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Although I’ve been a Tolkien fan for a long time—since at least a few years before the movies came out—and I’ve read much of his work (The Silmarillion, most of Unfinished Tales, and probably half of the Histories), I’d never got around to reading “On Fairy-Stories” until this class. I meant to; I borrowed the Tolkien Reader from my friend, who also happens to be in this class, and hung onto it for probably a year without actually reading it. I had a friend who’s read everything Tolkien, including all his essays and letters, and often refers to his concepts of sub-creation and Eucatastrophe, so I was vaguely familiar with those ideas, but for some reason I’d just never got around to reading the essay that actually discusses them.
After having done so, I’m now wondering why I didn’t read it a long time ago, and then at least once a year since then. “On Fairy-Stories” is good enough for that, in general, but its beautiful defense of fantasy as a legitimate genre and sub-creation as a crucially important art affected me personally as well. I write, and I’ve always loved writing (even if I’ve not always been good at it), and while I’m well aware that a novelist isn’t exactly a day job with regular pay, it’s still what I need to do. Maybe more to the point, I’ve been drawn to sci-fi and fantasy for quite some time, and in many ways that makes it worse. Writing’s not a “real job,” to begin with, and some people see writing fiction as silly and unimportant; as for sci-fi and fantasy, well, that doesn’t even deal with the “real world.” It’s silly an escapist and it’s not real. Even people who otherwise support my writing have taken this stance toward SF/F in general, maybe unconsciously, and I’ve tried to explain why I like reading those genres but haven’t spent much time defending why I write it. I just sort of ignore that. But judging by my reaction to “On Fairy-Stories,” it’s bothered me a lot more than I’ve realized—because Tolkien’s essay made me feel so validated as a writer of fiction and a reader and writer of fantasy that I almost cried. (I may have been in an oddly emotional state at the time anyway, I’m not sure, but still.) Fantasy matters. It can be escapist and that’s okay, because sometimes we need to get away from our world to recover from its ugliness and to see it in new ways—and the simple act of sub-creation matters too, taking part in a small way in the creation of the world. It isn’t silly or pointless. It matters.
I would have to admit that I’m a little bothered by Tolkien’s quick dismissal of science fiction as a genre, especially since I think his eloquent defense of fantasy qualifies pretty well for sci-fi as a sort of subgenre of fantasy. Both genres deal with worlds and realities that aren’t quite our own, after all, and both can absolutely be used to make the familiar a little more alien in a way that lets us really see it again. I do take his point that sci-fi tends a little more toward the industrial, ugly, and dystopic, but those elements can be just as useful (and, in my opinion, just as beautiful in their own way), and I rather think at this point he’s letting personal preference take over just a little too much. He loves nature and the country and high fantasy, and cities only when they’re idealized like Gondolin or Minas Tirith, probably in part because he’s experienced very closely how ugly industrialization and warfare technology can get. That doesn’t necessarily disqualify sci-fi as a legitimate genre that can do the same things for which he defends fantasy as a legitimate genre.