Sometimes people talk about fantasy as allowing readers to see or realize things about our real world that they would not otherwise have seen (that is, they argue that fantasy can more effectively help us see reality than realistic fiction or even nonfiction can). Has this happened to you? Is there something you think about differently now because you were initially inspired to by a fantasy story?
I think Terry Pratchett did this best.
The most famous example is one that has escaped into the real world. The Sam Vines theory of economic unfairness or Boots theory even has its own Wikipedia page.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. … A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. … But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
The other one that I find myself thinking about quite often is from The Fifth Elephant.
When does something become new and not the same traditional thing that you had before? Does it matter?
“This, milord, is my family’s axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation . . . but is this not the nine hundred-year-old axe of my family? And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y’know. Pretty good.”
The more I think about it, the more I realize that most of my philosophical thinking is just Terry Pratchett. (I’ve always said that I want to grow up to be Granny Weatherwax.) I’m probably about due for a Discworld reread.
“His philosophy was a mixture of three famous schools — the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans — and summed up all three of them in his famous phrase, ‘You can’t trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there’s nothing you can do about it, so let’s have a drink.”
