Author Neil Gaiman notes that the prison system is big business. How can they predict jail cell growth? “[U]sing a pretty simple algorithm,” Gaiman said, “based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn’t read.” Not that all illiterate people are criminals or all literate people are not, but the relationship between being unable to read and crime is strong. Sixty percent of America’s prison inmates are illiterate; 85% of all juvenile offenders have reading problems, according to the U.S. Dept. of Education.
Gaiman said he went to China for the first sci-fi convention ever approved by the Communist establishment. He asked an official why this was finally approved. The official replied that the Chinese had no imagination for invention, so they asked the likes of Google, Apple, and others who were inventing new technology. These people were readers of science fiction and fantasy.
“Fiction can show you a different world,” he said. “It can take you somewhere you’ve never been. Once you’ve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in.”
, J. Mark Bertrand asks, “How can imagination transform culture?” By giving it new eyes, he says. “As a reader,” Bertrand explains, “one of the most striking glimpses I have ever had of the divine came at the climax of The Man Who Was Thursday, a novel that starts as a thriller about anarchists and ends in a very different place indeed. If there’s a lesson to be learned from this, it’s that the truth can be proclaimed and it can be defended, but it can also be imagined.”