On this episode of the Plutopia News Network podcast, Jon, Scoop and Wendy welcome award-winning British science fiction novelist and literature professor Adam Roberts to discuss his new critical book Fantasy: A Short History and what it means to “suspend disbelief” in fantasy and science fiction. Adam explores how science fiction can be seen as a subset of fantasy rooted in modern scientific thinking, while fantasy is humanity’s default storytelling mode, stretching from ancient epics to Tolkien and beyond. He traces how genre fantasy crystallized as a recognizable category in the late 1960s and 1970s with Tolkien’s paperback boom and publishing lines like Ballantine Books. The conversation ranges across the Avatar films blending of sci-fi spectacle and mythic enchantment, the commercial and cultural drive toward endless sequels and mega-series (from Victorian triple-deckers to Star Wars), and the idea of fantasy as “re-enchantment” in a disenchanted modern world. The conversation is tempered by questions about grimdark violence, romantic fantasy trends, fascism and authoritarianism in fantasy settings, and how technology, the internet, and AI may reshape imagination, community, and the ways people escape into (or build) alternate worlds through books, film, cosplay, and video games.

Adam Roberts:

But I think it may be that cinema is becoming more like video games. And it’s more about particular special effects, spectacular. That’s diminishing, I think, for the art form, because video games are necessarily structured by the obstacles that you put in the way of the player. The player overcomes the obstacles and gets to the end of the stage and beats the big boss. And that’s a rather kind of denuded way of thinking about the possibilities of storytelling. But then I also think that in a game like Skyrim you can do anything at all. You can fight dragons and you can go on adventures and quests, or you can just live in a village and explore what the possibilities of that are. And that’s rare. It’s rare certainly in cinema, but even in book form, where there usually is a more linear conflict that has to be overcome.

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