I used to read a lot of science fiction. I liked the complex, imagined futures, the invented civilizations and cultures. It was a sort of escape, obviously.
I hardly ever read science fiction anymore. I haven't stopped, entirely, but I will plow through less than half-a-dozen novels of the genre in any given year, anymore. I had a weird insight, yesterday, as to a possible reason: the real world is more interesting, more complex.
Take, as an example, one particular aspect of the sort of thing I like about those science fiction and fantasy novels: imaginary languages. I used to spend time inventing languages, myself. A strange hobby, I know. And at least once before in this blog, I've alluded to the fact that the Korean Language is in many ways a surrogate for those invented languages: whenever I feel that language-inventing impulse, I simply pull out my Korean reference grammar and browse a few pages.
Yesterday, I was walking down the street, watching the people, looking at signs, thinking about the world's complexity, and realized the whole of Korean culture was the same kind of surrogate. At some point, the real world became just as interesting and complex as any possible imaginary one. In that sense, the sort of escapism I used to achieve by reading a book I can now achieve simply by looking around. Maybe that seems strange. Or even trivial. But it felt like a great insight, at the moment.