And, as I’ve been trying to argue, the literature of the fantastic is not genre fiction but, in its own way, as realistic as naturalistic fiction; it just comes into the real through a different door. A naturalistic novel is entirely capable of being escapist: Read a little chick lit and you’ll see what I mean. The truth is not arrived at by purely

that suffocating childish escape wish that’s the wake of a certain type of fantasy. That feeling that in a different world you’d be yourself.