My Escapism Has Changed

During October last year, I was listening to a light fantasy novel. It wasn’t particularly engaging but it whiled away my commutes and evening walks well enough.

After October 7, I couldn’t listen to audiobooks for several weeks. Try as I might, I couldn’t focus. My mind kept wandering, and with it my fingers. I felt compelled to thumb through half a dozen Telegram channels and news websites.

The magnitude of what was going on left no room for fiction.

Now I’m back to reading novels and listening to audiobooks. My job requires me to drive a lot so I’m a voracious consumer of audiobooks and it has been my habit to read for half an hour before sleep since I was in the first grade. Though I love a good history, my great love has always been fiction.

However, in recent months, I noticed that what was once escapism is no longer so. The dark lord assumes the face of Khamenei or Nasrallah. Orcs are the mirror image of the barbaric hordes that invaded Israel on the morning of October 7. The vast ruined cities so favored in post-apoc and sci-fi fiction are right across the border. When a dragon swoops to burn a village, I await for the Iron Dome missile that will shoot him down.

All wars are my war. All monsters are my monsters. I cannot help it. It’s as if my mind has created a filter that strips fantasy of the fantastical and leaves behind the bare bones of war… and there’s nothing fantastical about war. That’s not escapism. That’s just overloading reality.

So where is my escapism now? In stories where nothing grandiose happens. The cozy whodunit where the polite detective is looking for a murderer in a society dominated by decorum. The explorers of a mysterious planet with totally unique physical laws. The changeling and the stolen child looking for identity in alien worlds.

Even if you’re not fighting, war affects you. You run to bomb shelters when there are sirens. You volunteer to help the troops and meet people you’d never have otherwise met. Your heart sinks each time you see “allowed for publication.” You search for the headlines for people you know. You go to funerals. Countless small changes that make wartime different from peacetime.

People always talk about the big changes, but somehow the small changes never make it into the stories. This is one of them. War changes fantasy.