Fiction – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I want to explain how fiction is necessary for my survival.

I am in the business of writing serious, analytical, and factual accounts about the human experience. As a historian, that’s my job. I do write fiction as well, though I keep both as separate as the church and state are supposed to be in this country. Still, as much as I enjoy my work, as much as I like the feeling of getting my academic writings on paper and presenting them at conferences, when I’m looking for some fun reading, I usually turn to fiction. Fiction is fundamental to the human spirit, it allows us to dream, to imagine alternate possibilities, to envision possible futures.

At any given moment I’m usually reading 2 or 3 books for fun, normally there’s at least one sci-fi novel, maybe a memoir, and possibly something relating to natural history. I admit, 2 out of 3 of those are nonfiction, depending on how you understand the truth of that memoir, but if I had to choose between those three genres when I’m sitting alone in a restaurant at lunch or dinner or looking for something to read before bed, I’ll go for the fiction ahead of the others. I also tend to disagree with the trend of late that prefers dystopian fiction over anything else. There are so many of those stories out there, from the Ender’s Game books by Orson Scott Card, to the Blade Runner and Mad Max films, to even my old favorite Douglas Adams’s A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I don’t like dystopia, and I don’t honestly understand how it could be enjoyable to read or watch a story talking about such a future. 

Rather, I prefer the opposite, utopian fiction, stories that offer us a vision of what our future could be like. I think that’s why I’ve been drawn to Star Trek since the pandemic began, and have now watched several of the TV series, a few of the films, and even read some of the accompanying novels. There’s something about a vision of humanity’s future as a contributing member of an interstellar community that really seems heartening to me, that as distant as that potential future seems now, we might well reach it someday. This is one area where my work and my favorite stories intersect; my historical research deals squarely with exploration, in my case mostly set in Brazil in the 1550s. In many respects, my research is a cautionary story of all the horrible things that the explorers fanning out from Europe did to the peoples they encountered. Normally, academic history books aren’t read by many people, and certainly there are only a few that get much public attention. So, I hope that if anyone eventually reads my work, they’ll recognize in it my efforts at warning our own generations and generations to come of the rocks and shoals that threaten any present or future explorer who seeks to venture out without harming others in the process.

So yes, my love of fiction does influence my work, but only indirectly. When it comes to my writing, when I need to refresh and rethink my work, I’ll turn to those same novels and bask in their eloquence and style. As a writer, as a dreamer, as an optimist, fiction is necessary to my survival.