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. 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.”
