Science fiction is historically not escapist at all, but that has somewhat changed.
These days we have adults everywhere who will openly exclaim their plain adoration of dragons and robots and hobbits devoid of any particular meaning or social value. They just merely love dragons and robots and hobbits. This is escapism and it's historically unprecedented.
That is not something American cinema ever done tho.
I've been reading some of his books recently and enjoy them, he's a legend for a reason. But once you get accustomed to the style and archaic words, you start to realize the stories and characters are pretty basic. Where he really shines are the creative premises.
Literally the oldest surviving epic is Gilgamesh, which features Tiamat, the mother of dragons.
humans have been obsessed with fantasy for centuries and even more.
We live in a time when adults everywhere will openly exclaim their adoration for fantastical nonsense. They will unabashedly assure you that they simply adore dragons and robots and hobbits, devoid of any purposeful meaning or relation to the world we live in. Almost nobody who loves zombie films, for example, has the first clue what zombies meant when first devised.
They are literally the same. Fantasy is just modern mythology and most fantasy is rooted in ancient historical tales or historical events. The Kree-Skrull war for example was based on WWII USA vs Japan.
Old mythological stories and religions are based on historical events and switched to entertain. It's almost a certainty that Ramanaya never happened but Indian invasions of Sri Lanaka did happen etc.
> Almost nobody who loves zombie films, for example, has the first clue what zombies meant when first devised.
Ok and who cares? People don't speak ancient Sanskrit or old English either. Are you going to be complaining people who love English don't have the first clue what English looked like when it was invented.
Ever heard of Odyssey and Homer? That is adults being fascinated by escapist features long long time ago. We have records of adults entertainment and adults being fascinated by entertainment from pretty much any historical periods we have records from.
For some reason dubious psychologists had a thing for King Arthur stuff for quite a while and I'm not really sure there's any dragons in there, there's weird fisher kings and stuff. I think someone is rich enough and has enough free time (probably over a billion now, but similar people existed in the past in lower numbers), they would find some weird thing to work on or think about.