The Comfort of Other Worlds
Greetings, readers. In this issue, I want to share a 9 p.m. thought—the kind that shows up right before sleep, when your brain is tired enough to be honest. The thought was this: Are people reading more fantasy because the world is in crisis?
As I mentioned in my last Substack, I didn’t used to gravitate toward fantasy, sci-fi, or speculative genres. Until this past year, I mostly stuck to literary fiction. Now that I’ve crossed over, I can’t seem to stop—and I don’t particularly want to. With so much happening in the world, slipping into a reality far removed from this one feels like taking a vacation without packing a bag.
Which got me wondering whether this shift was personal or part of something larger. Is our growing appetite for dragons, dystopias, and alternate worlds a response to the moment we’re living in—or am I just assigning meaning to my reading life after too much scrolling?
This isn’t the first time readers have turned toward imagined worlds during periods of instability. After the French Revolution, when faith in political systems, institutions, and even reason itself began to fracture, writers turned toward Romanticism. Folklore, myth, the supernatural, and the sublime surged not because people wanted to avoid reality, but because reality had become unrecognizable. When the social order collapses, realism can start to feel insufficient. Imagination becomes a way to process grief, fear, and longing without naming them directly.
Fantasy, in this sense, isn’t escapism—it’s translation. A monster becomes fear. A quest becomes survival. A ruined kingdom becomes a society trying, and sometimes failing, to rebuild.
The twentieth century only deepened this pattern. Many of the fantasy worlds we now treat as cultural bedrock were shaped in the aftermath of war. Tolkien began developing Middle-earth after surviving World War I. His work is saturated with loss, endurance, and the quiet heroism of carrying on when the world feels irrevocably damaged. These stories weren’t about pretending violence didn’t happen—they were about imagining what comes after.
The same can be said for the explosion of speculative and dystopian fiction following World War II. As nuclear anxiety, technological acceleration, and authoritarian fears took hold, writers turned to imagined futures to explore moral questions that felt too dangerous—or too large—to approach head-on. Fantasy and sci-fi allowed writers and readers alike to ask: What kind of world are we building? And what kind of people are we becoming inside it?
More recently, during the COVID-19 pandemic, reading trends showed a marked rise in fantasy, romance, and immersive series. Locked inside our homes, cut off from routines and certainty, many of us reached not for stark realism but for stories with structure. Fantasy worlds have rules. Magic behaves in specific ways. Conflicts are terrible, yes—but they are legible. They move toward resolution.
In moments when real life feels endless and unresolved, there’s comfort in a story that promises an ending. Even the darkest fantasy offers something the present often can’t: coherence.
So maybe that 9 p.m. thought wasn’t as idle as it first seemed. Maybe we are reading more fantasy because the world feels fractured, frightening, and difficult to interpret. And maybe that isn’t a failure of seriousness or attention, but a deeply human response. When reality overwhelms us, we reach for stories that remind us how to survive it—sometimes by stepping sideways into another world first.
Fantasy doesn’t ask us to abandon this one. It asks us to imagine alternatives, to rehearse courage, to remember that even in the darkest chapters, people persist. And perhaps that’s why, lately, I can’t stop reading it. Not because I want to disappear—but because I want to come back with a little more hope than I had before I turned the page.
