Once More With Footnotes

world, a flexibility of response, and an ability to play which they lose as they grow up. As a species we have retained it. As a species, we are forever sticking our fingers into the electric socket of the un i verse to see what will happen next. It is a trait that will either save us or kill us, but it is what makes us human beings. I would rather be in the company of people who look at Mars than people who contemplate humanity's navel — other worlds are better t h an fluff.
     
                  And I came across a lot of trash. But the human mind has a healthy natural tendency to winnow out the good stuff from the rubbish. It's like gold mining: you have to shift a ton of dirt to get the gold; if you don't shift the dirt, you won't fi nd the nugget. As far as I am concerned, escapist literature let me escape to the real world.
     
                  So let's not get frightened when the children read fantasy. It is the compost for a healthy mind. It stimulates the inquisitive nodes. It may not appear as "rel evant" as books set more firmly in the child's environment, or whatever hell the writer believes to be the child's environment, but there is some evidence that a rich internal fantasy life is as good and necessary for a child as healthy soil is for a plan t , for much the same reasons.
     
                  Of course, some may read no other kind of fiction all their lives (although in my experience science fiction fans tend to be widely read outside the field). Adult SF fans may look a bit scary when they come into bookshops, so me of them have been known to wear plastic pointy ears, but people like that are an unrepresentative minority and are certainly no weirder than people who, say, play golf. At the very least they are helping to keep the industry alive, and providing one of the best routes to reading that there can be.
     
                  Here's to fantasy as the proper diet for the growing soul. All human life is there: a moral code, a sense of order, and, sometimes, great big green things with teeth. There are other books to read, and I hope children who start with fantasy go on to read them. I did. But everyone has to start somewhere.
     
                  Please call it fantasy, by the way. Don't call it "magical realism", that's just fantasy wearing a collar and tie, mark-of-Cain words, words used to mean "fa ntasy written by someone I was at university with". Like the fairy tales that were its forebears, fantasy needs no excuses.
     
                  One of the great popular novelists of the early part of this century was G.K. Chesterton. Writing at a time when fairy stories wer e under attack, for pretty much the same reason as books can now be covertly banned in some schools because they have the word witch in the title, he said: "The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons. But children have alwa ys known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed."
     

This was published in 1990 in the anthology Digital Dreams, edited by Dave Barrett. I was tempted to "update" this — after all, it's about Virtual Reality, haha, remember that? — but what's the point? Besides, it would be cheating.
     
    I just liked the idea of an amiable repairman, not very bright but good with machines, padding the streets of a quiet, dull, sleeping world. Things are breaking down, knowledge is draining away, a nd he's driving his van around the sleeping streets, helping people dream  ...
     
     
     
     
     
# ifdefDEBUG + "world/enough" + "time"
     
                  Never could stand the idea of machines in people. It's not proper. People say, hey, what about pacemakers and them artificial ki dneys and that, but they're still machines no matter what.
     
                  Some of them have nuclear batteries. Don't tell me that's right.
     
                  I tried this implant once, it was supposed to flash the time at the bottom left-hand corner of your eyeball once a second, in li ttle red numbers. It was for the busy exec, they said, who always needs to know, you know, subliminally what the time is. Only mine kept resetting to Tuesday, 1 January, 1980, every time I blinked, so I took it back, and the salesman tried to sell me one t hat could show the time in twelve different capitals plus stock market reports and that. All kinds of other stuff, too. It's getting