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When I tell people that I write science fiction and fantasy, I usually get one of two reactions: a blank look followed by an "Oh really?" and a hasty retreat, or the supercilious raised eyebrow with a comment like "I used to read that stuff when I was a kid, before I discovered real literature!"

Science fiction and fantasy are often accused of being escapist, trivial, and mindless, portraying bug-eyed alien monsters, scantily clad women, spaceships and bizarre other worlds, while Real Literature concerns itself with humanity's true problems, the struggles of the Self to become whole in a hostile world and so on. Often the movies and books of science fiction and fantasy are in fact frothy and shallow. But I have recently read a book by Ursula K. Le Guin called "The Telling" that concerns itself with the dominance of a space-faring culture over one that it just beginning to take its technological first steps. It is about cultural survival and personal freedom under totalitarian rule. It is about self-imposed cultural censorship. It is about colonialism of the mind. Nothing to do with the real world, eh?

Good science fiction and fantasy examine the human condition against the backdrop of the universe itself. Through imagined worlds, alternate societies and made-up scenarios of possible futures, such works ask questions that force us to face ourselves. What if Hitler had won the second world war? What if genetic engineering were allowed to proceed unchecked? What if people began to define cyberspace as the true reality? What if?

But the value of science fiction and fantasy ---- collectively called Imaginative Literature --- goes far deeper than the ability to ask difficult and interesting questions. Because Imaginative Literature invents not only alternative technologies but also alternative cultures, societies and ways of perceiving the world, it is the one literature we have that is truly revolutionary. It stimulates us to think beyond our social and cultural conditioning by confronting us with the question: "what if things were different from the way they are?" It gives us, in other words, freedom of thought.

Unfortunately Imaginative Literature in the West is still dominated by a white-male-patriarchal-cowboy-techno-fetishist mode of thinking. It is only in fairly recent years that other voices have been heard in the field: voices of women, of people of alternate sexual orientation, people of color, people proposing political schemas other than runaway capitalism. Still, there is a dearth of voices from the so-called Third World. Recently it has become fashionable among science fiction authors to use Third World characters and our cultures in their stories; more often than not we are exotified, portrayed in stereotypical ways to the point of being unrecognizable. But I digress. The point I am trying to make is that Imaginative Literature has not yet realized its revolutionary potential.

But what of imaginative fiction as literature? While much of what is in the field seems to be written amateurishly and clumsily, with no apparent feel for the use and beauty of words, imaginative fiction has a long tradition as a literature in which Style is as important as Idea. Elegance of language, experimentation with style and use of words are all to be found in this realm, dating from such classic writers as H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Aldous Huxley among others. More recent writers who wield their pens with particular elegance include Ursula K. Le Guin, Poul Anderson, Philip K. Dick, Theodore Sturgeon, Walter Miller, Molly Gloss and Neil Gaiman. Our own Amitav Ghosh has authored a science fiction novel, "The Calcutta Chromosome," which I highly recommend.

Now some readers might at this point wonder why I insist on clubbing science fiction with fantasy. Science Fiction deals with things that have, at least, a pseudo-rational explanation, while fantasy violates our credulity by proposing impossibilities and conveniently ascribing them to magic. Surely they are at opposite poles?

This is a difficult question but I will attempt to answer it in the spirit of going out on a limb. First we must address a prejudice not uncommon among certain afficionados of science fiction: that fantasy, like myth and legend, is inferior to science fiction. These are the same people who regard myth and legend as illiterate babblings to be ultimately replaced by scientific explanations. However myth, legend and fantasy have their own, intrinsic importance that has nothing to do with their validity as explanations for natural phenomena. The reason why they have persisted for so long is because, in the form of story, they speak to us about our greatest terrors, our wildest dreams. Not directly or literally, but through symbol, metaphor and archetype --- which is the language (according to Ursula K. Le Guin quoting Carl Jung) of our unconscious minds.

This is where science fiction and fantasy meet. Through their multifaceted lenses we can examine the human condition in a way that Mainstream Realism cannot. Reality is a complex beast which needs something larger than realism to hold it, understand it. It needs nothing less than Imaginative Literature itself.

Both science fiction and fantasy provide us with powerful metaphors for how we live. Take aliens in science fiction or monsters in fantasy. Are they not a metaphor for the Other? The Other can be anyone different from ourselves --- a person of another caste, class, nationality, race --- or an animal, or an alien. How do we deal with the Other --- do we attack it in fear, worship it for the same reason, accept it on its own terms, bend it to our will? Imaginative literature confronts some of these questions in a way that reaches the deepest parts of our being. Imaginative literature ultimately enables us to face ourselves.

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