Nobody escapes to jail

Fantasy, odd as it sounds to say so, is a perfectly rational undertaking.

Ursula Le Guin, No Time to Spare

Ursula Le Guin made her living creating fantasy, so it stands to reason that she would defend it. Yet like Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were highly intelligent, very rational individuals who wrote (and read) fantasy, and one could name any number of others like them. Lewis remembered as a schoolboy that the fantasy stories he read seemed more rational, more relevant to his own life, than the more realistic stories he read. The latter always seemed phony, somehow always unlike the real world.

Fantasy is often equated with daydreaming, which is a waste of time, at least according to most parents, teachers and employers. Better to focus on real people, real problems, real solutions. or so we've been told. They're right, but only up to a point. We all do need to live in reality, but many successful careers, my own included, have been inspired by childhood fantasies?

If fantasy always fails reality, why did our parents and teachers tell us those stories about Cinderella, the Three Bears, the Tortoise and the Hare, the Emperor's New Clothes, etc.? Even in adulthood, don't we sometimes recall some of these stories and relate them somehow to our own lives?

Fantasy is often referred to as escapism, a charge to which Ursula Le Guin had an apt reply: "Escape from real life, responsibility, order, duty, piety, is what the charge implies. But nobody, except the most criminally irresponsible or pitifully incompetent, escapes to jail. The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is 'escapism' an accusation of?"