Not Just Escapism: The Real Power of Speculative Fiction in a Crisis-Driven World

I owe some of you an apology.

The ones who spend your online time watching dancing kittens and mischievous dogs.

I used to look down on you with mild annoyance. No, I didn’t want to see the fifteenth cat video you’d sent. I had better things to do.

Or so I thought.

I understand now.

When a nation feels like it’s marching toward some inevitable revolution—and counter-revolution—when headlines churn through scandal, corruption, and files no one fully explains, when the institutions we rely on appear incapable of correcting themselves… a dancing kitten isn’t trivial.

It’s relief.

A brief reminder that goodness and joy still exist. That not everything is broken. That delight is still possible.

And yet—as much as I enjoy tuning out for a few minutes and watching howling huskies—I need more than laughter.

We all do.

We need hope.

We need light.

We need a reason to wake up and endure.

That is why I write. More specifically, that is why I write what I write.

Speculative fiction takes what we see today and asks, What if? It pushes into the darkness. It traces worst-case trajectories. But if it is doing its job, it does not leave us there. It leaves an opening—an escape hatch. A sliver of light that suggests calamity is not inevitable.

That is where it parts ways with horror.

Horror stories tells us that evil is persistent. That it can be restrained, delayed, outwitted for a season—but never finally undone.

Speculative fiction, at least the kind I am drawn to, insists on something different.

It echoes an ancient line:

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

It does not deny the darkness.

It simply refuses to grant it the final word.

In a word, it clings to hope.

But as is the case with most words in the English language, hope can mean very different things.

Sometimes it means preference. I hope my team wins.

Sometimes it means probability. I hope the weather holds.

Sometimes it means little more than wishful thinking dressed up in optimism.

That kind of hope is fragile.

It rises and falls with circumstances. It depends on outcomes. When events move in the wrong direction, it collapses.

The biblical writers use the word differently.

When Paul speaks of hope, he is not describing a gamble. He is not crossing his fingers at the future. He speaks of hope as something anchored—rooted in a promise already secured. In Romans, he describes it as something we wait for with patience. In Hebrews, it is called “an anchor for the soul, firm and secure.”

Biblical hope is not naïve. It fully acknowledges suffering. Paul catalogues it plainly—tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, sword. He does not deny the darkness.

He simply insists that the darkness is not ultimate.

That is a very different thing.

It means hope is not optimism about circumstances. It is confidence about the end of the story.

And that distinction matters.

Because if hope is merely optimism, then the headlines will destroy it. But if hope is anchored beyond the headlines—if it is tethered to something not subject to polling cycles, scandals, revolutions, or counter-revolutions—then it can endure.

That is the kind of hope I am interested in.

Not denial.

Not distraction.

Not dancing kittens—though I’m grateful for them.

Something sturdier.

Something that can stare into worst-case scenarios and still say: this is not the final word.

I can think of no better example than The Lord of the Rings.

Beyond the spectacle — dragons, orcs, wizards, armies stretched across massive battlefields — beyond an enemy who appears all but unstoppable, it is the ending that makes the story endure.

Why?

Because evil does not win.

Yes, the road is long. The losses are real. The scars remain. But Sauron falls. The darkness recedes. And the world, though wounded, is not consumed.

That is what makes the tale satisfying in a way horror rarely is. The shadow is terrifying — but it is not ultimate.

To be clear, inevitability does not make for good storytelling. If victory were never in doubt, there would be no tension.

But the promise that evil can be defeated — that darkness does not have infinite claim — makes for something else entirely.

It makes for a better life.

A steadier one.

One capable of joy, even in the middle of turbulence.

One that can watch a howling husky, or a dancing kitten, and laugh — not as an escape from despair, but as a defiance of it.