Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy Bettina Tizzy.
I've got a piece up in The Daily Beast about the pretty amazing work done by the Harry Potter Alliance, a large organization of Harry Potter fans who work on everything from gay rights issues to genocide prevention. The piece is partially about the work that the group does, but it's also about a question I've spent a bunch of time talking with HPA co-founder Andrew Slack about: how do people build out from fictional worlds into the universe we actually live in? I'm curious about the hold that fictional universes exert on us. Whether it's by writing fan fiction, role-playing, going to cons, etc., it's easy to burrow deep into the worlds that matter to us most. What's much harder than finding entry points into fiction within our world is altering our world to look like fiction. Science, of course, does it for us to a certain extent. We can build limited but glorious physical fantasies with the bricks and mortar and wood we have at hand. But achieving social change, or harnessing magical thinking to practical ends, is much, much harder. It's amazing to me that Slack and HPA have been able to do what they've done so far. If they succeed on a larger scale, and manage to spread their model to other fandoms, it'll be a fairly remarkable achievement.