One of the first arti­cles I ever pro­fes­sion­ally pub­lished was Exhibits with a Pulse, for the Amer­ican His­tor­ical Asso­ci­a­tion. Written in 1997, the article addressed the 1995 con­tro­versy sur­rounding the Smith­sonian Air and Space Museum’s intent to exhibit the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.

A lot of folks were pissed off about the inter­pre­ta­tion of the plane, which they said focused too much on the suf­fering inflicted on the Japanese. The Amer­ican Legion and Air Force Asso­ci­a­tion gal­va­nized in protest, and the whole ker­fuffle wound up with the museum’s director having to resign.

The article cov­ered a lot of things, but one of the points I made was that the con­tro­versy was largely fuelled by a sense of own­er­ship over the story. The people looking at the plane were people who had actu­ally lived through the event, what­ever their degree of par­tic­i­pa­tion. The inter­pre­ta­tion of what hap­pened, its place in his­tory, was impor­tant to them. Impor­tant enough to dig in and fight.

I stared thinking about this when Peter V. Brett tweeted a link to an essay by fan­tasy writer Terry Brooks, Why I Write About Elves. When I first read it back in 2005 it didn’t have too much of an impact on me. Even back then, Brooks was an insti­tu­tion in fan­tasy, his orig­inal Shan­nara trilogy (Sword, Elf­s­tones and Wish­song) were part of the canon of my youth, books that served to define the person I would become nearly as much as Tolkien before him, or Martin after.

Like my article, Brooks’ essay makes a lot of points, but the larger one is that he appre­ci­ates fan­tasy because of its ability to “mirror reality” without reflecting “an exact image.” It allows Brooks to write at a remove that helps him tackle tough issues with enough dis­tance to not be over­whelmed by them.

It was amazing for me to read Brooks’ essay now as a fan­tasy nov­elist myself, and realize that he used fan­tasy as a tool for dealing with that same human ten­dency that sank the Enola Gay exhibit. Sto­ry­tellers of all stripes (and museum cura­tors are most cer­tainly sto­ry­tellers) face that same chal­lenge: how to convey their point to an audi­ence without it being over­whelmed in the bag­gage of alle­giances that are inte­gral to everyone’s real life.

China Mieville over­throws bureau­cratic and cor­rupt … fic­ti­tious gov­ern­ments. Char­laine Harris deals with the rigors of big­otry … against vam­pires. Daniel Polansky skewers the lines of class and priv­i­lege … in a dis­tant place that feels familiar, but no one has ever vis­ited. I address the hide­bound nature of mil­i­tary bureau­cracy … as it deals with the emer­gence of magic in the world.

Once a story leaves the author’s hands, they have no con­trol over it any­more. It belongs to its audi­ence, and they will inter­pret it as they will. But I sus­pect that Brooks (and my) attrac­tion to fan­tasy isn’t all that unusual. We want to write about the things we see around us. We want to talk about issues that res­onate. But we want to do it in a way that dis­penses with the innate cer­tainty that most people have when they approach any topic. We want there to be a chance to see things in a new light. We want to write, as Brooks says, “… a story that inspires us in ways  we might not rec­og­nize at first, but on reflec­tion can pro­vide us with fresh insight.”

That’s part of why Brooks writes fantasy.

Me too.