Fantasy Isn’t (Only) Escapism
From a woman in emergency humanitarian and development response work, why speculative fiction isn’t running away from reality.
Growing up is serious business, or that’s how it was pitched to me by the outside world when I was a little girl. Feeling things too much, crying, and making up stories were just sweet things a girl did. Boys were brave and strong and realistic, or they should be, and room should be made for them.
When I grew up and entered various male-dominated fields of work, the definition became even more rigid: Emotion and whimsy are a no-no. You want to work in some of the world’s toughest places? You have to be a predetermined version of hardened, inscrutable, preferably seasoned. It’s hard to be both inured and wide-eyed. And if you’re writing fantastical stories? You’re definitely running away from the real world.
Luckily, I was raised by two aunts who took on that real world by chanting the opposite. When I was little, a request to go to the local public library and check out a stack of books too heavy to carry alone was never once turned down. My aunts encouraged me to read widely and to read what I wanted. Until the day she died, one of my aunts listened to me read her everything I ever wrote, from half-baked poems when I was seven and we were living in Mill Valley, to my calling her years later from Tripoli, Libya, and reading her a piece of a story about portals between places.
My other aunt, the scholar, raised me on Star Trek, fantasy books, and politics on our back porch that sat facing the creek. The year I moved from Italy to California, she left her job in San Francisco early every day to pick me up and walk me home from middle school. She was the one I called when I wanted to throw both my college theses out the window, the one who told me I would finish them, and encouraged me to “sprinkle a little magic in there, you like that” (I did finish them, but I didn’t sprinkle anything in). No matter what else my aunties were doing, they were always there, and whatever version of myself I was in that moment, that was fine by them.
Still, when I stepped into the humanitarian field, I was going to be Serious. Much of the reading discussed by my colleagues was nonfiction, classical books, or research—the type of literature that I can also enjoy but that often felt like an unspoken competition and always brings to my mind the word “tomes.” Once, during a trip, some colleagues made a comment about a book I had in my backpack (“I thought you were smarter than cutesy books!”). For years after that, if I read what at the time was termed “chick lit” or speculative fiction that wasn’t sci-fi (with strong female characters, even!), those books didn’t take center stage on my bookshelves, but lived crammed at the back. It didn’t occur to me that not everybody was going to be diminutive. I just simply decided I wasn’t good enough. But I was going to be good enough. I was going to be Tough Enough.
If we were in the field and some of the men side-eyed me because I was a woman and therefore going to freak out about malaria, I was going to show ‘em. I spent years reconfiguring pieces of myself, reading what I thought I should, swallowing tears if something happened in a conflict area that was hard, or even if I just missed home. I still wrote the stories, because if I didn’t, the pressure would build until it was just under my skin. But I never talked about them. And I never, never shared them, because if I did, it would mean that I wasn’t able to handle real life.
And then, slowly, without my allowing it, the magic seeped in anyway. During my third move to a new country, I started to dread that inevitable feeling of uncomfortableness. I took a deep breath, and I decided to think of it as a spell.
There’s always a moment, often extended, when you’re in a new place and you’re so uncomfortable. Great. That’s one of the ingredients of the spell. You’re going to look silly trying to speak a new language. That’s another ingredient. You’re going to do something culturally inappropriate. Third ingredient. You’re going to learn from it. Fourth. You’re going to desperately need a cleaning product at the supermarket, and you’ll communicate it purely through the one word you remember, which happens to be “beetle,” and a lot of arm movements. Fifth. You’ll go home to an unfamiliar apartment and write it all down (or paint it, or photograph it, or whatever you do that is yours). Six. You’ll meet someone (this does not have to be romantic). Seven. You mix it all with the most important element: time. You have to give it that. Sometimes it won’t work. But often, it will. And it will be a transformation. And after that, a place is also yours (and vice versa). And it’s very hard not to care about what happens to a place once it’s yours.
For me, the magic seeped in through the people I met, family I found along the way, places that felt like portals, connecting to each other. It crashed in when I realized that the people I really looked up to, also in my professional life, were women who did things their own way, who followed their meandering hearts and celebrated others following their own callings. These women, like my aunties, were not only unapologetically themselves (and certainly read whatever they wanted), but they also reminded me I get to follow my path whatever way works for me. My writing style slowly evolved, and I realized it was actually harder to write in a way that was easily readable, and with that came admiration for some of the books I’d seen scoffed at as being “unserious.” Were they, though? My bookshelves started to be what they wanted to be.
A little uncertainly, I started writing the book I wanted to write—the one that had started burning in my chest around Tunis in 2019, that I didn’t start really writing until Rome in 2021. I suppose it’s not a surprise that in discovering pieces of the soul of a new place, that falling in love with cities and ways that had previously felt so alien, colored the gods of The Web of Time, so that they are tied to that which they love and can’t understand: places, humans, the ages of history before ours and how they paint modernity. And so, it came to be that The Web of Time is a mix of real historic cities, real life, and fantasy, because I think that’s what real life is: a weaving of the mundane and magic.
Writing a story about portals and history and errant deities, about loss and grief and hope, helped me realize that stories are how I am fully a part of what happens in the real world; that this is how I come towards things, not run away from them. That opening to a new place and a new culture so that it can, in turn, open to you, can be scary, can be magic. That if there are tears, it doesn’t mean I do my job any less well (and that, by the way, that’s not true only for me or for women). That I get to sprinkle a little magic in there, because I like that, and that this does not cloud my logic or reason. Also, that it’s not weird to be scared of malaria.
Like many of us, I write despite the branches pulling me back, scratching at my face, and the branches are often also me. Maybe it’s through traveling, or writing what I actually like, or the people I get to call my community, or being raised reading with two elderly aunties on the back porch facing the creek, or a mix of all of those things, that I’ve learned my armor in tough situations can be made up of stories, encrusted with tears (also, especially, the happy ones), that it can be both porous and impenetrable. A girl needs her armor, there’s no doubt about that, and a strong one because it is a tough world. But porous, to let what you need in, and to let what needs to go out, so there is space. After all, you never know where the portals might be.
Check out Flavia Brunetti's The Web of Time here:
(WD uses affiliate links)
