He looked into the water and saw that it was made up of thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different colour, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity;... these were the Streams of Story,... each coloured strand represented and contained a single tale. Different parts of the Ocean contained different sorts of stories, and as all the stories that had ever been told and many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was in fact the biggest library in the universe. And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories; so that unlike a library of books, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead but alive.(Rushdie 1990: 72)

Salman Rushdie's wonderful tale of Haroun Khalifa and his quest to rescue the Sea of Stories from the polluting poisons of a ruler intent on eliminating all that cannot be ruled stands as a compelling testimony to the essential power and beauty of narrative.'Rushdie locates the source of narrative inspiration on a separate moon made entirely of story waters and he puts the hero in charge of restoring their purity and health. This moon, as a symbolic allusion to Romantic utopias, invokes both the distance from the'real'and the desire to attain and incorporate the utopian to better the real world.