What is strange about strange things?

A huge part of speculative and imaginative literature, especially its genre variants, is that strange things happen. But another part of it is that many of these strange things are actually plausible or at least credible.

It is not strange for the crew of a starship to encounter strange new worlds in outer space. The universe is big enough and we are ignorant enough to allow for that possibility. What is strange is that it happens on a weekly basis.

It is not strange for a detective to solve a mystery using the most unlikely of observations. People can be smart. The strange bit is that the same detective manages to do it in every case, week after week.

In short, it seems to me that in much of serialised speculative genre fiction, the regularity of strange occurrences is stranger than the actual strangeness of them.

In one story you have an alien virus that is manifesting as a disease among characters. The ship’s doctor works for a few hours, isolates the infection, and manages to create a cure. The fact that a medical professional could find a cure for a disease is not the strange part. The strange part is that it took only a few hours and it wasn’t really much harder to do than last week.

Fantasy is often described as an escape from reality and this may lead some of us to conclude that it is somehow the opposite of reality. But in truth, much of it is perhaps better defined as just an escape from footwork.

Fantastic literature is often not very far removed from reality. It is just reality minus the boring parts. It is adventure and excitement without the long waiting periods that must come before it. It is findings without the long years of research. It is the essence of a laborious journey left over after the eventlessness has been distilled out of it.

In the real world, nothing happens most of the time. A single great achievement during an entire lifetime is far more likely than exciting weekly adventures. Perhaps this is why we seek out the exhilaration of strange fiction - to remind ourselves that there is something beyond the footwork and that drudgery is not doom.

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