Clifton Crais calls this age, the “Mortecene” – The Killing Age, rebuking both Enlightenment’s self-congratulation and the more scientific language of the Anthropocene. Our age is characterized by the ‘politicization of everything’. A hope in anything beyond is often characterized as escapist fantasy and leads to insinuations of being apolitical and naive. CS Lewis, a good friend of Tolkien and the author of one of 20th Century’s most important works of fantasy himself said  (On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature)-

“What lurks behind such a hint is, I suppose, something like this.

If we were all on board ship and there was trouble among the stewards, I can just conceive their chief spokesman looking with disfavour on anyone who stole away from the fierce debates in the saloon or pantry to take a breather on deck. For up there, he would taste the salt, he would see the vastness of the water, he would remember that the ship had a whither and a whence. He would remember things like fog, storms, and ice. What had seemed, in the hot, lighted rooms down below to be merely the scene for a political crisis, would appear once more as a tiny eggshell moving rapidly through an immense darkness over an element in which man cannot live. It would not necessarily change his convictions about the rights and wrongs of the dispute down below, but it would probably show them in a new light. It could hardly fail to remind him that the stewards were taking for granted hopes more momentous than that of a rise in pay, and the passengers forgetting dangers more serious than that of having to cook and serve their own meals.

Stories of the sort I am describing are like that visit to the deck. They cool us. Hence the uneasiness which they arouse in those who, for whatever reason, wish to keep us wholly imprisoned in the immediate conflict. That perhaps is why people are so ready with the charge of ‘escape’ “.