Find Your World: The Value of Escapism

I've heard that old gripe time and again that commercial fiction, genre fiction, fiction-as-entertainment, or whatever you please -- that all of that is "worthless schlock and mindless drivel," as a professor of mine once put it. Self-important scribblers of fiction-as-art so often condemn the pulpy volumes that populate the shelves of the bookstore in the mall and cling like geriatric bats to the racks at the used paperback shop, making the rounds again and again until they decay into powder and memories. But there has to be a reason that these things hang on while the ultra-limited chapbooks and one-shot acid-induced exercises in irony that tend to emerge from the deformed chrysalis of the average MFA program are soon forgotten and chipped up for toilet paper. Simply put, I believe, we are in love with the ideas that escapist fiction offers -- but why?

I think the answer can be pegged pretty easily if we look at the fiction itself. At the moment, two things rule my life outside of school: Sword and Planet fiction and the video games I play. Sword and Planet, for those unfamiliar, is a subgenre of fantastic fiction that's two parts fantasy and one part science fiction. It operates in terms of pacing and tone much like historical adventure (Sword and Sandal -- think Ben Hur) and weird fantasy (Sword and Sorcery -- think Conan), with the single exception that it takes place on another planet -- hence the name -- to which the protagonist, typically an average Earthman, has been transported.

Usually, the hero is either an anachronism or a nobody on Earth (sometimes he's both), and his life holds no prospect for happiness there. However, on being transported to the new planet, he becomes a great hero. He may have special physical abilities, or his outmoded, romantic, and combat-inclined world view turns out for once to be an asset, enabling him to beat the bad guys and get the girl over the course of his stint on the other world. At the end of the story, he is often forcibly compelled home to Earth, much to his agony, and the story leaves off as the hero struggles vainly to return to his adopted homeworld. Provided any sequels, we can be sure that he will find his way and will yield as many follow-up stories as the readers will consume.

For most people, this sounds pretty kitschy. Me, too. I think it's terribly ridiculous, and that's why I love it. I think the reason that Sword and Planet draws so much derision from "serious" writers is the exact same reason that it is so cultishly popular with us unwashed plebes. To get it, though, you have to go way back with me in time. In my case, we're going back to the early Reagan Administration, but your temporal mileage may vary.

Whatever your destination, think back on your childhood. There was probably a time when you imagined going Someplace Awesome, a pretty much nonexistent but still awesome location where everything you wanted to exist and/or happen would take on an uncompromisingly verifiable physicality. Dragons? Check. Unicorns? Not for me, but if you like them, then check. Badass swords? Yup. Powers? If you dig them. Bad guys to fight? Check. A world where you and you alone are the coolest of the cool, the baddest of the badass? Doubleplus check.

Maybe you never had daydreams like that, but something similar probably crawled through your brain once or twice, and even if you never did want a mishmash of album covers, the toybox, and your own imagination to spring to life, you did want something you couldn't have, wanted to be somewhere, someone that would never be. Even if it was just that you wished you were the prettiest girl in the 8th grade or the toughest guy in the school but you knew that was never going to happen, then you've tasted this wine of which I speak.

We still do this kind of stuff. Who hasn't slid into a daydream at work, on the road, or even just out in town? Even the cranky stuff counts. For instance, I imagined terrorizing the cashier at the Wal-Mart the other day and considered possibly attempting to save the world from the roving pack of children in the parking lot, but I'd rather not be magically transported to jail, so I didn't do it. On a moderately less misanthropic note, I often just want to ride off into the sunset on my way to Adventure (which I believe may be in Alaska) and get away from the unending annoyance and complication of daily life.

Of course, the time machine and matter transporters aren't quite ready yet, so I still have to contend with bills, grocery shopping, and whiny students who email me at three in the morning wanting special treatment after a bout of negligent behavior. Thus, I have to find my escape elsewhere, and that usually means fiction. However, when I'm writhing in a vat of my own cranky disillusionment with the world, the last thing I want is to be reminded by some "literary artist" that life is an unmitigated, inescapable, roiling sea of Suck. I already received that memo, thanks. I don't desire in my free time to be reminded of it and compelled to consider taking a flying leap or smashing my car into a derelict retaining wall somewhere. Maybe that's ironic and artistic and gets you posthumous Real Live Writer Cred or something, but I'll pass.

No, I'd rather jam my head into the sands of another world and indulge myself for a bit before diving back in to the unpleasant struggles of this one. After all, for the moments during which I'm engaged in the struggles of that fictional hero, I get to come along for the ride. I indulge that escapist impulse that civilization has buried deep, deep inside the soft yellow stockpiles of pizza and Chinese food that will carry me through any possible oncoming ice age. For a brief, fleeting instant, I, too, can find myself on another world where my ill-matched philosophies and inclinations are an asset instead of a burden. I can put on my space sandals and believe, if only for an instant, that there's something more epic out there for me than a flavorless destiny that includes paying bills, doing the laundry, and struggling to be allowed to do my job in spite of the "support" structures supplied by the establishment.

That chance to momentarily step out of the constraints of one's fate is powerfully compelling. During some of the most stressful times in my life, I did my strongest indulging in such fiction. As a result, stories like A Princess of Mars are potent medicine for me even if I've read them ten or fifteen times. That's what they're made for.

