The lion king

I commend to you all this excellent New Yorker profile of C.S. Lewis by Adam Gopnik. Gopnik is particularly strong on the tensions between Lewis' dutiful Anglicanism and his unruly imagination. My favorite passage analyzes the problem of Aslan in the Narnia books:

"If we had, say, a donkey, a seemingly uninspiring animal from an obscure corner of Narnia, raised as an uncouth and low-caste beast of burden, rallying the mice and rats and weasels and vultures and all the other unclean animals, and then being killed by the lions in as humiliating a manner as possible — a donkey who reëmerges, to the shock even of his disciples and devotees, as the king of all creation — now, that would be a Christian allegory. A powerful lion, starting life at the top of the food chain, adored by all his subjects and filled with temporal power, killed by a despised evil witch for his power and then reborn to rule, is a Mithraic, not a Christian, myth."

Fantasy as thought experiment

One of the architects of 20th-century science fiction, the influential writer and vastly more influential magazine editor John W. Campbell Jr., liked to argue that science fiction was a series of thought experiments, that each good sf story was a well-worked-out answer to a stated or implied "What if?" question about the universe and humanity's place in it. In this Slate article, Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik -- whose upcoming book is winningly titled How Children Change the World -- argues that for children, fantasy, too, is a series of thought experiments, a series of well-worked-out answers to a stated or implied "What if?" question about the universe and the child's place in it.

Where no fan has gone before

The title story in Kelly Link's collection Magic for Beginners is about the ultimate cult TV series, and by "cult TV" I mean in all senses of the phrase. For followers of The Library, the TV screen that separates fiction from fact, characters from audience members, may be as porous as Alice's looking-glass. Link's story may be more realistic than you think. This article from the December issue of Wired magazine reports that some Star Trek fans, after years of devotion and study, have themselves been fully initiated into the Mystery; now they are the TV series.

Drunken Santas run riot in Auckland

This December 2005 news story from New Zealand -- which is marketing itself to tourists these days as Middle-Earth and Narnia rolled into one -- neatly encapsulates the ambivalence of fantasy, and its ultimate resistance to marketing. Santa, like the fairy of folk tradition, is a dangerously unpredictable figure.