Briefly stated, fantasy is reality minus details, plus details.
F = (R - d1) + d2

Delving more deeply, there exists a reality. Some may say there are many, or that there is one but viewed from many angles, all of which I don’t care to debate. Whatever it is, it’s full of details.

These details often get in the way of our full apprehension of it. Scott McCloud makes reference to this in his theory of “masking“, in which a less-rendered protagonist is more accessible to a reader than a fully-rendered one.

Once the reality has been distilled from its trappings, additional details can be re-introduced safely. In the inarguably well-rendered Buffyverse, there are specifics to the point of trivia. Still, the writers of the show have stated that the Monster-of-the-Week is merely a metaphor for abstracted human issues. Dealing with stress becomes demonic slave-drivers. Reality is still intact, but wholly transformed into fantasy.

This is no thought exercise. These issues come up on a regular basis for many of us. Granted, I may have first become aware of them in my high school days, where my own hobbies were under constant scrutiny by the hacky-sacking upper crust, despite their established positive effects… More recently, watching an episode of Firefly with my girlfriend led to questions like, “Why are they speaking in Chinese?” and “Why does that guy have a sword?” which pulled my relationship with fantasy (specifically sci-fi in this case) to the center of my human relationship. I was forced to confront why (or better yet, how) I better relate to Malcolm Reynolds than an office-mate.

The details in “Children of Men” are not what made it a great film, but they are what made it fantasy. I’ve seen plenty of movies about men with kids, but none have so well abstracted the concept of fatherhood. No doubt an excellent script and flawless acting helped create the world, but the world was what made the film reach me and establish a connection between my abstracted model of myself-as-father all the way back to the reality of my being one someday.

Fantasy is the laboratory in which many of us discover reality. It may take a certain kind of mind, but to those people it is invaluable.

10 PRINT "Stan is awesome."
20 GOTO 10

BASIC programs in the 80s were written as one big heap of code. This line number sent you to that line number, as labyrinthian as the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books popular at the time. I faced a hard game of catch-up when I went to college and had to discard the monolithic BASIC for the, by comparison, fractured and disjointed C++. Classes? Libraries? I want my code all in one place!

<%= 1000.times {puts "Stan is awesome."} %>

It was an evolutionary hurdle to understand that the functionality I had relied on could be abstracted into functions, to be written once and called upon whenever I needed them. Ruby on Rails is a step beyond C++ in terms of abstraction, built upon a MVC framework that separates what the program does (the Controller) from what it does it to (the Model) and how it looks when it’s done (the View). These “three branches” got me thinking about abstraction in government.

First there were monarchies, these were BASIC. A single leader who did all the governing single-handedly: judge, jury, and executioner (though of course, they didn’t use that phrase because judges and juries hadn’t been invented yet). Lots left to be desired here, obviously. There’s a big jump in 1215 with the Magna Carta, which introduced functions in the form of Barons (who could throw exceptions with the best of them).

The U.S. government is more like an MVC framework than any before, with clearly defined roles of each branch. Looking closer, the legislative branch contains two classes, Senate and House, that contain methods like Pass, Reject, and the wickedly recursive Direct to Subcommittee.

What would a truly agile government look like? How could programming methodologies like YAGNI or DRY be applied to the passage or even execution of law? Is the inevitable babbling about a “litmus test” whenever a Supreme Court Justice is nominated really just unit testing?

This is getting dangerously close to the dorkiest post I’ve ever made, so I should point out that the trend toward abstraction exists in environments other than just programming and government. In storytelling, we’ve gone from epic oral mythologies to self-contained novels to hypertext that links to pre-written content. In occupations, we’ve gone from hunting/gathering to raising specific crops for trade to trading representations of those crops in futures markets. At each step, the subject of the old level becomes an object of the new.