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Is Fantasy So Fantastic? Yes!Dateline: 18th January, 2004There was an awful rainbow once in heaven; So wrote John Keats in Lamia. Keats was writing in a period in which science and technology were beginning to explode, when things which had seemed supernatural or beyond our understanding were beginning to be understood. The rainbow was no longer a mysterious apparition in the sky but a natural result of light being broken into its component colours by refraction through water droplets in the air. It was "given in the catalogue of common things". Lamia was published in 1820 and since then we've had nigh on two centuries of scientific and technological development. We understand so much more about the world - indeed, about the universe - and yet, as Philip points out, the BBC's Big Read suggests that s huge number of people not only read but love children's books, and, in particular, children's fantasy books. The huge popularity of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, in both book and film form, further testify to that fact - not to mention Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Star Wars, Star Trek, and so on. Why is it so? Numerous reasons, really. For a start, people feel that we are in the grip of forces over which we have no control. The more we learn about the way the universe works, the less power over it we seem to have. The more we learn about science, the more we realise that no one person could ever hope to comprehend life, the universe and everything. The more we look at the world around us, the more we realise that we have little control over our own lives: government, local authorities, the police, big business - they not only know more about us than we know about ourselves, but we are also helpless when confronted by them. I got a parking ticket a couple of weeks ago - the first ever, and for parking in a place where I had parked for twenty years. £30 fine if paid within fourteen days, otherwise £60. I could have appealed, but that would take far more than fourteen days and so, if my appeal failed (and I suspect it would), I'd end up having to pay the full amount. So I paid up - but that didn't stop me from imagining what I would have said at such an appeal, what I would dearly love to say to the traffic warden, and imagining the slow and extremely painful suffering I would like to inflict on him/her! We often have no recourse when we feel we have been treated unfairly except to retreat into fantasy. And if the world really does seem to be such a big, bad, unfair place, isn't it nice to be presented with a picture of a world where, in spite of adversity, good always wins in the end? And if the weakest part of our society - the children - can conquer evil, there's hope for us! You might describe it as escapism, but it's more than that. It's a defence mechanism, a way to help us deal with an increasingly cold and indifferent world, a world in which we as individuals count for nothing. Oh yes, and they're bloody good stories, too! << Philip Fisher's repudiation of fantasy Articles Indices:
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