A World Without Stories?
A meditation on the value of speculative fiction
Picture if you will this terrifying scenario: a world with no stories.
Perhaps that doesn’t sound so scary. Sure, you enjoy reading stories, but you could survive without them. You could still put food on the table and a roof over your head. You’d be able to keep your house warm in winter and cool in the summer. You’d still have neighbors to chat with, places to travel and explore, games to play, and puppies to pet. But something would be missing.
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, I saw a meme circulating online that said, in essence, that the pandemic had shown us how important farmers and truck drivers are and how unimportant artists, writers, athletes, and performers are. I beg to differ.
I take no issue with the importance of farmers—and farm workers—or truckers. Indeed, the pandemic did shine a light on the importance of farmers, farm workers, and truckers—as well as home health aides, retail workers, health care workers, and others who are often underpaid and under-appreciated even though they perform services that are crucial to meeting our basic daily needs.
But it also shone a light on the importance of those who create and perform. When you were stuck at home during the early days of the pandemic, how did you pass your time? Did you read more? If so, did you only read essays and news articles, or did you also lose yourself in a novel or two? Did you watch more television? If you did, was it all news programs and documentaries, or did you also watch movies and binge-watch dramas and comedies? Perhaps you listened to music. Maybe you only listened to instrumentals, but you probably listened to songs with lyrics, too. And what are lyrics? That’s right—they’re stories.
Stories, especially in the genres of fantasy and science fiction, can transport us to other worlds. They offer an escape from our daily grind and from the problems of the world. At the same time, stories, especially speculative stories, can reflect a mirror on our society and make us think about how we might make our world a better place.
Growing up, as a shy and socially awkward child who was smaller and younger than most of my classmates, I often lost myself in stories, imagining my favorite characters living in my world and becoming my friends. My sister and I pretended to be many of characters from the shows and movies we loved, but among our favorites were Helena and Myer from Space: 1999. (We preferred Space: 1999 to Star Trek because we couldn’t both be Lt. Uhura. But the importance of representation is a matter for another essay.) Those stories—and their characters—gave us a template to imagine our future selves exploring the galaxy and doing all sorts of exciting things.
Would we have survived without those stories? I suppose we most likely would have, but our lives wouldn’t have been nearly as rich. Nor would yours.
So, imagine this scenario: You’re in a cabin. Or perhaps you’re in your apartment or a hotel room. The wind is howling outside. Or maybe it’s just rainy or too hot or cold to walk around outside. You’re lonely. Perhaps you’re bored. Or maybe you’ve just had an exasperatingly hectic day, and you want to unwind and forget your troubles for a while. You might even want to imagine a better world. What do you do?
Now imagine the same scenario, but this time, you’re in a world with no stories.
The good news is we don’t live in that world. We live in a world full of stories. Yet in some ways, storytelling is under attack. There are movements afoot to ban certain stories from reaching certain audiences. The market for stories isn’t always conducive to bringing new stories to broad audiences. The tried-and-true and the formulaic often wins out over the new and different, and there simply aren’t enough places for stories to be show-cased where people can find them.
I could explain all this in detail, and I could make a cogent argument persuading you to do all you can to resist book bans and to support writers and publishers in our effort to create more spaces for stories to find their way into the world. But you’d feel like you were being lectured. Nobody enjoys that. Rightly so.
Instead, I could write a story about a world with no stories. I could give you a copy of Fahrenheit 451; I could show you “All the Time in the World,” the Twilight Zone episode where a man who longed to read all the books in the library finally has all the time in the world to read them, but the glasses he needs to read break and there’s no one to fix them.
That is the power of stories.