Of Fantasies and Fantasists

I've commented briefly about our current, rather prevalent, indulgence in fantasy in past posts.  I comment on it more extensively in this post.

Above is an image from the 1963 film Jason and the Argonauts.  I don't know if I saw the film when it was first released, but was a preteen, at least, when I first saw it, at a drive-in theater, I think.  I was quite impressed by the fighting skeletons, and the appearance of the gods in various parts of the movie.  Poseidon was there, as I recall, standing in a pool of water pushing what I assume were fiberglass cliffs apart to allow Jason's boat passage.  There must have been others.  I think there was a hydra.  I can't remember if the Furies were involved or not.  They were in some movie I saw back then, in any case.  I enjoyed these garish displays.

Curiously, fighting skeletons figure in our fantasies once again.  Entire armies of them in various states of decay appear now and then in Game of Thrones.  There must be something about them we find attractive.

I can understand how a preteen and even a teen might enjoy fantasy films along the lines of Jason and the Argonauts.  I find it more difficult to understand why an adult would, but it would appear they did, and do.  They would have to, in order for such films to make money.  Of course, adults may have been and may still be required to attend fantasy movies with children, like those churned out relentlessly by Disney, but it isn't clear to me that they would enjoy doing so.  I saw quite a few of those myself when my daughters were young.

I may be wrong, but it strikes me that young and old now are consumed by fantasy, far more than they have been in the past.  Games and all forms of media are devoted to it.  I have no figures on which to base a comparison, but my guess is that there are far more fantasy stories, games, films, TV, books than there are history, or biography, or documentary non-fiction or historical fiction, and even science fiction.  Perfectly respectable and able writers of science fiction such as George R.R. Martin and C.J. Cherryh have lept into fantasy as a genre, creating wizards, mages, dragons, knights, quests of all sorts to entrance us.  It's like the second coming of Sir Thomas Malory.  This isn't even to mention the vast mound of fantasy erected by J.K Rowling and others, or comic book fantasy like that involving X Men, or Captain America, or Superman, Batman and assorted other super or supra men and women which permeate popular entertainment.

Has this always been the case?  I doubt it.  I suspect it's more a phenomenon that arose in the 20th century, when the written word and film became more readily available to us all.  Technology makes media omnipresent and even more available now.  Magazines, comic books, novels, TV and movies were all available in the 20th century, but now are almost obsolete as computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones provide access to everything to everyone.

Fantasy and magic were common in the ancient world but were common because what was thought to be real included them as part of our lives.  Gods were everywhere, as were stories involving them, and divination and magic, sometimes by or of the gods and sometimes of demons or those men and women who knew how to invoke their power.  Even those philosophers who doubted the common myths involving the gods took them seriously, recognizing that they were real and powerful to most others.  They had a profound practical impact on daily life.

That's not the case now, however.  Now our reality, our lives, are godless, without magic, without heroes.  We can't believe in them, or are in any case wary of appearing to believe in them as part of our day-to-day lives.  But we want them to be or at least wish they were.  We may even hope or possibly believe they can be, if only....something.  The world, as we know it to be, is not enough.

So our dreams and imaginations are populated with them.  They're everywhere but "here."  And they mean more than anything else because we can't accept their absence.  But though there may have been a time when the supernatural or fantasy figures which were made part of religion after the fall of paganism, and which incorporated much of the pagan, sufficed to allow us to tolerate the real, that time seems to be gone.  We're more likely to believe fantasy than religion, however fanciful that religion may be.

 

William Gibson and the Creation of Worlds

I'm rereading Neuromancer and am moved to comment on what makes the superior writer of what's called science fiction such a boon to those who love to read.

All know William Gibson as the creator of cyberpunk, the man who named cyberspace, the matrix, who coined so many words and phrases now in common use when the Internet as we know it did not yet exist.  But reading this early work I'm struck by the imposing realness of the world he creates in this novel, and detailed in the subsequent novels Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive.  As far as I'm concerned, our Internet is far less interesting than the artificial reality he described as accessed by his computer cowboys, though it is not (yet?) here in our world.  But the world in which his cowboys lived and, sometimes, thrived, bears considerable resemblance to the one in which we live.

Consider the ubiquity of drugs use in that world, the omnipresence of new and interesting technologies, the significance of money, the grittiness of the urban landscapes in which people live and die, deals are made and information obtained and traded, the twisting of medicine and genetics to doing service in making money and pursuing and exercising power though the enhancement of physical and mental abilities.  The latter may not be here yet, but one feels that it will come; that it must come.

For some reason, when I try to visualize the world that Gibson shows us in these novels, the landscapes we see in the movie Blade Runner always comes to my mind.  That's what I see when the Sprawl or Chiba City are mentioned.  I'm surprised that a movie hasn't been made of Neuromancer.  I would prefer such a movie to the sword and sorcery epics we're being dubiously treated to instead in the form of Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones and their imitations.  Odd that we obsess over faux castles and kingdoms, swords and magic; there's something adolescent about it.

Which is not to criticize either Tolkien or George R.R. Martin, both of them being superb creators of worlds themselves.  Other such creators are (or were) Frank Herbert who made the Dune universe, and Philip Jose Farmer for his Riverworld.  C.J. Cherryh has made more than one interesting world, as has Dan Simmons, the maker of Hyperion and the Shrike.  Orson Scott Card, when he is not busy moralizing, has also manufactured fascinating alternate realities.

It is unsurprising that it is in science fiction and fantasy that the worlds are created and live and are experienced.  Nowhere else is the imagination given such free reign; nowhere else is it the case that new and different realities are expected.  But it is the gift of Gibson and others to make these realities simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar.  Outlandish worlds somehow turn out to be uninteresting.  It's impossible to picture oneself in worlds that are entirely unreal, and one must picture oneself somewhere in order for it to hold one's interest and attention; in order for it to be worth the effort of reading or thinking, or dreaming. 

Science fiction is a curious genre, though.  Great science fiction can fascinate in a good way, but science fiction that is not great can fascinate in a bad way.  The many versions of Star Trek and Star Wars are examples of science fiction that is not great.  They are not bad, really, but they are silly.  This may come of the need evidently felt to come up with aliens who always seem to be far too much like human beings, but human beings who are comical or irritating or mystical in one sense or another and used as expositive devices.  We see the results of the fascination with science fiction that is not great in conventions and cosplay, in a devotion to the Klingon language or to The Force, in dreaming one is a Jedi Knight or superhero. 

The worlds of great science fiction are disturbingly real; those of science fiction that is not great are cartoonish.  It's regrettable that the science fiction we see translated into visual media these days is that science fiction which generates cartoon realities, primarily those of the superhero.  This suggests we desire to escape our own world, which is understandable.  But to escape into cartoons is only to escape reality, not to reimagine it and think of it.