“He is encouraging them to read science-fiction,” Ellison writes, “in the hope that they may learn, first, to worry about green-skinned Martians instead of black-skinned Americans and, second, that all men are brothers, at least in the face of a very large universe which is likely to contain creatures who are not men at all.” In the introduction to the famous short story collection Dangerous Visions that he edited in 1967, he writes about a Christian minister he met in Alabama during the civil-rights era who believed that he had found a way to ameliorate resistance to racial integration among some local white teenagers. The late, great science-fiction author Harlan Ellison saw this early in his career. At its best, it is more than mere escapist entertainment, though escapism is where its power lies. Literary snobs may have a hard time accepting this, but popular genre fiction has social value. There are reasons for that, aside from a relentlessly binge-watchable story. And now, on television, we have the nearly 80-hours long Game of Thrones bigfooting everything else. Yet a clear majority of the most popular movies ever made belong to science fiction or fantasy, with the various Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings films bigfooting the competition. In publishing, crime fiction and romance tower over all others. In Hollywood, comedy and adventure sell the most box-office tickets. Science fiction and fantasy are not the most popular American genres. Fans of the hit show couldn’t even visit the library to learn how it ends because the last two books haven’t been published yet. The shocking and controversial final season took twice as long as the previous seven to finish, and if suspense could really kill, millions of people would be dead. Game of Thrones was the most popular TV show in the world in 2018, though not a single episode aired. Meanwhile, an army of ice zombies called White Walkers amasses in the frozen north, threatening to add the entire human race to its legion of the dead and render all political struggles irrelevant. With the monarchical line of succession in doubt, and the crowning of a young tyrant, war erupts to decide who should sit on the Iron Throne, a frightful chair of black swords, fused together by fire. Martin’s epic high-fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire, tells the story of a medieval realm, the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, that is torn apart after the political center no longer holds. HBO’s just-concluded Game of Thrones, based on George R.
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