Imagining complicated realities is what fiction does, whether through real-world settings or refracted through unreal, romantic forms. And whether it does that imagining well—convincingly, beautifully, honestly--may be all we can really ask of it.

only in genre fiction could we see anything like a revolution if it hasn't already happened in the historic past. Only outside the "given reality" are characters allowed to alter the fabric of daily life rather than just learn to cope with it. This isn't to say that genre fiction always depicts real change, or does so in interesting ways, but that

In terms of their portrayal of actual lived reality, cop shows are really not much different from science fiction: most police procedurals take place in a world where dangerous criminals are everywhere and only a well-armed and respected cadre of officers and prosecutors can stop them. This consistent representation of cops as heroic and successful

The Greek word for imitative behavior is "mimesis," and most of the time, when we get anxious about the effects of fiction, we're worried about mimetic responses—not so much from ourselves but from other people.

[Samuel] Delany prefers the term "given world" to "real world," since in his view it better explains the construction and fictionalization of reality: this is just the world we have been given to believe in as real.

what makes fascist art uniquely frightening is that fascism itself can be described as a kind of factionalizing tendency, deliberately co-locating itself inside categories of thinking and feeling more normally reserved for literature and art. Fascism operates at the level of story; it works like a story, with violent heroes and monstrous villains.

As with most modes of binary thinking, this creates superficial and destructive patterns: pretending that the conflict over pop culture is a simple battle between the right versus the woke corporatists allows the right to dictate the shape of reality, recasting diversity as a sincere corporate concern.

Sometimes what's wrong with reality is deeper than individual moral failings; sometimes our problems are greater than an inability to see each other's point of view. And boiling everything down to a failure of individual understanding can work as a neat and deliberate deflection away from those problems.

A book isn't a gym; it doesn't exist for you, to fix you, but for itself alone.