Find the True

As a writer of science fiction and fantasy, I don’t spend a lot of time steeped in reality.  This morning, I was worried about how an artificially-intelligent machine would track down one of its friends without the enemy spotting it along the way; later today, I will turn my attention to a reincarnated princess and the nightmares she has of her past life.  For me, the word “reality” is loosely defined.

I wonder, however, if it’s not the same way for writers at the other end of the literary spectrum.  I read an article recently about memoirists, who possibly have the most right to call their works “real”.  These people are writing about their own lives, on which one would hope they would be the foremost authority.  Yet many memoirists talk about how they have to stretch the truth, adding things that may not have happened or skimming over events that they deem unimportant to the story they’re trying to tell.  That’s the point, after all—they’re reshaping their own lives into a cohesive, sensible story line, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned about life, it’s not cohesive and it’s rarely sensible.  Thus, creative nonfiction is a misnomer—there’s a lot more fiction in there than readers might think.

So what about my “fantasy”?  Is there nothing real in that?  If that were true, I doubt anyone would read it, and yet fantasy remains a very popular genre.  In the end, fantasy explores aspects of reality that we don’t often encounter in our daily lives.  What happens when a man can literally look into the darkness of his own soul?  Ask Ged, the main character of Ursula LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea.  What would be the result if a man could use words to corrupt others’ beliefs and values?  Check out the Graceling series by Kristin Cashore to find out.  How might the widespread use of robots change the way humans interact with one another?  See Asimov’s I, Robot for details.  There are limitations in our “reality”.  Fantasy and science fiction opens doors to more possibilities than this world allows, taking average human beings and planting them in extraordinary circumstances.

Where is the boundary line in literature?  What’s real and what isn’t?  I think people have been asking that question for a long, long time.  They’ll probably still be asking it in five hundred years when cities fly and humans are living on the Moon.  Writers are simply the first to ask “what if?”, and from the answers they come up with, we can learn more about our own "reality".

**The title is a nod to Anne McCaffrey, from the first in her Harper Hall trilogy, Dragonsong.