[Regin Hardhammer]

Thanks everybody for your ideas. On one level you're right about books giving us a way out of our everyday life. In that sense, any book can be an 'escape'. It can get you away from immediate problems you have to deal with in school or work or whatever.

But escape can be more than that. It's like what Tolkien said. Can you blame the prisoner who's trying to escape? It could be that the life outside his prison is better than the life that's inside. Sometimes "escape" from your present life can start you thinking about ideas that you would never consider in your regular day-to-day existence.

My personal feeling is that writing about dragons and Elves doesn't make a book escapist, any more than writing about viruses or new technology automatically makes a book "relevent" to life. You can have one author who handles dragons and Elves in such a way that it makes you think about important things: the questions people raise to explain why they're here and what they're doing. And you can have someone else write abook about modern, "relevent" things that really doesn't have much thought behind it. That's the kind of a book you read once and toss away and never look at again.

It doesn't depend on the genre, but the quality of writing. So if sci/fi is having problems, they'd be better off looking at the kinds of books written and the authors and see if what they're saying is interesting and thoughtful rather than throwing rocks at their neighbors.