Victories Greater Than Death

Oh my God! I finally got a chance to read the preview sample for Never Say You Can't Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times by Making Up Stories. It was totally speaking to me. Then not very far in, I found out that the author is the same author who wrote Victories Greater Than Death. That's a young adult sci-fi novel I recently started reading. Now I realize that this explains the coincidence of why the book came up in my email recently. But this doesn't explain the coincidence of why I picked up a sci-fi novel that happens to be written by someone who writes about how using stories to escape from reality is a good thing. Something which I've been considering and wanting more input about.

Anyway, I need to get back to other things. I just had to write something quickly before this got lost in the stream. I'm including some passages I highlighted while reading the introduction of the book.

Putting any kind of story together makes you a god in your own private universe and grants you control over a whole world inside your own mind, even when the outside world feels like a constant torrent of awfulness.

That's a thought I've had and wondered whether that was completely narcissistic.

People sometimes talk about escapist storytelling as a kind of dereliction of duty—as if we’re running away from the fight. That’s some garbage right there, because escapism is resistance.

This is how I feel about escapism in general.

In her 1979 essay collection The Language of the Night, Ursula K. Le Guin paraphrases Tolkien: “If a soldier is captured by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?… If we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape and to take as many people with us as we can.”

I love how this was put by both Le Guin and Tolkien.

Visualizing a happier, more just world is a direct assault on the forces that are trying to break your heart.

Again, something I truly feel.

I look forward to continuing my reading in both books.