Speculative fiction tends to ask impossible what-ifs? “What if zombies showed up?” “What if SETI got an answer?” “What if your neighborhood was plagued by the serial-killing ghost of a golden retriever?” Test cases for the extreme, right?
But there are plenty of everyday what-ifs, too, because every person’s experience is different. You can always look with curious empathy toward another and ask, “What if I were more like you?” “What is your experience of being human?” Reading helps us ask these questions. These questions are the place where fiction and nonfiction come together into the seamless empathy-engine known as writing. In this sense, all writing is speculative.
There are a lot of blogs out there. The best one I’ve ever read makes me ask what-ifs like these: “What if I had an intellectually disabled adult child?” “What if that child were terminally ill?” “What is it like, as a parent, to accept that you will care for your child from birth to death?” “What is it like to do that as a single parent?”
Check out Catherine Lea’s Happiness: Optional to see how one person does these things. (With love. With exhaustion and perseverance. With humor. And with sharp-eye perception that goes right to the center of herself and others.) Start at the beginning and read to the present. You won’t be disappointed.
Then come back and tell me about the best blog you’ve ever read.
I’ve been turning over in my mind the question of why and how speculative fiction fits into “genre fiction” box.
I chose the metaphor of a “box” quite intentionally. Being “boxed in” is a defining feature of genre fiction. Mysteries are mysteries because they adhere to the rules of that genre. The same goes for romances. And for techno-thrillers. These rules aren’t always stated, and they’re certainly stretchy and, over time, mutable. But they have some firmness to them; their elasticity is limited. Stretch them too far, and they’ll break. While what results might be a good story, it will no longer easily fit the expectations of a genre’s readers. Marketing that story as fitting into a genre whose rules it breaks can be risky. It must pay off sometimes, but I bet it often doesn’t.
To “speculate” is to wonder or hypothesize outside the constraints of evidence. You can speculate about anything and arrive at any conclusion you like because you never have to back your ideas up with facts, images, data, or a quotations. Sounds pretty unboxed to me.
Why are genres such as science-fiction, fantasy, horror, slipstream, superhero, dystopian, apocalyptic, and alternative-history considered “speculative”? Well, part of it has to do with impossibility: we don’t have fast-than-light travel, there are no monsters, and history went down the way it did. I think of this as the nuts-and-bolts approach to defining the genre—speculative books depend on settings or plot points that can’t exist or happen in the real world of the present day.
But another way to think of the speculative genres is more philosophical: they ask, “What if?” You can imagine an author leaning back in her chair, rubbing her chin, and thinking, “What if Lincoln hadn’t been assassinated?” Or, “What if we met some aliens, but we couldn’t understand them?” Or, “What if that guy working at the 7-11 turned out to be a faerie prince?” “What then?” she says to herself. And she writes a book about it.
Maybe parts of her story are formulaic because some of these questions have been asked quite a few times. But the larger agenda that prompts them is impressive—it’s to free humanity from the constraints we know it operates under and see what happens when something that can seem tired and old, reality, is replaced by the new. Under impossible circumstances, do we become more human? Less? Or are we fundamentally unchanged? Perhaps our circumstances don’t make us. Perhaps we always are as we are.
These philosophical underpinnings, oriented as they are toward a freeing from constraint, seem to me fundamentally non-boxy. But perhaps there are currents of generic constraint within speculative fiction that counter these loosing impulses.
I think I’ll have to leave the pot simmering on the stove a bit longer; I don’t have a clear answer to this one, as of yet.
My blog, The Active Voice, has been dormant for the better part of a year. Mostly, I ran out of time. Cross-country moves, a new job, little kids … devoting time to blogging seemed impossible. Plus, I was struggling to finish my second book. What writing time I had needed to go to that project.
But now we’re settled. It’s time to make time for the things I really want to do. Blogging is one of them. And Solatium is finally nearing completion. I’m holding out hope that Spring Break (in March) will give me the uninterrupted time I need to wrap it up.
So here goes. I’m aiming for a post a week. Welcome aboard all over again.
The Active Voice