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Play, stories, art; encouraging children to travel through many worlds, or better yet, to create them, it vital – because we do not live in one world, we live in many. What we call our "lives" is a perception we impose upon our surroundings, not vice-versa. And a limited imagination yields a limited life, more likely than not a dissatisfying one. It leaves one ill equipped to meddle with the powerful ideas of self and adulthood (and gender and nationality ….) that are pressed upon us from our most impressionable years onward.
If you are not willing to grant that sweeping statement, allow at least that imagination can make living the life one does more enjoyable. Without entertainment, and stimuli; without compelling realities outside of our own, we would, I believe, feel less alive.
People often relate their dreams to me, as if amazed that they are capable, even in that sub-lucid realm, of conceiving of such nonsensical, even non sequitur, images. The wonder, or empowerment I hear in their voices is of the creator – cut loose of inhibitions: stimulating themselves. They marvel at their sleeping mind’s ability to not make sense, and then proceed as if it did. They seem surprised that they can open up reality and tinker with it – maybe even that they are permitted to.
Unfortunately, for adults, actively engaging the imagination seems left largely to dreaming – otherwise we retreat to passive entertainment, or day dream fantasies whose goal is to comfort, not challenge ourselves or the existing reality. Imagination, as a skill, is left in our childhood.
What a waste. To spend all those years developing a skill, and then to abandon it. To press one’s imagination into service for a job in which you have limited or no control over its use, and that you many not even like. And then, outside of work, to hand it over to a mass media that will hardly exercise or challenge it. To remove the joy, and let our imagination stagnate. No wonder "adulthood" is often portrayed as bleak.
I could easily, at this point, exhort everyone to take up writing – and that’s not a bad idea. Along with painting, and music, and dancing: all crafts that anyone can do well enough to get pleasure from – in short, more sophisticated forms of play, mixing the exuberance of imagination with the experience and knowledge of adulthood.
But writing – serious writing (and "serious play" may sound like an oxymoron, but it’s not) – is not for everyone. There is a bit too much work mixed in with the play to keep the thrill of creation all the way through the process. And even writers themselves find themselves turning again and again to outside stimuli to recharge their energy and renew their inspiration – turning to the work of other artists, work that stimulates and expands them not just as writers, but as people. Because in the end, an artist can only create a work as large as themselves. The process of becoming an artist, is the process of becoming a person – and I believe the reverse is true as well: becoming yourself is a kind of artform, and the central tool of the artist is a powerful and adept imagination.
This is why I feel lucky to have been surrounded with the stories and authors who so challenged and expanded my perception as a child, and have continued to do so. Because no matter how wide I’ve stretched my brain, no matter how many tools I’ve gathered with which to understand – the world has always been bigger. And as I continue to try to figure out which world I want to inhabit, and how I might go about getting there, science fiction continues to supply endless marvelous variation and permutation. In this way, readers of genre fiction, writers of it, and editors of it, like me, are indeed trying to not return to our childhood, but in this one way, to remain there – in that state of active and uninhibited play, in which we are free to imagine any possibility for ourselves, and the people we might become.

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