I'm reminded of a short story I read a week or so ago while immersing myself in the subgenre for the sake of my own work. "Kaldar, World of Antares" by Edmond Hamilton is nothing special. If anything, it's downright ordinary. Published in the Ace Books anthology Swordsmen in the Sky in 1964, it's the story of Stuart Merrick, a poor, unattached young man who answers an ad in a newspaper for a lucrative employment opportunity. As it turns out, Merrick's would-be bosses want to teleport him to a planet in the Antares star system to see if there is any life there. Merrick would be stuck there for a number of days, and would then be automatically returned. He might find himself on an airless world or a volcanic world, so there is a great risk of death even if there are no hostile natives. Merrick has nothing to lose, though, so he takes the job.

Upon his arrival, he is promptly made the Chan, or ruler, of the human population of Kaldar. There ensues a quick-paced adventure in which he fights spider people, hunts down traitors, and eventually saves the girl. But then Merrick is transported back to Earth as was the original plan. He rails at his employers demanding they send him back. They agree to do so after he's told them what he has seen, but they want to know: what could he have found there that is so compelling?

His answer is short and pointed: "I found -- my world!"

Merrick's answer is the key to our mystery as well. Earth was never Merrick's world, just as it was not John Carter's world or Carson Napier's world. It did not contain the things that would enable any of these heroes of other planets to live a powerful, fulfilling life that was characterized by a great destiny and a complete fulfillment of their ideals about society. Most Sword and Planet heroes are indigents, misfits, or living anachronisms. They are their universe's respective Last Romantics, caught in the flow of time and stranded on a shore where none of the rules they believe in apply. But then -- there they are, on a new world, and all that starts to change.

I've seen this in other kinds of media, too. There's an entire subset of Japanese animation and comic books that focuses on young, overstressed teenage girls being transported into another world or being shown that beneath the humdrum overlay of their own world, there is actually a secret struggle going on, and they are a necessary part of it. We see that in the myth of comic book superheroes, too, although the tendency in anime and manga more than in Western comics is to make the protagonist at least superficially similar to the audience.

And then there's video games. I won't touch on MMORPGs like World of Warcraft here because I don't know much about them. On the other hand, I do indulge in finite, story driven games. Most recently my husband prevailed upon me to bless the purchase of Brutal Legend, which is a game for the XBox 360. At first I wasn't sure about it, but as I had heard that its exclusively heavy metal soundtrack involved Manowar (the best band in the mutliverse, if you don't know), I figured it was worth a shot.

Essentially, the story of Brutal Legend revolves around a roadie named Eddie Riggs who finds himself transported to another world. Here on Earth, Riggs is trapped by his profession, working for hypocritical musicians who claim to be heavy metal performers, but who actually contain a higher percentage of poseur in their bloodstream than the entirety of the Glam scene in the 80s put together. The band members treat Riggs poorly, willfully breaking his equipment and telling him to "join the modern world" and create sets that "speak more to our tween demographic," implying that he is an anarchonism. However, Riggs can do nothing about these abuses if he wants to keep his job. He is, in fact, so dedicated to that job that he risks his life to save the band members that so despise him.

While watching his ridiculous charges perform, Riggs asks another roadie, "Do you ever feel like you were born in the wrong time? Like you should have been born earlier, when the music was real?" Shortly thereafter, a chain of events unfolds that leads to Riggs lying in a pool of blood after a stage accident. Some of that blood drips onto his monstrous belt buckle, and the item, which is revealed to be some kind of artifact, summons up a colossal beast made of metal and fire that facilitates the transportation of Riggs to another world.



Once he arrives in the other world, Riggs finds that everything he knows -- his music, his knack for construction, and his love of hot rod cars, among other things -- places him in a unique position of power. The human inhabitants of this world are suffering under the abuses of a demonic overlord, and Riggs brings them the power and the knowledge they need to fight back and free themselves from the clutches of their oppressors. Here, suddenly, Riggs is not an anachronism. He is not an outmoded leftover of a bygone age. In fact, as the game's narrator notes, he and he alone can do what must be done to save the world.

It should be no surprise, then, that I have enjoyed Brutal Legend a great deal. I have my own feelings of temporal misplacement, having received an infusion of Awesome and Badass from older relatives when I was a kid. My music tastes are stuck in the 80s, and I love fiction styles that quit being popular about five years after I was born. Much of the modern trends in both areas turn my stomach, and my personal philosophy is certainly not in line with the weak, submissive, ankle-grasping culture of the modern world. I've sat on my steps many a night, puffing my way toward an inevitable date with lung cancer, wishing there were some hidden place somewhere to which I could go.

To paraphrase Merrick, I want to find my world.

Alas, the line between fiction and life is, quite often, the bottom line. There isn't some Magical World of Badass where all our petty struggles can be exchanged for epic conflict. If there were such a thing, we'd all move there, and this world would be a pretty empty place. Bottom line is that I have to pay my rent and the crush of student loan bills that I've taken on in order to "educate" myself. Bottom line is that I have to behave on a certain level or I don't make the money I need to pay those bills. Bottom line is that half the things I want to do will send me straight to prison, and that's not the kind of world change I want.

Perhaps that's why I write -- and why I write what I write. I can't do certain things, but my protagonists can. I can't get out from under a ridiculous press of ivory tower nonsense and gilded unicorn crap, but my heroes have a way of extricating themselves from such things. I'm subject to my own body, traitor that it is. My protagonists never are. They may struggle briefly, but they always win. They may take some licks, but they stand supreme when the sun goes down. No struggle or sacrifice is ever in vain. Victory always comes, and bravery is always rewarded. Clearly life in this world isn't like that, and until I finish my time machine, we've got no chance of reprogramming the old girl. So what do you do when that fact presses too hard?

Throw that self-important chapbook in the garbage and go find your world.