Ever feel like you're in the Truman Show? by Lu Hersey

 I'd only gone for a walk to get some steps in after a busy day. Crossing a field on the way back home, I ran into a woman called Cathy, who needed directions. Or did she? 

Looking back, it's possible Cathy had set a trap to lure me into her alternate universe, forcing me to question the nature of reality - but she started off by asking for directions back to Glastonbury High Street. Despite her apparently normal (well, normal for Glastonbury) attire, and soft Canadian accent, before she even began her Do You Know What's Actually Happening In the World? speech, I'd mentally planned a route home that would avoid me having to walk with her.

What's Actually Happening In the World? began quite subtly. How did I find the vibe on Glastonbury High Street? Did I notice some low energies there? 

I mean, there are usually a few noticeable mental health issues going on, too many terrible bongo players, and a lot of people with terrible dress sense - but that's Glastonbury and I wouldn't want to be that judgemental. Not sure she even waited for my reply before she carried on to the next question. Had I noticed the frequencies up on the tor? Because, she said, that's where the higher energy is found. 

I started to feel uneasy. How long was this energy zapping conversation going to continue? Several minutes passed by while she talked higher frequencies, before reaching the first major point of her view of How Things Really Are. 

The nub of it was that they (whoever they are, they came up a lot...) are desperate to hold on to all the power, but those who see how things really are (that's Cathy and people like her) know that a paradigm shift is coming and they will lose the fight. 

The following half hour (it might have been only five minutes but it was starting to feel like eternity) was mostly about who she considered they are in this alternate world. Barack Obama - yes, the former president of the USA - started all the evil. Apparently he was the worst. Whereas Trump isn't that bad. He's right about climate change, it doesn't exist - it's them that control the weather. 

You can't be serious, I said, forgetting my veneer of polite. Cathy was unfazed. She told me she'd once thought just like poor, unenlightened me. But now she knows about the huge weather making devices in various remote places that they use to control the climate to induce fear in the population. I blinked in disbelief. You'd better believe it, it's true, she said. All enlightened people know it to be true.

I glanced longingly at the gate out of the field as she moved on to the subject of coronavirus. You guessed it. They released that into the world deliberately to control us all. By this point I was horribly fascinated, like a rabbit watching a dancing stoat. How could this seemingly normal woman, who had worked most of her life in a bank on Vancouver Island, possibly believe all this? You think? I asked.

Of course. They designed the vaccine to kill half the population, in case I hadn't realised. Hadn't I noticed how people were suddenly getting ill and dying? 

People were always getting ill and dying, I said, fidgeting and trying to edge away. She ignored me. The Good News (FINALLY, she was reaching the climax of her world view) was that there were enlightened people whose eyes had been opened, who knew what was going on, and there are more and more of these people every day! In fact The Enlightened (obviously including her) were half the population now, because of the paradigm shift. Believe it, open your eyes! she said. 

Fortunately for me, she could put me in touch with some people who understood, who had the knowledge from civilisations that had come before like Atlantis and Lemuria, and the shift was coming. Let me tell you some good people you can google later, she said. She gave me a couple of names to look up, which I've since forgotten. I had to be quick though, because apparently they kept taking these enlightened people's websites down. Thanks I said. I really need to go now. 

But when I got home, I did look them up, out of curiosity. She'd told me to keep an open mind. To open my eyes. And you know what? Sure enough, these people were in touch with the ancient Lemurians and Atlantians and could read the stars. And they had massive followings, because strangely they hadn't taken their websites down after all. 

Try to imagine for a moment that she was right. Who's to say who's being gullible and who knows what's really happening? I considered the possibility that nothing is how it seems, and I'd go as far as to say it's not unreasonable. Yes, we get a very distorted, one sided view of the world through the news. 

But it's one thing to acknowledge the news is distorted, but a very different thing taking the quantum leap to believe Trump is good and Obama bad, and that anyone who's had a vaccine is now under their control. That in the paradigm shift that's coming, the ancient Lemurians and Atlantians can lead the way to a new world.

What chance is there for anyone writing dystopian fiction these days? In a world filled with power-mad oligarchs, is Cathy's view any stranger than reality? Maybe we're all caught up in a real life version of the Truman Show and it's time we broke through the illusion to find those enlightened ancient Lemurians to follow. Or maybe we simply understand that Cathy's world view is a new folklore/religious belief in the making - because the world is potentially ending and people are looking for an alternative way of living. The Cathys are looking to the returning Lemurians and the Elon Musks are looking to Mars for escape. Maybe we need to work with what's actually here and try and fix the world we have? 

All I can say for sure is if I see Cathy again, I'll hide behind a bush.

Lu Hersey

Website: lu-hersey.com (site coming very soon, mostly about my books and sadly nothing about Lemurians)

Patreon: Writing the Magic

Substack: An old hag's snippets of folklore, myth and magic

Threads: luwrites

🦋: luwrites

From My Little Pony to QAnon: a journey in legitimising fantasy

We told — and tell — our children they could do and be anything. We gave them My Little Pony and Pokemon. We encouraged them to think that if they liked playing the violin or singing or playing football or prancing around the living room that they could grow up to be musicians, footballers and dancers. We encouraged them to read Rainbow Fairies and let them watch In The Night Garden, and if they preferred a book about space or cars, we rolled our eyes because they 'weren't reading' and looked for stories they would prefer, even though they clearly preferred not-stories. We said they wouldn't develop imagination or empathy because they didn't share our enthusiasm for made-up things over true things to the exclusion of the latter. And then they grew up and found that hardly anyone can be a footballer or musician. They did degrees they didn't really like or couldn't really use, running up large bills that will have to be paid back, and they still ended up working in call centres. Those few that did do what they wanted and made a career putting on make-up on YouTube or dancing in their underwear on TikTok, we sneered at for not having a 'proper' job. We told or implied to them that reading Harry Potter was 'better' than reading the Guinness Book of Records. We relentlessly promoted fantasy over fact. And now we act all surprised when they ignore the mainstream news media, believe conspiracy theories and get sick of staying indoors in a pandemic. What happened to believing you can change the world and be a dancer and see no evil? What indeed.

