On Dreaming in Darkness: An Introduction

The earliest stories humans told each other were fantasies. Legends and heroes, monsters and magic, creation and destruction; we as a species have always been taking the same brain advantage that let us create fire and tools and turning it to imagining things we’ve never seen. We can never really know, but all the evidence suggests that as soon as humans were humans, we've been imagining other worlds to help us in the real one. We want to know how people, whether they’re humans or elves, aliens or robots, face situations and experiences both possible and impossible. In matters ranging from sacred importance to casual fun, we turn to dream lands and magic.

Whatever genetic combinations or environmental triggers make up the love of the imaginary, I have them in spades. Perhaps the only constant element of myself throughout my life has been a love of reading, and in particular, a love of speculative fiction. Fantasy, science fiction, horror, weird fiction, magical realism, slipstream – I love all the tributaries that flow from it's strange river. It’s been with me all my life, and I still want to write it more than anything else.

My favorite stories are all SF: from the mythic grandeur of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, to the childhood legacy of Harry Potter, to the surreal socialist steampunk of China Mieville, the brutally human women in the worlds of Kameron Hurley, the twisted fairy tales of Catherynne M. Valente, the morally complex plotters and survivors of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, and the brave souls struggling in the broken worlds of N.K. Jemisin. I could go on and on (and certainly will in future posts).

I think one of the reasons I'm drawn to speculative fiction is because I love the sense of plunging into an unfamiliar world without easy explanations, where people with psychologies I understand have to exist in settings and histories I don't. The real world is a deeply strange place if you don’t place everything you see in the context you’ve learned. If you were a clone, or a robot, or lost all of your memories, and were suddenly thrust into Manhattan, every sight, down to children eating ice cream or a skyscraper or pigeons picking at some discarded popcorn would be so utterly alien, so beautifully strange.

Fiction is – among other things – a way of simulating emotions and experiences, a wonderful gift of the prefrontal cortex of the brain. I love that (simulated) feeling of a world where everything is radically new and wonderful again, where the smallest and most normal parts of our prosaic world are made weird. It helps shake off some of the sludge, the black-and-white dreariness the modern corporate world leaves us covered in. Our lives are short, and the world is beautiful and terrifying and weird, and we need to be able to really understand that. Fiction isn't the only solution, and isn't good enough on its own, but it's a vital piece of how we can learn to question and understand our own reality.

I’m always consuming, creating, or thinking about speculative fiction, and the massive fandoms that originate from fantasy and science fiction stories seems to suggest a lot of the world shares my love of these stories. But ever since I was old enough to look out into the “real world” and see the very real struggles of very real people, there’s been this nagging idea that maybe I should be focusing more on what’s “real”, even in fiction. Escaping to another land is not just failing to improve the world, it’s actively avoiding the morally necessary act of improving it. Am I just giving into the systems of the world that want me complacent, working my 40-hour a week desk job and relaxing by flipping open a book - perhaps one I've bought on Amazon? Am I wasting my time with imaginary worlds when I should be engaging real ones?

To be honest, it’s a question I’m probably always going to struggle with. But at some point in the last few years I reached a decision I think I’ll stay with for a while more at least. It’s not as simple as “engaging with the real world = good” and “engaging with fake worlds = bad,” quite the contrary. Speculative fiction and escapism don’t fit into such binary ways of thinking as that.

Imagining other worlds is one of the most powerful and fundamentally human things we can do. It’s central to any great endeavor, every push to improve the lives of everyone. We need to be able to look at the world around us, at the systems both visible and hidden that shape our conceptions of reality, at the very ideas of “the way things are,” and say: “no, things could be different.”

Maybe the world couldn’t have wizards or dragons, but we still deal with the struggles these ideas would raise. We have evil empires and flying foes that rain fire and death from above. We have socio-political-economic entities so complex and strange that no one can ever fully understand their effects. We have rebellions and uprisings, brave deeds and awful betrayals, illusions and world-changing creations springing up seemingly overnight. And mired in the every-day, buckling under the weight of history and context, strapped into our own personal experience, and told constantly by the forces of Power that “this is the best of all possible worlds,” slipping into another world for awhile lets us tackle the big, necessary questions of life without staying shackled in the present.

How do we handle people or nations when they literally have the power to destroy the world with the things we’ve learned and created? Who or what should be considered a person and deserving of moral rights? How can we fight back against an overwhelming enemy with the power to shape people's’ thoughts? How do we deal with a world of different people slammed up against each other, when every million people means a billion different fundamental beliefs of what’s real?

In order to change the world, we need to be able to set aside the world we live in and imagine something other. In order to be the best humans we can be and help each other just function and survive, we need to be able to imagine ourselves in other people's’ lives, in other people's’ minds – a world just as strange and alien as the best of speculative fiction.

In a world that measures worth on how much profit your labor generates for it, under the influence of systems that rule by convincing you there’s no other way to live, every flight of fancy is an act of rebellion. If you believe that the world can’t be any different than it is, you’ll never act to change it for the better.

That’s why I think engaging with speculative fiction – fantasy, science fiction, horror, weird fiction, slipstream, magical realism, and all their twisted cousins – is so important.

I’d also be lying if I didn’t admit that it’s also just fun.

George R. R. Martin said that “we read fantasy to find the colors again.” It’s easy - especially right now - to give into that paradoxical blend of boredom, hopeless, anxiety, and apathy that the modern world is so good at concocting. We need something to heal us, calm us, inspire us, connect us with others, and show us that all-too-human power of imagination. Franz Kafka said that good fiction should “comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” I think his words apply even more so to speculative fiction. We’re all comfortable and disturbed in this world, and we need these stories for both those purposes.

Again, exploring stories and imaginary worlds and fiction isn't enough on its own. This is a part I'm struggling with, and I imagine a lot of you are too. Staring at a screen that shoves all the evils and injustices and petty grievances of the world into our faces at all times, unceasingly, can be paralyzing. How can we possibly do any good? That's a step, and a idea, for another post, but I think we need the re-fueling and re-supplying of fiction in this fight.

And personally, I don’t know how to turn off the part of my brain that’s constantly generating stories and characters, creatures and magic, impossible cities and landscapes, horrors and beauties I’ve never seen. I wouldn’t want to turn it off even if I could. Delving into speculative fiction, or crafting your own elaborate fantastical world, is an act of creation, bringing something into the world - even if it's words on a page. As far as we're aware, we're the only species in the universe that can do something like that. That's pretty amazing and worthwhile to me. After all, even if we get our close-to-perfect world, we're still going to want to tell stories of other ones.

Terra Somnium is going to be a place where I can write and think and talk about the speculative fiction that matters to me. Some of it will be essays about particular works, some of it will be me confronting trends and tropes I admire and want to see done better. Sometimes I’ll drop in to gush about something that I want everyone to experience, and sometimes I’ll rip apart something from a place of love.

I’m going to try to be a better person, a better writer, and a better thinker, in the small ways this blog can help me do so. This world is beautiful and broken and terrifying and wonderful, but we can embrace what’s good about it by dreaming of other places, and by taking the magic we find there back home.