The fantasy-industrial complex has grown by enabling the suspension of disbelief more and more powerfully and ubiquitously: movies, then radio, then TV, then Disney’s theme parks and all their amateur spin-offs—Renaissance Faires, war reenactments, cosplay—and then videogames. Each new wave of entertaining fiction was more immersive than earlier ones, seemed more real. As this output seeped and then gushed into everyday life, the old willing suspension of belief was joined by unconscious suspension of disbelief, all the unreality that we tend to forget is unreal. By that I mean everything from
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