/lit/ - Literature

>f God is dead then fantasy is His grave.

>I’ve spent thirty-five years, now, searching for the secret of meaning, chasing research across disciplines and arguments through millennia. What is it? Why does it seem to be slowly boiling away? My short fiction and nonfiction on the subject have been published in Nature, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, and The Journal of Consciousness Studies.

>But epic fantasy has always been my primary vehicle. For me, fantasy fiction is the crash site of meaning. Create a world possessing the structure of Biblical Israel or Vedic India or Homeric Greece and it will be called fantastic. Create an alternate, intrinsically meaningful world, and the world will instantly recognize it as especially false. The very shape of meaning now indicates delusion: and this, I think, should give us pause.

>So I guess you could say that for me, fantasy is a pretty serious thing—something worth pissing people off about! My nutty ambition was to write the only kind of Bible a human could write in this remarkable and blasphemous age—a far different Book of Revelation, more honest to the complicated edges of the world, equally horrific. A textual crypt for the corpse of God.

>I knew it was crazy, outrageous even, but I had confidence in my ability to make the wreckage interesting. And with The Unholy Consult coming out this summer, the World at last stands revealed, and I feel like there’s so bloody much I can babble on about...

>>22946405
If God is dead then fantasy is His grave.

I’ve spent thirty-five years, now, searching for the secret of meaning, chasing research across disciplines and arguments through millennia. What is it? Why does it seem to be slowly boiling away? My short fiction and nonfiction on the subject have been published in Nature, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, and The Journal of Consciousness Studies.

But epic fantasy has always been my primary vehicle. For me, fantasy fiction is the crash site of meaning. Create a world possessing the structure of Biblical Israel or Vedic India or Homeric Greece and it will be called fantastic. Create an alternate, intrinsically meaningful world, and the world will instantly recognize it as especially false. The very shape of meaning now indicates delusion: and this, I think, should give us pause.

So I guess you could say that for me, fantasy is a pretty serious thing—something worth pissing people off about! My nutty ambition was to write the only kind of Bible a human could write in this remarkable and blasphemous age—a far different Book of Revelation, more honest to the complicated edges of the world, equally horrific. A textual crypt for the corpse of God.

I knew it was crazy, outrageous even, but I had confidence in my ability to make the wreckage interesting. And with The Unholy Consult coming out this summer, the World at last stands revealed, and I feel like there’s so bloody much I can babble on about...