Power and Punishment: Using the Language of Fantasy to Subvert Real-Life Oppression
Power lies at the heart of all fantasy, written or imagined. To craft a novel of the genre is to visualize an expression of power and assign it to factions that will then weave and warp over the course of the story. Yet, our ability to conjure is naturally shackled by the limits of what we have seen, what we believe, and what we hope is possible. It is little wonder then, that fantasy gives us worlds that are altered, yet familiar—inversions, allegories, and warnings. With these carefully constructed societies come equally detailed punishment, for there can be no law without consequences for breaking it. And it is in this interplay between power, its exercise, and its fettering that the fantasy genre’s subversive nature shines.
I often say that I don’t read much fantasy, and I don’t read a lot of the sword-and-sorcery, dragons, and romantasy novels that are currently so popular. However, I have read and loved both The Lord of the Rings (when I was younger) and, more recently, the Harry Potter series. I’ve always thought of these fantasy stories within the context of Joseph Campbell’s idea of the hero’s journey.
But this introduction by Shalini Abeysekara, whose debut novel, This Monster of Mine, was published earlier this month (April 2025), opened my eyes to a wider appreciation and interpretation of fantasy’s possibilities.
And whether I look at fantasy as a hero’s journey or as an individual’s confrontation with power, it still very much illustrates many of the basic patterns of Life Stories in Literature.
The Freeway Novel
To speak of the character of Los Angeles, City of Quartz, is to speak of a long list of contradictory facts encompassing the city’s simultaneous wealth and poverty, promise and disappointment, beauty and desolation. The freeways, being the most defining part of daily life in Los Angeles, have long offered the simplest and most effective way to represent the manifest experience of these contradictions. . . . The freeway novel does not figure the complete history of L.A. literature, but since its inception at midcentury, it has become a main source of its self-regard. Across the genre, one sees the evolution of Los Angeles’s image of itself, as well as the possibilities for its future.
Skijler Hutson examines how the freeway system of Los Angeles has come to symbolize the potential of life in the city, from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) into the 21st century.
AI isn’t what we should be worried about – it’s the humans controlling it
Billy J. Stratton, professor of English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver, acknowledges that we’ve been hearing grave warnings about the safety of artificial intelligence (AI). “Such anxieties and fears reflect feelings that have been prevalent in film and literature for over a century now.”
However, Stratton, who describes himself as “a scholar who explores posthumanism, a philosophical movement addressing the merging of humans and technology,” wonders if “critics have been unduly influenced by popular culture, and whether their apprehensions are misplaced.” His conclusion:
With some commentators raising the alarm over AI’s imminent capacity for chaos and destruction, I see the real issue being whether humanity has the wherewithal to channel this technology to build a fairer, healthier, more prosperous world.
What Is Kafkaesque?: The Philosophy of Franz Kafka
Writer Colin Marshall offers a concise explanation of the term Kafkaesque, which “tends to refer to the bureaucratic nature of capitalistic, judiciary, and government systems, the sort of complex, unclear processes in which no one individual ever has a comprehensive grasp on what is going on, and the system doesn’t really care.”
Although the article is short, it provides links to sources of further information.
‘You must read my diaries’: unlocking the private life of Edna O’Brien
“Towards the end of her life, the groundbreaking Irish novelist granted film-maker Sinéad O’Shea access to her most personal writing. What she revealed was shocking and inspiring”
When Sinéad O’Shea was working on a documentary film about Irish novelist Edna O’Brien, the novelist encouraged O’Shea to read her diaries. Here O’Shea offers “five excerpts from the diaries that helped me tell those two parts of O’Brien’s story: the glamour and the doomed love, but also her intellectual abilities, the quality of her writing and its context.”
How Mental Time Travel Can Make Us Better People
Katherine Harmon Courage, deputy editor at science magazine Nautilus, talks with psychologists about their recent results of a study designed to measure whether thinking about the future can change behavior as well as intentions.
The head researcher concludes, “Yes, our research shows that just one minute of future thinking is enough to promote prosocial behavior. . . . If we think about the future more often, we will become more likely to help each other.” Such thinking may help settle conflicts between friends, family members, and colleagues.
The big idea: will sci-fi end up destroying the world?
“Skewed interpretations of classic works are feeding the dark visions of tech moguls, from Musk to Thiel”
I’ve written before that I’ve recently come to appreciate science fiction as a means of expressing alternate ways of being, ways that break away from what societies generally portray as acceptable. However, in this piece writer Sam Freedman points out that many tech creators and advocates—such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg—as well as major players in “rightwing American politics” have subverted the messages of classic science fiction writers such as Philip K. Dick, Neal Stephenson, and William Gibson.
“The real issue is that sci-fi hasn’t just infused the tech moguls’ commercial ideas but also their warped understanding of society and politics.”
Five Novels About Coming of Age When You’re Old Enough to Know Better
I used to think of the coming-of-age story as a predominantly teenaged genre: first loves, failed friendships, big mistakes, the mean girls and bad boys of high school hallways and college campuses. But in recent years, many of the best new novels are about finding yourself and a trajectory that feels right in your twenties, or even thirties, with much mess along the way.
Emily Everett suggests some novels that deal with questions about “what it means to come-of-age in your tricky, tender twenties, to push through the instabilities of class, money, grief, and loss, to try to find a right place for yourself in the world.”
© 2025 by Mary Daniels Brown
