To dissemble the discrete units of meaning linked by a network of signifiers that bind an individual to a cultural stereotypical model of conformity is a subversive activity.
Fantasy literature and speculative fiction is seen to accomplish this through metaphor, contradiction and parody, but always accompanied by a fragmentation of accepted realism. Often as represented as being viewed through an social outsider's eyes; or by the arrival of a powerful dichotomy in the reality of a social insider.
Often critics of the fantasy genre and its offshoots point out that a desire for the 'impossible' is doomed to failure (suicide, madness, death). This viewpoint fails to take into account the altered perspective engendered in the reader who is seeking the resources with which to reassemble their world view, and themselves within such a world, in a manner more in tune an emergent paradigm, evolutionary or revolutionary, with which they might seek personal alignment.
Several of my own narratives include the discovery of forbidden texts, lost philosophies or vanished civilizations, combined with information from the future that is channeled by a visionary group or an individual whose quest is the grounding of the kind of singularity of consciousness that Teilhard de Chardin referred to as the Omega Point or moment of collective sentience.
Maybe the only kind of democracy that makes sense is one where we are each of us our own seer. And our personal vision untainted by the age old master/slave paradigm that persists despite its counter-evolutionary irrelevance to the coming age.
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