In this sense, a romance is the opposite of a science, even if, as in the case of science fiction, science happens to be sponsoring the event by supplying the stage dressings, actorly preoccupations, uproarious witticisms and so on. Which is as much to say, adventurers, insofar as they are actively adventuring, are perennially engaged in an unending succession of blind dates, and the greatest adventurers are those who know least and trust most to the type of evidence least valued in a materialist age. Yet the critical point of comparison here is this: that whatever else he is, the adventurer in a work of science fiction or fantasy is always and primarily a mystic, and more often than not an ascetical mystic.įor the adventurer is a man who sets off on a quest in search of a thing for which he has almost no evidence, aside from perhaps some dubious hearsay and a few strange stirrings in his heart. In a materialist age, the habits of the mystic will always be felt to be an indulgence, even when this indulgence takes the form of asceticism. Setting to one side Tolkien’s response to the charges of escapism – who are those most preoccupied with others escaping, but jailers? – there is a comparison which might shed a healthy glow upon the apparent pallor of the science fiction and fantasy genres, and that comparison is mysticism. Their conventional departure from ‘the real world’, whether by spaceship, portals or potions, is felt by some readers to be an insupportable exodus from life as we know it, a rejection of both the pleasures and pains of regular experience in favour of a wandering, indulgent and perhaps even perverse desire for escape. Science fiction and fantasy literature have occasionally been the subject of a similar critique.

The rejection of gravity would be the final triumph of this Eastern wariness of the world, climbing an airy staircase past all clouds and into a numbing nothing which is the furthest distance from all stars. For it is the essence of Buddhism to become ever more detached from the things of this earth, foregoing its abundant fruits in an effort to avoid pricking any thorns. I do not know whether the Buddha is said ever to have achieved even a temporary state of levitation, but if he had this would seem to be the natural expression of his philosophy.

Tau zero