On Fantasy
by Chris Walley
Let me begin with what may sound like a confession:
I'm British, a Christian, a geologist, and I write fantasy.
It's the last that arouses the real interest and about
which I get lots of questions. One of the most interesting is
this: Why, as all the sales figures and surveys indicate, is
fantasy so popular today?
But, first of all, I need to point out that
"fantasy" is a word that covers an enormous
sprawling range of literature. It isn't
all pagan tales with a strong dose of witchcraft.
Some fantasy could be described as
science fiction with a touch of the supernatural
and some is openly Christian; I'm
happy to have both of those descriptions
applied to my own works. But the range of
values and virtues portrayed in fantasy is
so wide that to reject it all is akin to saying
"all painting is evil."
So why, in an age of triumphant technology,
is fantasy so fashionable, particularly
among the young? I see two factors in
this: one to do with the loss of the frontiers
and the other with the loss of idealism.
The Loss of the Frontiers
Let me explain what I mean by "the loss of
the frontiers" with a fragment of autobiography.
I began studying geology more than 30
years ago partly because I loved the idea of
visiting wild, remote locations——of going to
the frontiers.
Geology largely rewarded that ambition.
In the course of academic and industrial
research, I visited wildernesses where
utter silence reigned, worked in mountains
marked as blanks on even the best
maps, slept in deserts where the stars were
undimmed by streetlights, and battled
through steaming jungles where one could
easily be lost foreve
Today, a generation later, I find that
much of that world has vanished. Now the
wilderness echoes to the sound of vehicles,
the white spaces are filled with contours,
the streetlights are spreading, and with a
handheld GPS you can't get lost anymore.
Tourists stand gawping along the frontiers
of yesteryear.
I believe this taming of the world and
the loss of the frontiers is widely sensed.
The children coming into adulthood in the
West today are the first human generation
ever who face no frontiers. They look
around them and see no undiscovered
countries, no unreachable summits, and no
uncharted seas. The best offered is the
hope that a very, very few of them may,
briefly, make it to Mars—a destination that,
frankly, intrigues the mind far more than
it enchants the heart.
And it's not just places; things have been
tamed. There can be now few creatures of
any size that science has not labeled and
catalogued. Most of the predators that were
feared a few generations ago are teetering
on the edge of extinction; they arouse our
pity, not our fear. The cry of "There's a lion
in the street!" is now not a cue for terror but a call for vets and conservationists.
Everywhere the frontiers have been
reached and the result is a global claustrophobia
that our young people sense even if
they cannot name.
It's this concern that fantasy touches.
Fantasy offers worlds with unlimited vistas,
unclimbed peaks, and unending seas.
In its deep waters and brooding woods
strange and terrible creatures still live.
The far frontiers our world has lost are still
to be found in the unending lands of fantasy.
(Incidentally, this is one reason why the
British have such a long tradition of fantasy
literature; our own wilderness vanished
centuries ago.)
The Loss of Idealism
If the loss of the frontiers is the first factor
in the popularity of fantasy, the second factor
centres on the loss of idealism. Let me
again mention my own experiences here. I
spent around eight years of my working
life teaching at the American University of
Beirut, much of it during Lebanon's more
troubled times. As a young assistant professor
in the early 1980s, I was frequently a
bemused—and sometimes scared—spectator
of the noisy local skirmishes of the civil
war. I learned little about who was fighting
whom, let alone why, but I did learn that
death and disaster weren't the exclusive
fate of the wicked. In fact, I was rather disconcerted
to find that the wicked did
rather well out of the war.
With the Israeli invasion of 1982, things
moved up a notch; tanks and planes got
involved. But the same injustice persisted;
good people died and the wicked escaped.
The Israelis were followed by the wellmeaning
peace-keepers of the Multi-
National Force, and then in February 1983,
I was blown off my chair by the first of the
suicide bomb attacks—the one that nearly
leveled the American Embassy. A few
months after that, my wife and I spent a few
nights with our two infant sons in the basement
as shells landed all around, and a few
days later we were helicoptered out as the fleets of the West quietly vanished over
the horizon.
All was incomprehensibility and confusion,
but what was certain was that the
forces of the good—or at least the well-meaning—
had been defeated by a largely
invisible evil.
