Reasons For Blogging And For Reading Fantasy

Because SM Stirling's Nantucket, Volume II, has not yet arrived by post, I browsed through the NESFA Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson volumes that I have, started to reread "Operation Afreet," then realized that I do not remember the course of this story. This means that it is possible to reread Operation Chaos and find new details to blog about. Blogging requires reading or rereading in a particular frame of mind, being prepared to enter into the fictional world rather than just skim across its surface. It is more like a virtual reality than a linear narrative.

I do not need to revisit accounts of the experience of a man becoming a wolf. See here and here.

Why do we read narratives as fantastic as this one? We do not believe in werewolves. But we have imagined them and can appreciate accounts of what they would be like. Without fiction, we would not be who or what we are. And some of the supernatural elements of fantasies are believed by some of us. The Christian Heaven and Hell exist in the goetic universe.

Fiction requires willing suspension of disbelief. Some religions require willing belief. This is a difference of degree, not of kind.