Ursula K. Le Guin recently wrote an important essay on the place of fantasy in society. The essay is superb throughout, and you should definitely read the whole thing, but one of my favorite parts is this.

Though modernism is behind us and postmodernism may be joining it, still many critics and reviewers approach fantasy determined to keep Caliban permanently confined in the cage of Kiddie Lit. The voice of Edmund Wilson reviewing J R R Tolkien is still heard, bleating: “Oo, those awful Orcs!” There should be a word - “maturismo”, like “machismo”? - for the anxious savagery of the intellectual who thinks his adulthood has been impugned.

To conflate fantasy with immaturity is a rather sizeable error. Rational yet non-intellectual, moral yet inexplicit, symbolic not allegorical, fantasy is not primitive but primary. Many of its great texts are poetry, and its prose often approaches poetry in density of implication and imagery. The fantastic, the marvellous, the impossible rode the mainstream of literature from the epics and romances of the Middle Ages through Ariosto and Tasso and their imitators, to Rabelais and Spenser and beyond. This is not to say that everybody approved of it. Conflict with religion and with realism always loomed. In the first great European novel, imagination and realism meet head-on, and their contest is the very stuff and argument of the book. Don Quixote is driven mad by chivalric fantasies - but what is he without his madness?

I’ve long been fascinated by the aversion that some people have to forms of entertainment they deem insufficiently mature and realistic. Le Guin references other genres besides fantasy, including science fiction, though she argues that fantasy is the primary non-realist literature of choice in childhood, whereas SF and other non-literary/ non-realist/ genre fiction are adopted as readers enter adolescence. I think her point is valid, though it’s not just fantasy that triggers maturismo. I have encountered serious discomfort before, occasionally even alarm, when I tell some of my friends and acquaintances I write science fiction.
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