Fantasy fiction, always, has a way to make the difficult things look easy and bring into sharp relief things which are hard to articulate within any other type of context or, indeed, any other genre. You’re quite right to suppose that the same thing could be said of almost any other type of writing. Words have the ability to create a verisimilitude which takes us out of ourselves and allows us to see things which we can perhaps sense but cannot articulate with sufficient clarity to think about.

Of all the types of writing three stand out especially as having the ability to do this almost by magic and with no apparent effort, provided, of course, the writer is skilled enough to pull it off. In no apparent order they are: poetry, science fiction and fantasy.

In terms of marketing we have found it convenient to lump science fiction and fantasy together but in terms of what they are as vehicles of expression this makes about as much sense as lumping the bicycle and the bullet train together on the principle that somehow, in the act of transportation, there are wheels involved.

Each of these three forms of writing has distinct tropes and a separate ability of conveying what it is that it is being used to convey and they are united only by their ability to make the reader transcend the conceptual limitations of everyday thought and actually visualise alternate realities and alternate ways of looking at the world not as mere exercises in stylistic writing but as viable notions worthy of serious contemplation not just for the practicalities they reveal but also for the underlying concepts that govern them and which are, by nature, reflected in the workings of our world.

I suppose I need to probably explain, to some degree, what I mean here and even give you an example or two but this is my blog and if you are reading this it’s up to you to understand what it is I am actually saying.

It has often been thought that poetry, science fiction and fantasy are purely escapist genres, written only for entertainment whereas all other forms of fiction are somewhat more didactic and have therefore a greater degree of acceptability by the mainstream who feel that their reading needs to be somewhat more ‘serious’ than the popularly accepted notion of escapist literature that, for the lack of a better word, ‘taints’ science fiction, poetry and fantasy fiction, permits.

Yet, fantasy permits the writing of the unthinkable with a clarity that is derived of the tropes of its genre and which is incapable of being rendered by any other type of writing.

In the writing of fantasy fiction and in the reading of a fantasy novel we manage to transport our thoughts and ourselves to those places which exist in the gaps between worlds. We explore notions which are immutable and hence applicable in any setting and test those which are derived only as part of time and place.