Some months ago, Jennifer Howard used a critical review of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell to argue that fantasy should be about “high seriousness,” “magic that battles for the soul of the world,” and above all, “the epic sense of Good and Evil, of things larger than ourselves, that makes the best fantasy so powerful and so necessary.” Fantasy allows us to escape the modern age for a little while: “When the news strays so far from the familiar moral contours of the struggle between Good and Evil, it’s tempting to lose ourselves in stories in which this battle is fought in clear terms and on an epic scale.”
Howard’s argument recalls J.R.R. Tolkien’s claim that the function of fantasy is to serve as “consolation,” a counterblast to modernity and industrialization. But the conservatism of much genre fantasy goes beyond fetishizing feudal relations. Fantasy is conservative to the extent that it does what Howard wants it to do, by becoming a kind of storytelling that is disconnected from politics. The fantastic imagination—i.e., the capacity to imagine places where the rules work differently than they do here and now—can help to puncture the spurious sense of permanence on which everyday politics rely, the sense that the way things are now is the way they inevitably must be. The fantastic imagination shows that our guiding principles and power arrangements can be different, and perhaps that they should be different. But if genre fantasy does what Howard says she wants it to do, by creating a hiding place far from the complexities of politics, then it becomes what its critics have always claimed it is—an exercise in escapism.
One way to deal with this tendency toward escapism is to examine it as a symptom of the pervasive fantasies of a consumerist society. Thus the British writer M. John Harrison uses genre tropes and savagely beautiful prose to dissect the fantasies beneath “the beautiful world of the corporate ad, in which dolphins swim alongside our car, simultaneously delighting and blessing us.” China Miéville—who cites Harrison’s work as a crucial influence—takes a different tack. His New Crobuzon novels seek less to interrogate genre fantasy than to remake it, playing out the battle between the fantastic and the political within imagined settings.
Miéville is both inside and outside the fantasy genre. He’s won two Arthur C. Clarke awards, but he also received mention in Granta‘s most recent Best of Young British Novelists exercise, before eventually being consigned to the Salon des Refusés for disreputable genre connections. Miéville’s novels are politically aware, but not in a way that tries to expose fantasy as an ideological confection. Instead, the tension between the political and the fantastic—how the fantastic imagination is trammeled by politics, tries and fails to escape politics, or, most rarely, reimagines politics—gives the books their driving force. Miéville is a Marxist who has written extensively on the form and origins of international law. The politics of his imagined societies reflect, as do our own, underlying relationships of profound inequality. The fantastic imagination not only helps expose the imperfect foundations of these politics, by showing that things need not be so, but is a necessary beginning for thinking through how they might be changed.