Do I need to say that history since has
reinforced the lesson? To try to make the
world a better place is to risk being sent
home in a body bag. Of course, orthodox
biblical Christianity (not to mention
church history) has always taught that
God's great settling of accounts doesn't
occur in this life. But the harshness of the
way this world deals with injustice is still
striking.
Now I feel that this view—that far from
rewarding the righteous, this world simply
stamps on them—is no longer the prerogative
of cynical Brits of a certain age. It's
increasingly wide spread. Even our victories
seem to have an expiry date on them: the
West won the Cold War and got, not lasting
peace, but 9/11. Disillusionment and pessimism
are widespread, and idealism is only
to be found amongst those of excessive faith
or great naivete...or both.
Young people, particularly those from a
Christian or post-Christian culture, are
taught an ethic which says "right will triumph,
evil will lose." Yet as they grow up
they see that, whether on the international,
national, or local scale, this wonderfully
reassuring equation doesn't seem to work.
In reality, in this life evil goes unpunished
and good goes unrewarded.
I believe that this creeping pessimism
about the state of the world is the second
factor that gives fantasy its widespread
attraction. In fantasy—at least in all popular
works of the genre—things are very different.
In fantasy, we're offered a world
where right triumphs: Sauron is
destroyed, the White Witch is slain, and,
however we view J K Rowling's Harry
Potter saga, we know that, in the end,
Lord Voldemort will be defeated. In fantasy,
too, the nature of the forces are clearer
and neater; the boundaries of good and
evil are plainly drawn; and heroes and villains
are clearly distinguished. There are
no Abu Ghraibs or collateral damage in
Middle Earth.
An equal trait of fantasy is the way that
the enemies come out into the open. One
of the many emotions created in the wake
of 9/11 is a bitter frustration that the
enemy remains hidden and elusive. Orc
armies are so much easier to deal with
than Al-Qaeda. In the world of fantasy,
the moral struggle is clearly defined and
well lit.
It's no coincidence that my first thoughts
of the present fantasy cycle were born as I
spent long Beirut evenings behind locked
doors listening to the sound of machine gun
fire. And it's also probably no coincidence
that the British boom in fantasy began
when we had retreated from being a world
power; our thankless experiments at making
a global empire having taught us, to the
point of national cynicism, that this world is
a messy place where injustice is the norm. So we abandoned idealism for pragmatism,
a quiet life, and the business of creating
worlds where goodness did win.
My view then is that whether they
express it or even recognize it, people
today find the world both increasingly
constrained and hostile to idealism.
Fantasy's allure is that it allows access to
worlds of boundless frontiers where justice
ultimately reigns—where goodness
is repaid and evil penalized. The worlds
of the imagination aren't just limitless;
they're better, fairer, and more hopeful
places.
An Increase in Demand
If these observations are correct then I
think we can assume that the demand for
fantasy is likely to increase, rather than
decrease. On all scenarios for the future,
the few remaining frontiers will be soon
be lost and, short of God's merciful intervention,
this world will remain a place
that continually fails to repay those who
seek good. Fantasy is here to stay. And, I
believe, Christians ought to get involved;
after all the best way of driving out the
bad is simply to make a better product.
But there's more. As a Christian I cannot
help but take the view that this longing
for unlimited worlds and the utter
victory of righteousness is an expression
of that desire all human beings have,
however much they may deny it, for that
eternal kingdom over which Christ
reigns for ever.
There'll be no fantasy amid the new
heavens and the new earth; there at last
we won't need it. But in the meantime
the best fantasy fiction speaks deep into
the hearts of men and women. To those
who know Christ, it brings refreshment,
and to those who don't know him, it
offers tantalizing clues that beyond the
limited perspectives of this soiled and
troubled world, there's a place of infinite
glory and eternal justice
Chris Walley grew up in northern England, studied
earth sciences at university, and has a doctorate in geology.
He taught at the American University of Beirut in
Lebanon, consulted with the oil industry in Wales, and
currently teaches geology at Wheaton College. He's the
author of The Lamb among the Stars fantasy series. He
and his wife live in Wales and have two sons, one of
whom is training to be a church youth worker.
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