Fantasia

I know, I know... I like Harry Potter too. Lord of the rings is epic. I mean, I even have a soft spot for Valerian and the city of a thousand planets, John Carter... even Alice in Wonderland if you feel like getting a little old school.

Especially Alice in Wonderland actually.

And any other kind of story that fits into that incredible little sub-genre I like to call PORTAL fantasy. You know the ones. There's some kind of door between this world and another. And you better believe our hero is going through it. Whether that door is a rabbit hole or a wardrobe, a tornado to somewhere with yellow bricks, a red pill to the real world, a stargate, or even a Delorean, the cool part about these stories is the implication that someone from the real world… someone just like the reader gets to go through the door. Someone just like the reader gets to be the hero.

And there is one door that seduces the reader of fantasy fiction more than any other. One door that seems all the more possible because it’s in their hands at the very moment they’re reading about it. I am, of course, talking about a book. A particular book. A book that encompasses all and every imagined world that any human has ever dreamed of. I am talking about a book called The Never-ending Story. The book that exists within itself, just as the imagination to experience it exists within the reader all along. For something written in German in the 70s it’s so incredibly Meta that nothing like it has been written before or since. Not successfully anyway.

And it does something that few other books have ever done. It doesn’t just imply that something fantastic might happen to someone like the reader. It actually does involve the reader. How?

Well, Bastian Balthazar Bux, ‘borrows’ the book from its last reader, a bookstore owner named Carl Conrad Coreander. These names are not an accident. As each chapter of the book begins with the next letter of the alphabet from A to Z, we are lead to believe that the readers of the book have similarly been connected sequentially, moving through the alphabet in the opposite direction… and if the book store owner was C, and our hero is B… That just leaves one reader left. Possibly ever! And who is reading it now if not... us! The world implodes and expands at the same time as we realise this… A world where every single manifestation of human imagination exists… and it might be gone the moment we finish reading the book?

We realise that we are the Nothing with the power to destroy Fantasia. We realise that it is our imagination that must keep this world alive beyond the time we spend between it’s pages…

And then in the last chapters… As the world is crumbling around our heroes… the Child-like Empress just comes out and says it. Bastian doesn’t realise that he is part of the story… that, just as he is reading, there are others reading about him right now. …Us.

I remember reading that when I was 12 years old. It was like a bass drop in my mind. And nothing I’ve read since has ever had that kind of impact.

The Never-ending Story made me want to keep imagining amazing thing. It made we feel the need to. It made me believe that it was my duty to do so! If I didn't, what would happen to all the characters I'd read about. And the ones I'd created?

In the one instance that Carl Conrad Coreander and Bastian Balthazar Bux cross paths, the old man tells him that. "This book is not for you... The books you know are safe." I disagree. This book is for everyone. Safe is for suckers. I can’t think of any worlds that have blown my mind more than the one named for, and after the genre itself.

FANTASIA