issue was involved, the story was very interesting.
What kinds of fantasies are not justified? Those with no intellectual or moral application to human life—for instance, the movies about man-sized ants from another planet invading the earth. “Wouldn’t it be horrible if ants suddenly conquered the earth?” Well, what if they did? If those ants at least symbolized some special evil—if, like animals in a fable, they represented dictators or humanitarians or other human monsters—such a story would be valid. But fantasy for the sake of fantasy is neither valid nor interesting.
In H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, men cannot defeat the Martian invaders, but the germs of the common cold can. Like the rest of Wells’s novels, this one appears to have profound meaning, but it actually does not. That the Martians are killed by cold germs is a nasty satirical touch, suitable at most for a clever short story. All it says is that nature can do what man cannot—and you do not write a whole novel merely to illustrate that one point. Wells tucks his message in at the end to give an allegedly redeeming meaning to what is only fantasy for fantasy’s sake.
I know of no ghost or horror stories that I would classify as valid.
In The Song of Bernadette, the author presents the story of Bernadette of Lourdes [including her divine visions] as if it were fact. The story has no validity for anyone except those who choose to believe it, but it is not a fantasy. It is a religious tract.
One could make the point that all religion is a fantasy. Religion is not, however, fantasy for fantasy’s sake. It has a much more vicious motive: the destruction of human life and the human mind. Religion uses fantastic means to prescribe a code of morality; therefore, it claims a relationship to human life. This raises the issue: Should man be guided by mystical dogma? But speaking in literary, not philosophical, terms, religious stories are distortions of reality for a purpose applicable to human life—although one would certainly be justified in fighting the purpose.
Pulp-magazine thrillers, which often have good plots, are devoid of any value application to reality. An example is a little pocketbook Leonard Peikoff once gave me. I had asked him if he knew of a good plot story, because I am miserably bored by any other kind, and he gave me one called Seven Footprints to Satan. It is the story of a man who becomes the prisoner of an archvillain who pretends that he is Satan and creates horrible evils for the sole purpose of stealing jewelry from museums and amusing himself by playing chess with human beings. The story is exciting in the sense that the writer knows how to keep up his suspense and mystery and when to introduce the unexpected—but the total has no meaning whatever. It lacks even the meaning of a good detective story or Western, which presents, in primitive terms, the conflict of good and evil.
A detective story is applicable to human life since crimes and murders are committed, and it has a crude moral pattern: the good fights the evil and always wins. But in the above type of science fiction or fantasy thriller, the message is not that the good wins in human life, even though the hero might escape. The values involved are meaningless and inapplicable to this earth.
You have probably heard the Romantic school of writing called “escape literature.” The pulp-magazine type of thriller is an escape, but not in the usual sense. It is not merely an escape from the drudgery of one’s existence (which would be a legitimate form of enjoyment); it is an escape from values and from the mind. The only thing that can make a story exciting and hold a reader’s interest is some value at stake. In a thriller of the above kind, which features a fantastic and impossible villain, the escape for the reader consists of dropping all concern with values. He has the advantage of reading about a struggle, yet he can learn from the story no abstraction applicable to himself.
This school of literature tells the reader that there are values, except that they do not apply to his life. “Yes, you can have thrilling purposes and adventures, but they have nothing to do with your life on earth.” Strangely enough, this cheap pulp literature is the expression of a religious metaphysics and morality: values do exist somewhere—on Mars or in another