There are things I am saying, things I am talking about, but I try not to make them obtrusive. The necessity to struggle against evil, the difficulty of identifying evil, how easy it is to go astray, are very simple questions. In modern mainstream fiction, if you discuss good and evil, you’re castigated for being judgmental or for being old-fashioned. Originally this was a way of deciding which was the greater wrong—’It is wrong to steal, but my child is starving to death. Obviously, in that situation it is better to steal than to let my child die of hunger.’ But today that has been transmogrified into a belief that anything goes, it’s what you can get by with, and there is no real morality, no right, no wrong—it’s simply what produces the Platonic definition of evil: ‘a temporary disadvantage for the one perceiving evil.’
In fantasy, we can talk about right and wrong, and good and evil, and do it with a straight face. We can discuss morality or ethics, and believe that these things are important, where you cannot in mainstream fiction. It’s part of the reason why I believe fantasy is perhaps the oldest form of literature in the world, at least in the western canon. You go back not simply to Beowulf but The Epic of Gilgamesh .
And it survives pervasively today. People in the field of science fiction and fantasy are willing to accept that the magic realists are fantasy writers, but to the world at large, ‘Oh no, that’s not fantasy, that’s literature.’ Yes it is fantasy. And a lot of other things, that are published as mainstream, really are fantasy but not identified as such. We really have quite a pervasive influence.
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