Why Tell a Story?

Tolkien always said that stories should be told for their own sake; not as tracts written to advance the author's personal ethos. However, though fantasy is primarily a means of escapism, it can, in a secondary way, reveal something to the reader about the real world and himself.

The mechanics of this revelatory process are best illustrated by an observation that's often made about Star Trek. What Gene Roddenberry really had in mind for all those actors with plastic spoons stapled to their heads wasn't to make them aliens, but representatives of different aspects of human nature. The fantastical sci-fi context was a sub-creation that allowed the audience to suspend our disbelief so we could enjoy an entertaining story and hopefully learn something at the same time.

That being said, truly distinct fantasy worlds are extremely rare, if they exist at all. The reason is simple: every author lives in the real world and must draw upon it as a primary source. The result is that every fantasy and sci-fi setting contains elements of our primary world that are juxtaposed, exaggerated, or tweaked until a new sub-creation emerges.

The sub-creation process admits of varying degrees. At the near end you have something like urban fiction, wherein fantastic events take place in a near-photo realistic version of our world that is only different in that fantastic events take place there. Hellblazer form DC/Vertigo is the best example of this setting I can think of. At the far end we find cosmologies so bizarre that they bear hardly any resemblance to the known world. Some of the alien worlds imagined by H. P. Lovecraft fit this bill. Occupying the middle rung of the fantasy world continuum are settings that fundamentally resemble the actual past. Robert E. Howard's Conan cycle takes the literal approach, placing the barbarian king's adventures in a forgotten past age. Most mainstream fantasy settings simply approximate an idealized version of the middle ages. Examples are too numerous to name.

Whatever the degree of departure from reality, the author's primary focus should be to fashion a sub-creation different enough from the primary world to make the reader leave his mundane concerns behind while not straying so far as to disable suspension of disbelief. This delicate balance can be upset in the opposite way, whereby a supposed fantasy world contains so many allusions to primary world concepts, institutions, and historical events as to be jarring to the reader.

An author's primary weapon against these dangers is a solid foundation of thorough research. "Write what you know" has never been so apt. Borrowing popularly-known iconography and historical memes for a dash of verisimilitude is all well and good, but a writer should take care before uncritically swallowing fragments of the popular zeitgeist. The glut of pseudo-Arthurian tropes drawn from Bugs Bunny rather than Malory or White can get tedious; second only to the ubiquitous old black legend chestnut of the highly-organized, officially-sponsored zealots who go about strangling suspected demoniacs and generally ramming their superstitions down simple folks' throats. (Constructive advice for medieval fantasy authors: please consult histories on the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition that weren't written as colonialist propaganda).

In conclusion, fantasy as a storytelling device works by rearranging the real world until the audience forgets where they are, allowing the author to weave a tale that primarily entertains while granting a fresh perspective on the human condition.