When I think about going off to some far-away fantasy world where wonders abound and the boredom of the ordinary is a thing of the past, what I notice is that I’d be going to get away from what’s here, not because I have any real appetite for the strange newness of the other. You can’t run away from your troubles, because you’re wherever you go. Step through the portal and I’m the same flawed person on the other side of it, just with better scenery.
That’s one of my problems with isekai. The whole genre runs on the premise that the constraint is external — that if it weren’t for this dull job and this dull world and these dull people, the protagonist would finally get to be who he actually is. Getting hit by a truck as a form of absolution. But I’m the largest single source of my own troubles, and I’d be coming along.
Except the prompt didn’t say relocate. It said vacation.
That’s a different thing, and it’s more honest about itself. A vacation admits up front that you’re coming back. Nobody goes to the beach thinking the beach is going to fix anything. You go, you get sunburned, you come home to the same pile of mail. The isekai premise needs the trip to be one-way to work, because the moment you know you’re returning, the fantasy stops being about becoming someone else and starts being about seeing something.
And that’s the part I don’t think anyone actually wants. Nobody’s daydream is being a tourist in a fantasy world. You don’t get reincarnated with cheat skills and a destined sword so you can take a guided walking tour. You get reincarnated so you can matter there. The world isn’t the fantasy. The position in the world is the fantasy. Rivendell is a nice place to visit, but not one person who has ever pictured Rivendell has pictured themselves standing in the back of the council of Elrond with no opinion and nowhere to be.
Which brings me to the Honorverse, since that’s what I’m reading right now, and I want to say I’d like to go there. But think about what going there would actually involve. It’s military science fiction. The overwhelming majority of it takes place aboard warships during wartime. A civilian passenger on a warship is not a guest, he’s mass — something the engineering department has to account for and the tactical department has to work around. And that’s if the ship isn’t taking fire, which it usually is. The parts of that series that make it worth reading are precisely the parts you’d want to be about six star systems away from.
Planetside isn’t much better. Grayson would be a fascinating place to read about and a miserable place to spend two weeks as an outsider with opinions. The gravity alone. And I’d be a middle-aged roofer from Georgia with no useful skills in any of it — I can’t navigate, I can’t fight, I don’t know their politics, and my one marketable trade doesn’t come up much on a space station.
Here’s the thing I keep circling back to, though. I said I’d want to visit the Honorverse because that’s what’s on the nightstand. But I’d have said the exact same thing in April about whatever I was reading in April. And I’ll say it in October about something else. Which means the world isn’t really the answer. Manticore isn’t the draw. Being about a third of the way into something good is the draw, and I already have that, and it’s not somewhere you can travel to because it isn’t a place. It’s a condition, and it ends when the book does, and then you go find another one.
So the honest answer to the prompt is that there’s nowhere I especially want to go. There’s a book I want to still be in the middle of. I’ve got a few hundred pages left on this one.
Leave a Reply