As a suddenly thirsting reader I escaped first of all to what was then called Outer Space. I read a lot of science fiction, which as I have said is only a twentieth-century subset of fantasy. And a lot of it was, in strict literary terms, rubbish. But this was good rubbish. It was like an exercise bicycle for the mind—it doesn’t take you anywhere, but it certainly tones up the muscles.
Irrelevant? I first came across any mention of ancient Greek civilization in a fantasy book—by Mary Renault. But in the fifties most schools taught history like this: there were the Romans who had a lot of baths and built some roads and left. Then there was a lot of undignified pushing and shoving until the Normans arrived, and history officially began.
We did Science, too, in a way. Yuri Gagarin was spinning around above our heads, but I don’t recall anyone at school ever mentioning the fact. I don’t even remember anyone telling us that science was not about messing around with chemicals and magnets, but rather a way of looking at the universe.
Science fiction looked at the universe all the time. I make no apology for having enjoyed it. We live in a science fiction world: two miles down there you’d fry and two miles up there you’d gasp for breath, and there is a small but significant chance that in the next thousand years a large comet or asteroid will smack into the planet. Finding this out when you’re thirteen or so is a bit of an eye-opener. It puts acne in its place, for a start.
Then other worlds out there in space got me interested in this one down here. It is a small mental step from time travel to palaeontology, from swords ’n’ sorcery fantasy to mythology and ancient history. Truth is stranger than fiction; nothing in fantasy enthralled me as much as reading of the evolution of mankind from protoblob to newt, tree shrew, Oxbridge arts graduate, and eventually to tool-using mammal.
I first came across words like ecologist and overpopulation in science fiction books in the late fifties and early sixties, long before they had become fashionable. Yes, probably Malthus had said it first—but you don’t read Malthus when you’re eleven, though you might read someone like John Brunner or Harry Harrison because their books have got an exciting spaceship on the cover.
I also came across the word neoteny, which means “remaining young.” It’s something which we as humans have developed into a survival trait. Other animals, when they are young, have a curiosity about the world, a flexibility of response, and an ability to play which they lose as they grow up. As a species we have retained it. As a species, we are forever sticking our fingers into the electric socket of the universe to see what will happen next. It is a trait that will either save us or kill us, but it is what makes us human beings. I would rather be in the company of people who look at Mars than people who contemplate humanity’s navel—other worlds are better than fluff.
And I came across a lot of trash. But the human mind has a healthy natural tendency to winnow out the good stuff from the rubbish. It’s like gold mining: you have to shift a ton of dirt to get the gold; if you don’t shift the dirt, you won’t find the nugget. As far as I am concerned, escapist literature let me escape to the real world.
So let’s not get frightened when the children read fantasy. It is the compost for a healthy mind. It stimulates the inquisitive nodes. It may not appear as “relevant” as books set more firmly in the child’s environment, or whatever hell the writer believes to be the child’s environment, but there is some evidence that a rich internal fantasy life is as good and necessary for a child as healthy soil is for a plant, for much the same reasons.
Of course, some may read no other kind of fiction all their lives (although in my experience science fiction fans tend to be widely read outside the field). Adult SF fans may look a bit scary when they come into bookshops, some of them have been known to wear plastic pointy ears, but people like that are an unrepresentative minority and are certainly no weirder than people who, say, play golf. At the very least they are helping to keep the industry alive, and providing one of the best routes to reading that there can be.
Here’s to fantasy as the proper diet for the growing soul. All human life is there: a moral code, a sense of order, and, sometimes, great big green things with teeth. There are other books to read, and I hope children who start with fantasy go on to read them. I did. But everyone has to start somewhere.
Please call it fantasy, by the way. Don’t call it “magical realism,” that’s just fantasy wearing a collar and tie, mark-of-Cain words, words used to mean “fantasy written by someone I was at university with.” Like the fairy tales that were its forebears, fantasy needs no excuses.
One of the great popular novelists of the early part of this century was G. K. Chesterton. Writing at a time when fairy stories were under attack, for pretty much the same reason as books can now be covertly banned in some schools because they have the word witch in the title, he said: “The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons. But children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed.”
MAGIC KINGDOMS
Sunday Times, 4 July 1999
When the third Harry Potter book came out, the Sunday Times asked me to address the subject of why the British seem to be so keen to write fantasy. I think the full brief was: “We need it by Thursday.” When it was printed, as “Fantasy Kingdom,” it turned out that some editor had kindly assumed that “numinous” was a mistyping of “luminous” and had changed it. Sigh.
I remember a back garden I used to see from the train. It was a very small garden for a very small house, and it was sandwiched between the thundering railway line, a billboard, and a near-derelict factory.
I don’t know what a Frenchman or an Italian would have made of it. A terrace, probably, with a few potted plants and some trellis to conceal the worst of postindustrial squalor. But this was an Englishman’s garden, so he’d set out to grow, if not Jerusalem, then at least Jerusalem artichokes. There was a rockery, made of carefully placed concrete lumps (the concrete lump rockery is a great British contribution to horticulture, and I hope one is preserved in some outdoor museum somewhere). There was a pond; the fish probably had to get out to turn around. There were roses. There was a tiny greenhouse made of old window frames nailed together (another great British invention). Never was an area so thoroughly gardened, in fact, as that patch of cat-infested soil.
No attempt had been made to screen off the dark satanic mills, unless the runner beans counted. To the gardener, in the garden, they did not exist. They were in another world.