[caption id="attachment_269" align="alignleft" width="193"] cover art by Tom Brown.[/caption]

Recently, Neil Gaiman talked about the book-reading Nazi resistance undertaking by his Polish cousin, a Holocaust survivor. He said this: “We [writers] decry too easily what we do, as being kind of trivial — the creation of stories as being a trivial thing. But the magic of escapist fiction … is that it can actually offer you a genuine escape from a bad place and, in the process of escaping, it can furnish you with armour, with knowledge, with weapons, with tools you can take back into your life to help make it better… It’s a real escape — and when you come back, you come back better-armed than when you left.”

It’s a powerful statement. Books that take you out of yourself can be the difference between coping and not coping. The relief of not being trapped inside your own life and head for a few hours, can be immeasurable. Whether that’s an escape from stress, depression, abuse, or state led terror, the escape is real, and the consequences matter.

We live in difficult, dangerous times. Not as dangerous (yet) for most of us as daring to read books in a Nazi run Polish ghetto – a place where you could be shot for such transgression. Most of the people who might read this blog are probably not in that kind of danger, but around the world, too many people are facing all of that and worse. Many of us are looking at our world, with the threat of climate change, extremism, tyrannical government and worrying. Too many places at war, so many fleeing refugees, too many western governments that won’t help solve the problems. Too many hard won rights being stripped away, too many places where those rights never even existed in the first place.

It seems crazy, in face of all that, to hold up a book. Any book. What is a book against guns or hunger? What is a book when you are afraid, or fighting for your life?

And then, without a story of something better to fight for, a story of how things could be, a vision of hope... without that, what is there for any of us?

Perhaps books can save the world. Not by having all the answers, but by giving us space to imagine the right questions, and to dream of something better.

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