Earlier today (as I write this), I began reading a collection of some of the nonfiction writings of Neil Gaiman, a noted British writer of speculative fiction whose works I have to-date been unfamiliar with, although they are at least familiar enough to me that I know his name.  Gaiman (whose political and religious worldviews are quite different from my own) nonetheless approved of C.S. Lewis’ statement that the only people who object to escape are jailers in defending the speculative fiction that both men have been justly known for.  To believe that there is something inherently wrong with escapist literature is to believe that we are to be imprisoned in this world and that any thought of a world different than our own is to engage in revolutionary (and therefore unacceptable) behavior.  That authors as different as Neil Gaiman and C.S. Lewis could recognize this same insight is striking, and it certainly gave me much room to think about how someone as temperamentally conservative as I am can nonetheless be viewed by those around me as at least a potentially revolutionary person because of my willingness to engage in speculative thinking (showing perhaps a disturbing sense of intellectual freedom) and because of my obvious lack of contentment with the world’s status quo.

Although I generally read nonfiction, I have always read and retain a fondness for speculative fiction as opposed to grimly realistic fiction that portrays all of the ugliness and evil of our world as something that must be taken as a given.  Throughout my life I have found reality intolerable in some fashion, largely because it has been so personally oppressive to me, and this feeling of being oppressed has led in turn to a fondness for thinking and writing that allowed me to see this present evil world as a possibility among many rather than being something that is rigidly ordained with the imprinteur of divine legitimacy on all of its institutions and ways.  Without having any sort of fondness for a great deal of the revolutionaries of the age, from childhood I adapted an approach toward the world and its ways that was itself quite revolutionary, by not assuming its legitimacy and pondering the possibility that things could be other than what they are in one form or another.  Being a person easily prone to daydreams and easily able to read and appreciate a wide degree of writing it was easy enough to figure out that there were plenty of others who viewed this world as something worthy of escaping from in at least an imaginative sense.  From childhood I saw a variety of ways that this escape could be done, from viewing earth and its troubled ways as being under the potential judgment of alien species who viewed our existence with considerable alarm, or through the imaginative recreation of a past purified of many unpleasant aspects and capable of serving as a moral critique on the present, or through the reading of various dystopian writings that imagined ways that our reality could become something even more intolerable in the future.

All of these approaches shared some common elements.  For one, all of them served to critique the contemporary world and its ways from a privileged position that was outside of the present, be it an alternate version of the present or versions of the past or future.  For another, the perspective of the author as having an alternative version of reality allowed the reader a certain imaginary space to look at the present from the light of a different place.  Alternative histories, fantasy worlds, beliefs in multiverses and potentially alternative timelines, or a perspective that has cosmic and heavenly scope that views the earth in its proper smallness all allow us to put this present world in a perspective that allows us to see that things can (and perhaps should) be different than they are.  The knowledge that the present day world, and the authorities of the contemporary world, are not inevitable means that they can be changed, and if they can be changed they must begin to justify their existence and authority and not simply take it for granted.

As an aside, it should be reminded that there are common roots between author and authority.  The author creates worlds by one’s words and also speaks as an authority of the subject matter of one’s creations.  Likewise, those who are in positions of authority claim a right to rule or ruin the institutions they serve from the offices they possess.  One of the persistent sources of conflict between authorities and authors, conflict I have participated in and witnessed even as an obscure author myself, is the way that having a commitment to self-expression as an author is commonly viewed as making claims for an alternate source of authority, and thus marks one as as rival or enemy to those who are in authority unless one’s authorship supports those authorities that exist.  To the extent that one’s writings explore other interpretations or other options than those that now exist or are now being held, one’s authorship makes a claim for rival authority that is going to be viewed negatively by those who feel themselves threatened by those alternative scenarios and interpretations.  This need not be done consciously.  An author may be one of those people who is compelled to create by intense and traumatic personal experiences and a sensitive nature and a compulsive need to make sense of one’s own existence, but once one has made a commitment to being an author and creator, in whatever genre of art, one becomes a critic of the world and authorities that exist.

After all, the very fact that one finds reality intolerable in some fashion or that one feels oppressed by the authorities that exist automatically means that one is estranged and opposed in some sense to the behaviors of those authorities that now exist.  It matters not where the fault lies–indeed, authorities who abuse and exploit others and thus compel them to escape their intolerable realities by any and all means available are the authorities who will be the most sensitive and least accepting of the escape of those exploited and abused individuals into intellectual and imaginative freedom.  Those authorities who are less abusive induce less escapism among those whom they rule over and are less intractably hostile to the imaginations and speculations of their contemporaries.  As is often the case in this present world, those who are the most evil are also the most hostile to the natural and inevitable consequences of their evil, because those consequences expose their illegitimacy and wickedness.  The development of escapist views on reality coincides with the imaginative critique of reality, and both are most threatening to those whose behavior in the real world departs the most from that which is ideal.  To the extent that the real approximates the ideal, there is less of an urgent and pressing need for the real to be criticized and delegitimized from the perspective of the ideal, which perhaps may exist only in our hopes and dreams and imagination where our reality is particularly oppressive.

In that light, it is perhaps unsurprising that even despite their strong differences that both Neil Gaiman and C.S. Lewis had such a firm opinion that those who were hostile to escape must themselves be jailers in some fashion.  For at its heart escapist literature is a cry of the heart in dealing with intolerable reality, or a voice crying out in the wilderness about the self-destructive ways of wicked and corrupt elites and authorities.  The prophet who is given a vision of the glorious world to come and the author of fantasy or science fiction whose God-given imagination allows for the creation of alternate worlds or realities are not so far apart when they are both seen as critiques and just condemnation of the world that is.  In the highly competitive world of the struggle for authority in this existence, the authorship of works that point to other possible worlds that could exist if there are changes in our own world amounts to the establishment of rival loci of authority in the world than those authorities who now exist and whose character and competence are being called into question.  Such rival claims of authority, no matter how unconsciously done, will be treated with savage hostility by those who feel insecure in the presence of those whose perspectives are different and whose earnest desire is that the world be different than it is, for with a changed world will come changed authorities and changed priorities, and that will be unacceptable to those who so conspicuously benefit from the status quo.  To see the world as potentially being different than what it is is to proclaim oneself as a revolutionary, whether one realizes it or not.  And those who oppose that escape from intolerable reality reveal themselves as jailers, whether they are willing to admit it or not.  By our actions our characters are revealed.