Some people create hinky punks, Hobbits, Electric Monks, and Wee Free Men, others construct human characters. Some create Discworlds, Hogwarts, and Mordor, while others re-map Earth's land spaces and the interior landscapes of its inhabitants. Sometimes we get a glimpse of the blue green planet we call our "home" from far away, sometimes we are too close to see the alien view.

The Otherworldliness of the Other verses the re-inscriptions of the Real world. Whose to judge between them to present one above the other? Yet I am increasingly drawn to the Other World, as are many others. Does this indicate the deep rooted human intimation of Otherworldliness? Intimations of the deep desire we have for the Othering of our existence in a place far beyond, Worlds beyond and far away.

I am just re-encountering the Electric Monk. With his cowl and bemused horse, his predisposition to see things as pink (that doesn't endear him to me), to shoot humans at blank range and then worry that the reaction of the human was rather strange and excessive, and his wide-eyed view of the world he enters. I am also relishing the fundamental interconnectedness of things, time travel, sofas stuck on stairways.

For sheer genius one cannot beat the imagination of some 20th century writers of fantasy: J.R.R. Tolkien, Douglas Adams, C.S. Lewis. Terry Pratchett, J.K. Rowlings. There are few realistic novels I re-read, but as for the niovels of these brilliant Otherworlders - I am compelled to revisit their work time and again, and each time I relish their power to excite, entertain, enthrall, and fire the imagination. Thank God for the visionary Otherworld writers who remind us of the Spaces beyond our blue green and the traces of the divine and supernatural that lurk within and around us.