I could probably have written a realistic novel about teaching in the sort of school I was teaching in at the time, but I didn’t want to, probably because I wouldn’t have wanted to read one and because of a combination of timidity and idleness, I knew practically nothing about anything else. I didn’t want to write a pure fantasy of the Tolkien sort, unconnected at any point with the real world, because the real world was exactly what fiction ought to be dealing with but I’d always felt ignorant about the real world, whatever and wherever that was. It was like ours, but different, so I could take account of the real-world changes that helped my story, and ignore those that didn’t. To some extent, my story was protected from awkward change because I set it in a world that was not ours.
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