Lego Ergo Sum

     Cogito Ergo Sum
     I Think, Therefore I Am

"We are such stuff as dreams are made on."
--Shakespeare’s Tempest      

Consciousness of self, social role orientation and the search for personal identity are the hallmarks of the adolescent stage. Researchers have noted that prior to this period, development largely depends on what is done to us. At adolescence, development depends mainly on what we do.

     Lego Ergo Sum 
     I Read, Therefore I Am

We grapple with social issues in seeking to find our own identity, but we’re also confronted with profound philosophical and moral questions. Adolescence is a period of accelerated brain development and increased cognitive ability. The "why?" and "what is?" of the preadolescent wonder years turn into the teenager’s more complex questions: "why not?" and "what if?" This is the principle reason fantasy literature and science fiction are so perfectly suited to “tweens” and young adults. At the center of fantasy and all its many sub-genres, is the quest to find out:

What if?

Adolescence being a developmental period of boundary testing and risk taking, fantasy literature and science fiction offer young people a framework for experiencing a world where not even the sky is a limit! And yet, the best of the fantasy genre is literature tightly anchored to the boundaries and contours that describe real truth – not fancy or artifice. In this way, fantasy and science fiction are supremely metacognitive.

Why not?

Paradoxically, all of the fantasy genres hinge on contemplation of some fundamental reality or deeper truth, sometimes through speculative ideation, but often through an invocation of apagogic reasoning – that is, they prove a universal truth indirectly, by showing the impossibility or absurdity of the contrary. So while stories in this genre focus on matters beyond reality, fantasy literature – and Sci-Fi in particular – concerns itself with the domain of nonfiction: realistic explanations, plausible logic and detail.

     Brave New Words

Fine literature of this genre can be said to be meta-metaphoric! The nonfictional qualities of fantasy push fiction to its limits and encourage the reader to decode entire new paradigms of thought. Once a new world has been convincingly established through a literary work, it naturally invites companion pieces which further extend the central metaphor while retaining a unique inner logic and culturo-linguistic coherence. These stories generate stories about stories themselves! Perhaps the proper word for this sort of metaphoric 3-D thinking is meta-epistemic.

"Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio."
-- Shakespeare’s Hamlet      

When the dream world is more like a nightmare, and the logic is twisted toward deception or damnation, fantasy literature crosses over into the melodrama and madness of horror. While horror literature models many of the characteristics and features of the fantasy genres, it may or may not remain relevant to the central tasks of adolescence which are thwarted by the transitional aspects of the high-growth stage: vulnerability, insecurity, ambiguity, frustration, aloneness and a sense of loss.

The other-worldly stories in Margo Lanagan’s collection, Black Juice are a harsh blend of phantasm and fatalistic fiction. Her book echoes the brutal simplicity of the pre-technological fairy tale. The beauty of Lanagan’s language is obscured and sublimated – not elevated – by the horror and horrific indifference of her environments. While not a fun teen read, the sort of phantasmic fictional realism found in Margo Lanagan’s very dry, Black Juice, confronts the adolescent reader with the crisis of authority without responsibility and its opposite.

     I Read, Therefore I Exist

FanLit and Sci-Fi have long been associated with Anglo cultural traditions, western religious themes and heteronormativity. (Damsels in hi-tech distress.) However, the recent radical changes in technology have engendered radical changes in literary perspectives. Over the last few decades, speculative fiction and urban fantasy have emerged as vibrant sub-genres with novelists like John Crowley, Matt Ruff and Emma Bull pioneering the way.

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1. The central quest of FanLit and Sci-Fi: "What if?"
   
2. Identity Formation – "Who am I?" in relation to God and the universe. "The Dark Unknown"
   
3. Hero -- the teen protagonist(s) saves the day, role development
   
4. Archetypal quest themes -- good versus evil, order versus chaos, illusion versus reality, and the necessity of thought as a tool for survival
   
5. Creative energy
   
6. Testing boundaries on a grand scale
   
7. Developing a "moral compass"
   
8. Highly charged emotionalism and intensity
   
9. Pain and struggle and a developing resilience
   
10. Raw vulnerability in facing the world and its relationship in a very different way
    
11. Understanding socially responsible behavior
    
12. Idealistic view of the world
    
13. Dawning intellectual awareness
    
14. Desiring independence
    
15. Concern about self and appearance -- experimentation with self-image
    
16. Greater understanding of gender roles and relationships
    
17. Emotional turbulence
    
18. Power and Control -- symbols of superhuman power and control
    
19. Authority / Responsibility
    
20. Introspection
    
21. Liminality (between-ness) -- half-living/half dead, human/wolf, etc.
    
22. Marginality – a sense of alienation. Being different, an outsider and also persecuted for that difference.
    
23. Acute Social Awareness – popularity. Getting the guy or girl, attaining beauty, becoming "special" in some way.
    
24. Physical change – loss of control; awkwardness; transformation.
    

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