This is the shortlist for the Carnegie this year:

What do you notice about this list? You're probably primed to look at gender balance, ethnic mix, any representation of disability. You probably didn't notice that they are all fiction (again). This is not because the Carnegie is not open to non-fiction (it is), it's because the literary world is not really open to non-fiction, at least in children's publishing. There are a few prizes for non-fiction books. But when did you ever see media coverage of the ALCS prize for an information book? Or the the Royal Society Young People's Book Award? Prizes are not — or should not be — a method of celebrating writers. They should be a means of celebrating books and their readers, of endorsing and validating the choices of readers. But around half of young people prefer to read non-fiction; their choice is not validated. Until a few years ago, even teachers and school librarians often derided children's choice of a non-fiction title when they were allowed free choice of a book. Many parents still do, and I suspect some teachers still do. 

I have nothing against fiction. I did a degree in it. I sometimes write it and even make money from it. But it's not all there is, and we are unbalancing children's lives in dangerous ways by treating it as the 'better' choice. By over-validating fantasy and under-valuing fact, we do young readers and ultimately ourselves, our whole society, a disservice. We have biased a generation or two against truth. Why put the work into learning about statistics or epidemiology when you can jump on a happy bandwagon and declare covid a hoax, then still go out and have a party? After all, when you wanted to read about the plague, they gave you a story book, and when you wanted to know about the Holocaust they gave you The Boy in Striped Pyjamas. Many adults associate fact and truth with their work, and fantasy with blobbing on the sofa watching Netflix. They prefer the second. We should not be modelling and nurturing a dislike of facts, though. It's fine to prefer fiction yourself in your leisure time, but pushing fantasy like a drug to youngsters has turned out to be a costly error.

Good fiction teaches us a lot. It shows us people confronting and dealing with the vicisitudes of life, developing the psychological tools to weather misfortune and press on with a challenging endeavour. It raises important ethical debates and metaphysical issues. Even not-very-good fiction has its uses in modelling relationships and behaviour that children can learn from. All those saccharine stories about fairies and ponies who are super-best friends and are sorry when they do something wrong are trying to sneak in lessons on being a Good Friend. They are the Water Babies disguised in shiny hooves and gossamer wings. I would not be rid of them.

Fiction can help children to develop empathy and imagination. But so can non-fiction. Do you develop more empathy reading about an imaginary character facing obstacles than a real person who has faced obstacles? If so, why? 

 

Pick a pirate: Is the life of the pirate on the right less interesting because she existed?

Do you become more imaginative reading about a Pokemon or a superhero than a Dunkleosteus, a lamprey or a parasitic wasp? Why? All fiction is rooted in fact. Take the fact away, and the fiction of the future becomes parasitic itself, feeding only on previous fiction. Perhaps that's why so many young writers start with writing fan-fiction, the ultimate parasitic genre. It requires no hard research and not even much experience of real life.

All 'fantasy' monsters are rooted in nature — so why is nature boring?

 

We now have the strange position where a government which benefits from people having a complete disregard for facts and the truth is promoting (for supposed economic reasons) a secondary curriculum denuded of arts and imagination. Of course young people should learn about and practise the arts — not so that they can be promised a career as a dancer, musician, painter or writer, but because it will enrich their entire lives and will be a lasting source of pleasure. We educate people to live, not only to work; work is part of life, not all of it. We need balance, equal promotion of and respect for humanities and scientific and technical subjects. At the moment we seem to teach the youngest children that their interest in fact marks them as unimaginative, unexciting, dull. A passion for fictional flying ponies and monsters is somehow more child-like, more normal, more endearing than an interest in spacecraft or trees. Then they get to secondary school and are told that music GCSE is a waste of time and why don't they like engineering? Well, why do you think? Because when they wanted to read a book of monster trucks, you rolled your eyes and gave them a story instead. Now you've a bunch of disillusioned kids who were told stories were 'better' than encyclopaedias who are being told facts are king and of course they can't earn a living as a musician. They have to spend their time doing the very thing you discouraged them from reading about and enjoying before. Of course they are disillusioned.

More importantly, the process instills early on the notion that facts don't matter as much as being imaginative. Truth becomes not a thing of joy and wonder but associated with hoop-jumping and becoming fit for the workforce. That's not very joyful. Couple that with the well-documented psychology of how people make choices and are attracted to easy and optimistic options, and you have a large number of people ready to believe conspiracy theories (which offer easy explanations and someone to blame) and vote for serial liars who make attractive promises. People are taken in by these ideas because they never been taught critical thinking, the bedrock of which is respect for the truth. They have never been told to respect facts or how to handle them. If you don't know how to handle information, you can't tell when others use it to manipulate you. So, yes, it's a long road from My Little Pony to QAnon. And not everyone who reads My Little Pony books will end up believing we are ruled by elite lizard people and Bill Gates is trying to put a microchip in you. But perhaps if we nurtured an interest in facts — in the truth — alongside a love of creativity, people wouldn't be so willing to accept all the fantasies they're peddled.

Anne Rooney (being deliberately provocative)

Out now: Our Extreme Earth, Lonely Planet, 2020