Why We NEED Fantasy Worlds

I've written this today primarily because the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) just issued their ruling on the Hobby Lobby thing, and unless you've been under a rock, you've already caught part of the fire storm of outrage that erupted in almost every corner of the Internet. For-profit corporations - already "persons," in the eyes of the law - were just give the right to hold religious beliefs, and to deprive their female employees of insurance coverage for contraceptives if that kind of thing - you know, women making their own decisions about their health along with their health care providers - offends their brand-spanking new moral sensitivities. I got to thinking about how any culture gets to this point, where its highest court can gut protections for some of the most at-risk members of its population with a 5-4 decision based largely on habits of thought that are in turn mired in a set of certain primitive religious texts.

My husband and I have been writing stories in the world of Menelon for two decades, but it wasn't a setting that was handed to us, fully formed, nor even partially! Menelon began as a world without a real name, one Michael and his first wife had played around with as they invented and re-invented their fantasy role playing campaign. It had a city named Fernwall, and another named Shanakra. It had a few religions in place, sparsely described and hilariously two-dimensional. There were few recognizable countries, though the "hidden island of the man-hating Amazons" cracked me up almost from the start (and has since been removed). There were a couple of monarchies. Lots of oceans and sailing ships. There might be a few more items that belong in that list, but when I first encountered Menelon, there really wasn't much to recommend it. The biggest attraction it held for me, as a creator, is that it was such a blank slate, a tabula mostly rasa, a baby so new it was practically premature, and much in need of nurturing.

Perhaps it was because I was already a mother, and a woman, that I started asking questions about some of the cultural assumptions I was almost automatically including in this newest child of ours. Those assumptions included almost everything to do with religions, and social hierarchies. Or, since I derive from hard-core Germanic, Pennsylvania-Dutch roots, they covered the basic tenets of Christianity specifically, and patriarchies, in general. Sure, recapitulating some of those assumptions for Menelon was just going to make for good dramatic tension, as humankind here on Earth has repeatedly demonstrated; but, left unexamined and encountered out of context, I found that those assumptions just... don't apply to a fictional world. Once I removed the long history of western culture - and the Abrahamic religious texts (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) on which they are largely based - I found there were no answers, only questions.

• Are there biological or environmental reasons women should be treated as second-class citizens at best, or chattel property, at worst? And if not, then why should they be?
• If an elder, wiser race had an influence on humanity's earliest development, how does that change its evolutionary track?
• In a world with real, non-human sentient races, what does "racial prejudice" really look like? Does skin color even matter?
• Why marriage? Or monogamy?
• What happens to native populations when they're not encountered out of entitled imperialism and manifest destiny?
• In an openly polytheistic world with gods and goddesses, how does a religion justify having ordination for only men? Or only for women?
• What would cause a people or religion to be shunned or persecuted by the rest of the world?
• In a culture with miraculous and/or magical methods of healing (yet without the laundry list of prejudices from the aforementioned Abrahamic religions), do people still argue over birth control? Abortion? Capital punishment?
• And how does this society handle criminals? Are jails and prisons the only answer?
• Without manifest destiny and the materialistic drive to exploit and consume everything, how do humans value their world, their land, their environment?

If you're creating a world, those are just a few of the questions you have to ask, and "because reasons" isn't an answer. They are just surface-scratching questions, and if you are attempting to be intellectually honest in the creative process, you know you can't rely on your own cultural assumptions, habits of thought, nor the centuries of predominantly Judeo-Christian, white male prejudice for sensible, rational answers. The whole process continues to be so enlightening for me personally that I think it ought to be taught in the schools. It would be one of the most inclusive and holistic educations anyone could imagine, and would include skills from so many disciplines: geography, astronomy, mathematics, chemistry, physics, art, et. al.  And then, design the world: logic, history, music, art, anthropology, archaeology, sociology, psychology, and yes, religions - and so much more.

That is why we need fantasy worlds. We need to create those inter-related fictional systems in thought, and then we need to look at this very real world around us with those same, wide-awake eyes; eyes that understand the structures that have been built on fallacies, and how to change them. Creating a world in fantasy empowers the creator in turn to change the cruelties, injustices, and crimes of this one.

That's the story I'm telling myself - and you - today, anyway.

AE Matson has co-authored Raven's Tears with her husband Michael, and is currently at work on book two of that series, entitled Dead Man's Trigger.  Follow her on Twitter as Zenstitcher. Or, here's Alesia's page at Author Central.