I have, for a few days now, been contemplating a very interesting question which a reader called Alex posed to me. He said (I assume it’s a he, but there’s now way to tell as written diction is so rarely gender-biased, and I know this is a can of worms waiting to be opened so I will forego the pleasure for now), that since we live in times where even our biological clocks can be tinkered with and digital worlds like ‘Second Life ’ make it so easy to be someone else and live a fantasy-filled, yet realistic, life, is there still a place for fantasy fiction in our life?

First Alex I would like to say that I know where you live, I have now purchased my ski mask and sharpened axe and I will be around tonight! Seriously though, this is a good question. Asking even if reading has a place in a world that lives on soundbites, digests, RSS Feeds, podcasts and emailed newsletters, is a very valid question.

To blithely say ‘yeah, reading is going to be around forever so what’s the prob?’ is to miss the point entirely and Alex has raised a very valid one. Reading as in the old-fashioned sense of the word of curling up with a book and losing yourself in someone else’s world for a while may not be around forever. I love reading and in this day and age the number of times I still do that, as an author who has to read, are about 30% of the amount I used to do and I am part of the trend.

This also begs the question of why should one choose to read a fantasy novel as opposed to entering an online fantasy world which is going to be a lot more interactive. Yet in doing so, in achieving this degree of interaction we, unconsciously, or perhaps because there is very little other choice, we recreate the structures, pressures and interactions in our fantasy worlds (like Simms and Second Life) so closely to our own real life that the ‘escape’ we achieve appears to be limited in terms of the challenges we choose to face.

I mean what good will it do to ‘escape’ to Second Life if I work there as a writer, have to do readings and need to go out and buy food and earn a living, albeit a digital one?  Which, I suppose, is exactly why we need fantasy fiction.

A good fantasy novel acts as an escape valve. It allows us to enter a world where magic works, where swords cleave flesh as cleanly as a hot knife goes through butter, where ethereal women do not need to struggle with their weight and where men are muscular without needing to go to the gym three times a week and sweat their guts thin on the treadmill. A fantasy novel does all that and more and it does it effortlessly, convincingly and without us realising it and it then goes on to do something else which all good literature should do and that is it strips away all pretences, it strips away all camouflage and it allows us to examine deep issues in a way that no other literature can permit.

Under the bright light of the fantasy fiction novel right, wrong and all the shades of free will begin to shine like coals in the dark. This is why we still need fantasy fiction and I guess that’s my answer to Alex. Fantasy fiction, like good poetry makes our life better by making us better than what we might otherwise be.