The Fantasy of Power: The Core of all Genre Fiction

 One of my favorite (not the best, just my favorite) television scenes is from The Sopranos. A very good show about a mafia boss in New Jersey, in this scene the main character, Tony, is at a very nice restaurant. A younger man is sitting at a nearby table wearing a baseball hat (which is poor manners for a very nice restaurant). Tony Soprano, a man accustomed to violence, a man with an air of authority (illegitimate authority, but still authority), tells the young man to take his hat off. Which he does.

The Sopranos did not paint its characters as saints or even Robin Hood style thieves. They were bad men who did very bad things. But they were often bad men who did good things, or at least things modern people would like to be able to do. We (or maybe just me) would like to tell rude young people to take their hats off in nice restaurants. We would like to be able to keep our children safe, to provide a nice income for our families. We all want more power, more agency, and we live in a world where we are largely powerless. I know that in a similar situation I'd be unlikely to risk a physical confrontation over a hat. When someone cuts me off in traffic, I have to let it go. Tony Soprano can make a call and have the person who cut him off kneecapped.

The real world, however, is not a place where most of us can have that kind of power, of agency. Even Tony Soprano has to live a life that induces crippling anxiety as the cost of his power. In the real world individuals can't go around beating up hat-wearers or people who park poorly - we would soon be jailed ourselves. And I'm not saying that's a bad feature of our world, just that it's stifling. The modern human has to live a life surrounded by uncorrected injustice. We see bad people go unpunished, and it irks. Because that's human nature.

Genre fiction - at least most of it - exists primarily to create a setting where main characters can have this agency. Genre exists so we can live a fantasy of power, where we can imagine characters who can go around righting wrongs and correcting evils and being successful at it.

Sword and sorcery Conan-style writing is an obvious starting point. Why love these settings? I think it's because we can imagine a very skilled man with a sword being able to win a kingdom on the power of a strong right arm. And that's not something we believe is true of the 'real' world.

Once magic is introduced  and normalized this connection grows stronger. Wizards in many fantasy settings are often as powerful as armies all by themselves. They can turn the fate of nations with a wave of their arm (or wand or fang or whatever). And that's the wish fulfillment in action.

Science fiction, at a casual glance, would seem to counter this pattern. In a more complex world, surely individuals would be even more disempowered, right? But in most science fiction the technology and culture are carefully calibrated to empower the right kind of individual. Cyberpunk only ' works' because hackers are given superhuman abilities to control the world around them (superhuman relative to actual, real life hackers, whose abilities are far more mundane). Space travel and the abilities of starships are often worked in such a way that captains can control the destinies of entire civilizations.  In books like Dune the entire technology tree is designed to make individual abilities far more important to war (think about how implausible the whole shield tech in Dune is, and how it was just a way to make a very skilled person with a sword more powerful than a small group of nobodies with guns). Asimov's Foundation series makes it possible for the protagonists to figure out WHICH real people are in position to be truly efficacious and focus on them - an entire branch of science devoted to allowing the author to make super-people in a setting that doesn't read like a comic book.

Superhero stories take the same idea to a more obvious level. In a superhero world, the heroes have greater efficacy than regular folk. And that is why we love them. Batman can do things you can't do. Superman can do even more things that you can't do.

I obviously haven't read all of genre fiction. I suspect there are some examples of genre fiction where the main characters are even more powerless than most of us are in our regular lives. But in the majority of popular genre fiction, to my knowledge, the heroes can have far greater impact on the world, because of the worldbuilding. The magic, metaphysics, culture, technology, or whatever, make it possible for individuals to be more powerful, not less. 

And that's why we love them. We love the idea of a Hobbit being able to toss a ring into a volcano and ending the tyranny of a great evil. 

Where's the ring I could toss to get rid of  Trump? Sadly, there wasn't one. The real world is much less satisfying.