores that sense of wonder and newness in our own world.  I step away for a time.  I read of other worlds and of strange sights, and when I return, this world itself is stripped of the dullness it had acquired.

     It’s easy to let our daily lives become tarnished with day-to-day worries and struggles and annoyances.  As days and weeks and months go by, we begin to think that’s what life is.  Petty.  Trivial.

     It’s not that these daily struggles and events aren’t important, it’s just that they’re not everything.  By pulling us away from them for a little while, we can come back and see again the beauty and the tragedy, the highs and lows that lie behind all the little events of our lives.

     I can look out my window here in Colorado and say, “Wow.  Mountains.”  I can be shocked by blades of grass and the wonderfully bizarre behavior of prairie dogs.  I can fall in love again with the people who surround me, and realize how amazing a curving street or a whimsical building or a friend’s idiosyncrasy really is.

     Speculative fiction puts me back in that Arnie mode of seeing the world with wonder.

     Our reactions can’t only be to good things, though, or the wonder is only superficial.  When a work of literature has cleansed us and renewed us and sent us back, we also are able to see the suffering around us.  This is a part of wonder too, the wonder that realizes the pain of a friend we hadn’t noticed because of our own distractions.  The wonder that reminds us that real people are suffering terrible events in Darfur and other parts of the world.

     The wonder that reminds me that my own home is not a perfect example of justice and that, wow, maybe there’s something I can do to make the society around me more just and more peaceful.

     This too is a part of seeing our world around us with new eyes, refreshed from journeys in wild and strange lands, whether among the stars or in the ancient past, or some alternate reality.  Maybe it takes eyes like Arnie’s to see what Jesus’ life to the full really looks like.

     I wouldn’t claim that this is the only function or purpose or power of speculative fiction.  And I won’t even claim that other fiction can’t achieve the same (as can art and music and hiking and canoeing and many other things).  But for me, because of who I am, because of how I was made, fantasy and science fiction and surreal works that lie along their edges all work especially well to push me into that place of wonder.

     It’s a place I need to be brought to and reminded of often.


* Not his real name.