Realism is a rich genre, but it's not the be-all and end-all of literature, says Ursula Le Guin. If you make it the standard of quality, you throw the imaginative babies out with the bathwater.
And what babies they are, as I was reminded when I opened Literary Wonderlands: A Journey Through the Greatest Fictional Worlds Ever Created. Edited by Laura Miller, with contributions from writers, critics and academics, this handsomely illustrated compendium takes us all the way from the epic of Gilgamesh to the war between the jinns, as recorded by Salman Rushdie.
Le Guin herself is here, for her 1968 novel A Wizard of Earthsea, the first in her six-part epic fantasy series that in its turn inspired other writers such as J. K. Rowling. At the age of 86, Le Guin is still producing books: collections of her short stories and novellas and recent nonfiction and The Complete Orsinia, which makes her with Philip Roth one of the only two living novelists published by the Library of America.
Viewed through the Literary Wonderlands perspective, the realist novel, which so dominates literature today, seems a recent and comparatively insignificant creation. Fantastic literature, Laura Miller says in her introduction, has always conducted a complex dialogue with the real world, and makes us see our lives in a new light.
Ancient myth and legend gave way to science and romanticism, which in turn gave way to the golden age of fantasy in the early 20th century, a fundamentally nostalgic quest. But in the new world order and the computer age that followed, fantasy and science fiction were about questions.
We think of these stories as entertainment for children and adolescents, and much-beloved examples are here, in the adventures of Alice, or Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, or Katniss in The Hunger Games. But it struck me how many more of these stories through the ages were intended for and read by adults, with very different purposes: instructive utopias, cautionary dystopias, escapist romps, allegorical tales and satirical portraits of the times (Gulliver's Travels was never meant for children).
By and large, the dystopias sound thrilling and the utopias sound dull or disappointing. Thomas More, who coined the term Utopia in his vision of 1516, thought the perfect society needed slavery.
While I enjoyed revisiting deservedly famous adventures such as The Time Machine or The Lord of the Rings or A Game of Thrones, it was more interesting to discover books I had never heard of. How about We, a Russian dystopian novel by Yevgeny Zamyatin, written in 1920 but considered so dangerous it was not published in the Soviet Union until the year of glasnost in 1988?
Thanks, however, to an unauthorised English language translation that appeared in New York in 1924, We became a highly influential tale of a repressive authoritarian society that inspired Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four, Huxley's Brave New World and Le Guin's The Dispossessed.
Or how about Herland? It's a 1915 novel by the American writer and feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and it sounds a bit more interesting than your average utopia: it imagines a society populated entirely by women, and they seem to be making a pretty good job of things. Gilman published it in serial form in her own magazine, but tellingly it was never published as a book until long after her death, in 1979.
As Miller points out, the first tales humans told each other were not about everyday life, but about the extraordinary. Lately the dominant realist mode in literature has been shifting. Who knows, perhaps the extraordinary will come into its own again.