Good stories

I know this is nothing new, but I recently talked with a man that was of the opinion that all fantasy and SF is just “Goblins and lightsabers” (which by the way would be a great role playing game and someone needs to invent it). He said that he couldn’t read it because it repelled him and he insinuated, like many do, that fantasy and SF is some kind of lesser genre because it doesn’t deal with the “real world”.

I obviously do not agree with his view. I think that good stories are mostly about people and whatever is is that we define as the “human condition”. This doesn’t mean that they have to be down to earth slice of life stories though. I think the whole idea about taking a crew of misfits that have to work out their differences to succeed and setting them in a time of yonder or in space with ray-guns is fantastic. Or for that a coming of age story involving ridiculous odds such as the world at stake or similar can be diverting to read.

I think, that regardless of the setting, stories that really resonates are all dealing with what it means to be human. It can be in relation to a world filled with faceless corporations trying to run your life as in many cyberpunk stories or on how to deal with loss as a surprising amount of short stories in fantasy and SF deals with.

As I said, nothing new, there are a lot of slice of life books that are great. But I do not think that they in any way depicts what it means to be human any more accurately than a fantastic book.