I would love to harness my ability to do all my best thinking in the shower and find a way to sue my powers for good. Until that time comes, I shall have to content myself with remembering some of the nifty things.
One of the big reasons books get challenged in libraries, bookstores and anywhere else people feel that their views are better than someone else's and therefore must be imposed upon us, will we or nil we, is that is fantasy is, well, fantasy. That is, not real and therefore likely to corrupt young impressionable minds to believe in things that can't be (or perhaps, shouldn't be) and lead them into doing evil things like asking that most dangerous of all questions: "Why not?"
Every science fiction writer who has ever written, has written about something that was proved to be scientifically impossible at the time she wrote or five minutes or fifty years later. However, a substantial portion of the time, that which was impossible was positioned at some slight angle to the possible. Isaac Asimov's world, galaxy and eventually universe spanning computer, whose name changes as its size does, but ends with with VAC, standing for the vacuum tubes which run it has been overrun by vanishingly small computers that can be held in the palm of a small child's hand. And yet, they span the world and reach as far beyond as we can (the story in which this computer appears, "The Last Question" may well have been challenged many times, and would certainly would be if "they" knew about it, if for no othe reason than the four words with which it ends).
Digressions aside, the example is sound. Science fiction is fiction, but it is based in some idea of science, some question of "what if" and leads to the question of "why not"? When the answer is that it is outside the laws of physics, for those with the right inclinations, one of two things happens. One is that the laws of physics are examined to find a way in which it might be possible, and often they are rewritten by new knowledge of the possibly infinite universe we are pivleged to be part. The other is that a different way to do the same thing is found. Or at least the first steps on the road forward are made.
Many of the what ifs and why nots will take decades or even centuries to master and to manage. This only really matters to those of who thought we might one day live on the moon and are resigned to lives walking on and trying to secure the future of this single earth. In the long run it only matters that we continue moving forward.
The fantastic, the unreal, the maybes, are, in my opinion, the challenges, not the things that should be challenged. Anything that keeps us as a human race, wondering, hoping and looking forward, is a good thing, nor does it deny all the other mysterious, fantastic and wondrous things which might be out there or in here.
