Fantasy has never really spoken to me. In college, in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, I had friends who were deep in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, in Dune, and things like that. And then even prior to that, I suppose, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, though I don’t quite remember when. And the truth is, I didn’t really ever get into any of them. There’s a particular richness, a sumptuousness even, of the worldbuilding, of the systems of magic, of the nomenclature and hierarchies of creatures, that made me deeply uncomfortable, or that I just couldn’t get into. I don’t know which it was.
That said, science fiction was always different. I know it in retrospect might seem inconsistent, but the truth is my father read Asimov, and I read the Foundation novels because they were on the shelf at home. And in a way, perhaps I’m backcasting the insistence, or the inclination, that consequences mattered, and that there was some kind of tether between the imagined world and what it actually could be. All of that meant I saw these as separate categories. And perhaps now I see them more as interconnected than not, but I never really thought to test that barrier, that difference in categorisation.
My daughter, who is now 12, loves fantasy. She always has. She also loves swimming, and swims competitively, which often means we spend long commutes in the car together, sometimes early in the morning, sometimes late in the evening, many times in a day. She has been listening to and reading a series called Skandar, and so she wanted to listen to it in the car, and I ended up listening to it alongside her as well. The first was Skandar and the Unicorn Thief, and now Skandar and the Phantom Rider. It is definitely not a reading practice I would have chosen voluntarily, but it is our form of spending time with each other. And it’s 25 minutes here, 30 minutes there, a few times a week, back and forth, with the narrator’s voice carrying me into a world I am still struggling to map, but one that she is completely fluent in.
Before I started listening to Skandar, I thought unicorns were sunshine and happiness. But here, unicorns are wild. These are skeletal things that are immortal, these are flesh-eating things. It was all brand new to me. And in a way, a lot of what I thought I knew about the genre, I had to put down before I could even hear what the books were actually saying.
That said, for those of you who have read the book, and for those who haven’t, there’s this idea of the bond. In Skandar’s world, a rider is bonded to their unicorn at the hatchery. The true bond is recognised rather than made, and it forms because of who each actually is, their element, their temperament, the fact of the match. Nobody is choosing in that sense. The rider doesn’t choose, the unicorn doesn’t choose. It emerges from between them. The two of them are already what they are, and the bond kind of completes it, or names it.
Then there is the Weaver, and in a way, her technology is the forged bond. Forged not in the sense of a blacksmith and casting, but forged in the sense of bonds made where none were supposed to be, that are imposed by an external force, hers, and designed to serve her purpose. Forged bonds vaguely look like true bonds, because they function like them in surface ways, but they run on coercion rather than on recognition. And the book moves through this distinction without ever explaining it, which is perhaps part of why I could relate to it.
And actually, my daughter pointed something out to me on one of our drives. She said you can tell true bonds and forged bonds apart by the colour. True bonds settle on one colour, the colour of the rider’s element. Forged bonds never settle, but flicker and cycle between all the elemental colours, never resting on any one of them.
What got me in this was a particular scene, that I won’t spoil for readers who haven’t gotten there yet, but I will say that Skandar, who is the protagonist, sees a forged bond that has been woven under his nose, and in that seeing is the moment. Not so much that the bond is bad, but that what was superficially a bond is revealed to be something else, while looking exactly the same. He was able to see differently, in a way that what allowed him to recognise bonds as bonds had not registered this one as a false bond, and now the seeing costs him, because he does not get to unsee it.
In that sense, I don’t think it really struck my daughter, because she has been reading it for a while. But for me, the thing that really came back to me as we talked about these forged bonds, and as it came up again and again, was the fact that I have spent the last 20 years of my adult life inside a sector that talks constantly about relationships. We use words like partnerships, collaboratives, convenings, collision spaces, co-creation. I have been in thousands of rooms that have been called by some variation of this vocabulary. Indeed, I have helped organise some of them. I have even written about them approvingly. What I started to see only later, and can see more clearly now, is how many of those relationships were forged in Skandar’s sense. It is not to say there is a Weaver or a villain. It is very much by people who loved what they were making, by funders with the best of intentions, by founders who were tired and wanted coordination, collaboration, co-creation to arrive faster than it usually does. By me, too.
In that sense, a forged convening, a forged collaboration, looks almost exactly like a generative one, right? There are some variations of introduction, some variations of working sessions, some moments of seeming connection, eventually a photograph for a deck. And I suppose the difference is what happens when the situation, or the container, as I sometimes say, asks something of the group that was not there in the original brief. In a way, a true bond can hold what was not originally planned for, while a forged bond cannot. Because the first time an actually unexpected thing arrives, the forged bond breaks invisibly, but permanently, and it is never named, and in a way, the container rearranges around the absence of what it had thought was there, but continues to perform as if it was there, and it becomes hollow and meaningless. I have watched this happen for years without language for it, right? And it really struck me. Maybe I should have been reading more fantasy earlier.
Alongside that, a smaller thing. In a way, reading a book by yourself is not the same as listening to a book with someone, or reading it with someone. The book is not the only source of what is happening. What happens between the two of you, in the pauses, in the questions, in the reflections, in what one does not have an answer to, in the parts where one of you laughs at something the other had not noticed was funny: all of that is part of the process of reading together, right?
If I had read it alone, I may have noticed this. Actually, I would never have read it alone. I would have noticed this, but I don’t know if I would have seen it this way, because seeing differently turns out to depend on company, more than I would have guessed. How do you see differently? You see differently by hanging out with people who see differently, I suppose, and then keeping yourself open and vulnerable, and being willing to sit in the uncertainty of not knowing what might emerge between.
I think that’s the thing I have been trying to say, that the common ground of any real understanding is between people, and not inside them. In a way, the book is the occasion, the reading is the event, and the event is shared.
I don’t know where to take this, but what I can say is that it is making me less sure about several things I had thought were certainties, and I am less sure that the cost of seeing is separable from the seeing itself.
My daughter, of course, was always ahead of me.
Originally published on Substack on 25 April 2026. Read on Substack →
Gautam John 
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