J.R.R. Tolkien, in his celebrated essay on “faerie stories,” defended literature that is denigrated as “escapist.” While the term has been used to denote writings of frivolous entertainment that is divorced from the concerns of the real world, he pointed to instances in which an act of escape was one of courage and even nobility—say the breakout of a prisoner of war or the flight of refugees from a tyrannical state.
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Given his abhorrence of modernity in general, his escape to fantasy constituted a protest against the state of the real world. He consequently rejected all attempts at interpreting his works as allegories of current events, dismissing suggestions that Sauron and his hordes represented the fascists or that the Ring of Power stood for the atomic bomb.
For scholars who study literature in historical context, however, it is impossible to ignore an aspect of his fantasy that was drawn from life. His story of hobbits who leave the comforts of the Shire to travel across a world of terrible dangers and monstrous evil, and his friend C. S. Lewis’s tale of children who go through a wardrobe into such a world, are reflective of the real-life adventures of two young men that they were who left their sheltered middle-class lives in England to face the horrors of trench warfare in World War I.
In that sense, their imaginings could be read as both a flight from and a struggle with the traumas that they experienced, an engagement with reality by means other than the brutal realism employed by fellow veteran novelists and memoirists like Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Ford Madox Ford, Ernest Hemingway, Erich Maria Remarque, Ernst Jünger, and Henri Barbusse.
In my most recent reading of The Lord of the Rings, the passage I found the most moving occurs at the very end when the hobbits return home after their harrowing adventures only to be faced with utter indifference by their own people—a scene that is found in many works by veterans.
In my most recent reading of The Lord of the Rings, the passage I found the most moving occurs at the very end when the hobbits return home after their harrowing adventures only to be faced with utter indifference by their own people—a scene that is found in many works by veterans.
As both a historian and a fiction writer, this notion of speculative fiction as escapism as well as engagement with lived experience interested me as greatly as my own participation in the genre never felt like a simple act of flight from reality. In the scholarship on the genre, it resonated with me deeply when I learned that a significant number of speculative writers had spent a part of their early lives in foreign countries.
Isaac Asimov immigrated from Russia as a child; J. G. Ballard was born in China and witnessed the Japanese occupation, his experience fictionalized in Empire of the Sun; James Tiptree Jr., who shocked the science fiction world when she revealed herself to be a woman named Alice Sheldon, accompanied her parents on trips to Central Africa when she was a young girl.
More recent writers include Bruce Sterling, who spent some of his teenage years in India; Jeff VanderMeer, part of whose childhood was in the Fiji Islands; and Nalo Hopkinson, who was born in Jamaica but also lived in Guyana and Trinidad before immigrating to Canada. Others left their country as young men in the military and, like Tolkien and Lewis, entered into the maelstrom of war—Kurt Vonnegut in World War II, Gene Wolfe in the Korean War, and Joe Haldeman in Vietnam.
It seems natural, almost common sensical, that people who had such multinational and multicultural experiences would not only find it easy to understand the notion of alternate realities, but the more creative among them would develop the capacity to imagine whole new worlds, whether in the language of science and technology (science fiction) or magic and the supernatural (fantasy). As Bruce Sterling explained,
It’s a period of being pulled out of your cultural matrix. When you come back to the reality, it’s never the same because you see it with bigger eyes. The experience of alienation is really crucial to the evolution of the sensibilities of many SF writers.
Interestingly, this quote comes from an interview with the speculative literature scholar Larry McCaffery who revealed that he read science fiction while living with his parents in the “alienating environment” of a military base in Okinawa (Across a Wounded Universe).
As the son of a South Korean diplomat, I went on my first plane trip when I was two months old, from Tokyo to Seoul. At the age of four, our family moved to Vienna, where I spoke Korean at home and German at school. I returned to Korea four years later where, some time in elementary school, I discovered science fiction for the first time, in a series of classics translated for young readers that included H. G. Wells’s Time Machine, Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, and John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids.
Given my early travels, entering into stories that took place in radically different worlds did not feel like a flight from reality but rather reenactments of the familiar act of moving from one country, one culture, and one language to another.
When I was eleven, we moved to Wellington, New Zealand, where I began to learn English. As I had always been an avid reader, it was deeply frustrating to start at a rudimentary level again, struggling through the language of books whose contents were too juvenile for me.
In order to rectify the situation, at the end of my first school year in the country, I went to a bookstore and randomly picked the biggest novel I could find so I could plow through it with the help of a dictionary. Perhaps my future fiction writing might have gone on a different trajectory if I had selected Tolstoy’s War and Peace or Dickens’s Little Dorrit, but the book I happened to choose was an omnibus edition of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings which played a significant role in making me a fluent reader.
When I eventually became a writer of speculative fiction on my own right, I became cognizant of how useful the genre has been in exploring what my wandering life has made of me, how people of different cultures perceive reality, and how we rely on sometimes wildly imaginative stories to understand ourselves, provide consolation and hope (Tolkien’s “eucatastrophe”), and to explore the mind’s capacity to think and travel beyond the material world it is trapped in. In that sense, speculative fiction can be a powerful tool to teach tolerance for the perspectives of other people and cultures.
In a recent conversation I had with Nisi Shawl, listening to her testimony on becoming an African American writer of speculative fiction, it occurred to me that one did not have to have been a traveler at a formative age to become the kind of writer I have described in this essay. Being a member of a minority racial or ethnic group, which I have also been most of my life, affords one the same experience of living in multiple realities.
As Nisi told me, “If you are black, living in white America is living in an alien world.” And the necessity of learning to navigate through that fraught world, for instance by code-switching, can provide rich materials for those who turn to speculative fiction to make sense of their lives.
When I entered adulthood, I decided on an academic career in history, a subject I also loved since childhood perhaps for the same reason I was drawn to speculative fiction, namely its exploration of worlds that are different from that of the present. After all, as L. P. Hartley famously wrote, the past is a foreign country.
The necessity of learning to navigate through that fraught world, for instance by code-switching, can provide rich materials for those who turn to speculative fiction to make sense of their lives.
After I settled down to the life of a history professor at a university in the Midwest, I ceased to wander physically, but my mind continued to travel, through time as a historian and through other realities as a writer. In that sense, my scholarly and literary activities have functioned as reenactments of my earlier peripatetic life, allowing me to grapple with all that I have experienced—the disorientation, the loneliness, and the trauma but also the joy, the wonder, and the transcendence.
Speculative fiction provided me with a particularly fruitful and pleasurable means of doing so as it afforded me the means to both escape the mundane world and to ponder my life as a wanderer of worlds. Fantasy is, no doubt, escapism, but it is also engagement with reality by means other than conventional realism.
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The Melancholy of Untold History by Minsoo Kang is available via William Morrow.
