Craig Chalquist, PhD, PhD
A writer, professor, adoptee, and enchantivist from Southern California, I am fascinated by how fiction brings about deep transformation, sometimes when we least expect it.
I grew up terrorized by periodic violence. Fictional images of better futures nurtured me and kept my soul alive. Fiction and fantasy weren’t mere escapes: they were ways to imagine possibilities beyond what I suffered. For some of us, imaginings like that are unbearable because they summon hopes so often defeated. I kept imagining because, although I was clothed and housed, I felt from early on that I had nothing left to lose.
Outside the home, environmental protection battles raged, the Vietnam War body counts rose, fiery riots surged, and we ducked and covered at school in case of nuclear attack. But in my readings, in my dreams, and in futuristic TV shows and movies, humanity got itself together, formed mature societies, and regreened Earth. I grew up wondering: Why can’t we make a better society than the one we live in?
As a psychotherapist, I worked with people more sensitive and visionary than the neighborhoods and workplaces they inhabited. Additionally, counseling men who had been incarcerated for violent crimes showed me that even the worst among us could, if we chose, find redemption. All these troubled people had one thing in common: they started out in constricted life stories about who they were and decided to walk into wider tellings.
Speculative fiction is a thought laboratory where we can test possibilities. Vital questions confront us: How will we weather climate chaos and other oncoming tests of our resiliency while holding on to and even deepening our humanity? What bonds with each other do we need to hold us together? What might reenchant our sense of place, world, relationships, and innermost self? How might we grow up as a species and become completely human?
The protagonists in my novels struggle with these big questions in very personal ways. Part of their struggle is to understand how technological developments like AI, human enhancement, longevity medicine, and CBI (computer-brain interface) might change relationships, values, and sense of self. Who are we after our devices breach the circle of selfhood? What wisdom do the ancient tales of humanity, including folktales and myths, offer for paths through our chaotic time?
These characters also wonder about the figure of the hero appearing in so many stories. Heroes imply that special ones among us, saviors perhaps, are needed to do the heavy lifting in difficult times. I’m much more interested in characters in crisis who don’t feel heroic about themselves but face adversity by learning to draw deeply on their resources and relationships. “Who will save us?” is not the question my work poses. Rather, it is this: “How can we save ourselves?” And heal our planet as we do?
How deeply the boy I was yearned to live in a better world! I still yearn for that. “I live in exile,” said H. G. Wells, “from the world community of my desire.” But to get there requires learning how to imagine such a world. Together. We do this by relearning how to dream together. Fiction helps us do that. Deep truths in the stories can move us forward, helping us find faith that the very best within us has yet to enter the lists and meet the challenge.
Read here about the Lamplight Trilogy and the entire Assembling Terrania Cycle
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