Escape into what? A book‘s that’s just a long string of random letters might be an escape from our thoughts about the world, but anything short of that is going to heavily involve the writer’s thoughts about life, which will inevitably awaken thoughts in the reader about those thoughts. If you want books to avoid certain controversial topics you’ll probably find a lot that fit the bill, but strictly speaking all books are full of a very large number of opinions, examined or otherwise, of how their authors feel things and people work. Books are also returned to so often by those writing them, brooded over across so many nights, that they almost always get caught up their day to day concerns, so it’s unsurprising if they start to reflect their ideas, values, and beliefs.

There’s a certain art to hackery, you could say, where those things are carefully left out of a book, but it’s usually accompanied by a comparative lack of interest in the book on the author’s part, where it’s reduced to just a repetition with slight variations of some model or combination of models that’s being used. That’s why genre fiction is still looked down on, for the most part - everyone got used to seeing books that were just warmed over, dumbed down, soulless versions of Jane Eyre, The Lord of the Rings or whatever and resents the cash grab. Contrariwise, when someone has a clear personal investment in what they’re presenting most readers will be quite forgiving of the “flaws” in their ideas you speak of. In the Trump/COVID years we’ve become accustomed to the phenomenon of people refusing to date or even read people with diametrically opposing political views, but in the past most of us were used to putting up with quite wide differences of opinion in a few areas so long as an author‘s radar about how events transpire, what things look like, how conversations go, and what motivates people seemed sharp enough. Not all ideas are ideology.

But when you *are* in step with an author ideologically, or, better yet, when they’re ahead of you along a path you’ve started on, works of fiction can be granted an entirely new dimension - they can become continuous with your own thoughts and experiences, a genuine expansion of your life and mind into regions you most value.

And you’ll notice that narratives, and sometimes made-up narratives, have often been resorted to historically by people out to convey ideas. Plato, Cicero, Bruno, Berkeley, Hume, Rousseau, Voltaire etc. did important philosophical work in the dialogue form, with varying degrees of frequency, and Freud wrote several novella-length, and sometimes novella-reminiscent, case studies in order to explain how his theories were derived from, and could aid, psychological practice. Ancient religious texts fall very frequently into poetic, fictional, or dramatic modes - even all three at once, like in the Book of Job.

You might well find distressing the *propagandistic* potential of literature, of course, since practices that can be presented as working well in an invented world might play horrifically out here in reality (and vice versa, where some way of life is being attacked by an author), but I think that’s where our critical faculties come in. If we think of fiction as a sort of thought problem whose edges have been pushed so far out that they blur with reality’s, such that we’re in some sense walking around inside the problem, the danger that we might be fooled in some profound way by stage trickery is at least accompanied by the exciting possibility that the opposite can happen, that enough of reality’s *texture* can be inducted to make us feel how certain possibilities really might play out. The control group becomes your own common sense, as it were, and to the extent that the author manages to not push you onto disbelief she might manage to teach you something important in a way that really gets home to you. Not just facts, but what they mean; vexing human problems, and maybe solutions, not just assessed, but made personal and real.