Imagined Worlds

It has long been a criticism of the Science Fiction fraternity - the readers of it - that they admire this genre because of its escapist leanings (and, of course a real proclivity for dressing up and living the part - the Tolkien afficionado who speaks elvish or the Star Trekkie with his Vulcan pointed ears or his Klingon body armour). Science Fiction and the Fantasy genre has grown up. Perhaps it is even approaching respectability. The literary critics, those guardians of the canon can now not only place Tolkien in the 1940s and Star Trek in the 1960s/70s but can historically allocate many other writers and their works to a position in which other texts of the literature and the visual arts can now relate. It is possible to make the connection that these works can be seen as both indicative and illuminating of the environment in and out of which they were produced.

The imagined world is a difficult place novelistically to construct. Often requiring epic lengths to create the necessary detail yet in that obsessive delineation of minutiae they risk losing the reader. John Norman's Gor books spend so long advocating the misaligned nature of male and female that it begins to read like the fantasy of a hen-pecked husband. The words "pleasure-slave" do little to enhance the feminist ideology which obviously seemed to threaten the author. Another perhaps more endearing methodology of imagined creationism is to allow each volume to stand on its own but to cohere to an overall universality of design. The Discworld concept in its shadowing of the real world has the power to find humour in both worlds. Thematically this can run for as long as Terry Pratchett can still find targets that amuse him. Jasper Fforde aims at the even more self-referential vision of literature, both classic and popular. It helps to have read Jane Eyre but his first book entitled "The Eyre Affair" works well without it. Classic patterms of literary development still function in this genre Girl meets Boy. Girl loses Boy. Girl gets boy back but only, it turns out, due to Thursday Next. Christopher Booker's "Seven Basic Plots" are as inspirational to the beginning writer as Joseph Campbell's "Hero with a Thousand Faces" was to George Lucas's Star Wars dream. For Fforde the pages of literature are ripe for the talents of a revisionist literary detective searching for her lost love.



Likewise Malcolm Pryce's Aberystwyth novels or Roy Clarke's Last of the Summer Wine, Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast or Christine Feehan's Carpathians they all convey in a microcosm the universe as their author sees it or would want others to see it. The popularity of each work further emphasizing that many other participants see it the same way. The accusations of escapism only block off an imaginative entry into these worlds - to see the honour in a work by the late great David Gemmell ; fighting against despair because it must be done - to see faith and loyalty in the words of James Barclay. The response of the reader to these works - to these worlds - is more than is termed a demeaningly described suspension of disbelief - it is a true spiritualised belief far from the religiose demands of compulsion - but not in broadswords and elvish heroes but in a humanistic capacity to improve and grow. Of course the book ends and the reader wends his weary way back to his life but inside him that affiliation to those higher qualities is still there and it only needs some trigger to harness it. We know we will be unlikely to face these heroic types of choices but we are shown the way. And we know the way. Read the instruction book carefully......


Afterthought...
The Pern books of Anne McCaffrey demonstrate this breadth of interest very clearly. From the original settlers decision to leave a crowded and strife-riven home planet to designing a system of government and opening up a new world with all its attendant crises. Where would one park one's dragon ?