Lately I’ve been reading The Wild Wood by Charles de Lint, an extraordinary writer whose fiction incorporates myth and magic from many cultures into the “real” world. Today I turned the book over and saw the reviews on the back cover, the first of which read:

“He shows that, far from being mere escapism, contemporary fantasy can be the deep mythic literature of our time.” - The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

I was struck by the fact that, even while praising the book, the reviewer felt the need to defend it against the label of “escapism.” It reminded me how frequently I’ve heard that term used to describe genre fiction, and fantasy in particular. And how often it’s paired with the disparaging “mere,” implying trifling works, of no lasting import, barely worth wasting time on.

How strange, to be so dismissive of works created primarily by and for the imagination. After all, fiction is supposed to be – well – fictional. As in, Making Things Up. And yet many arbiters of Serious Fiction seem to think that the more a piece of fiction diverges from the mundane and everyday, or the particular knowledge and experience of the writer, the less valuable it becomes.

I’ve always been puzzled by the “escapism” epithet. As a child, I fell in love with storybooks not because they took me away from somewhere, but because of all the places they took me to. Oz. A railroad town in 1880s South Dakota. The riverbank under the willows, where Toad and Ratty lived. Pirate ships and South Sea islands, cabins and castles and suburban neighborhoods.

The stories that stayed with me were the ones that left me feeling I had actually been to the world of the book and experienced it with the characters – and, most important, that I knew what it was like.

I knew what it was like to be a young woman in 16th-century England, where following the approved religion one day might be cause for execution the next, and any friend, neighbor or servant might be the one to turn me in. I knew what it was like to travel through Jacobite Scotland, dodging English patrols and mourning as a centuries-old way of life was destroyed forever. What it was like to take the shape of a hawk and hover high on an updraft, to plummet down and feel the hot blood in my throat as I tore into my prey. To hold the fate of armies in my hands, and to make decisions of life and death for thousands of souls. To struggle to do right when there was no right choice, or to succumb to evil and the lure of unlimited power. To rise up against slavery and suffering, or to take a human life.

Reading, of course, is not the same as doing. Maybe I don’t really know what any of those things are like. Even so, what could be more life-expanding and life-enriching than to inhabit the mind of a person who isn’t me, in a place or time I will never visit, that perhaps never existed or will exist, and be able to imagine it so strongly that it lives in my mind with a quality and intensity that matches my actual memories?

What could be more valuable, in these days of global interdependence and global conflict, than practicing being inside the skin of someones – or somethings – who are as different from us as they can possibly be? To think the way they think, to see the world from their background and point of view? To become – however briefly – the Other that we fear?

Of course, there’s still the question – why fantasy? Why expand our experiences to include beings and worlds that exist purely in the imagination?

Perhaps because fantasy literature reminds us that we are not the center of the universe. It suggests that the world exists on its own terms and not simply in relation to humans – that the spirits of raging seas and shadowed woodlands do not answer to us. That there are mysteries we will never understand and forces we will never conquer – and it allows us, if we are willing, to experience the universe from a point of view other than our own.