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Genre and Speculative Fiction

Speculative fiction distinguishes itself from other genres by its use of the fantastic mode, exploring realms beyond the real. While all fiction involves some speculation, speculative fiction embraces the fantastical, incorporating elements like futuristic technology, magic, and supernatural beings.

This genre is typically divided into fantasy, science fiction, and horror, although these categories are often blurred. Subgenres like cyberpunk, steampunk, and alternative history further complicate the categorization, with new subgenres constantly emerging and fading.

Despite its fluidity, speculative fiction forms a coherent genre for its dedicated fanbase, who readily recognize its hallmarks. To effectively engage in this genre, writers must immerse themselves in its rich tapestry of works, understanding the depth and breadth of the fantastic mode and its potential for reader engagement.

Approaches to Writing

A key element of speculative fiction is the realistic representation of fantastical elements. This realism can manifest in the creation of believable secondary worlds, where readers can immerse themselves in unfamiliar settings.

Crucial to this immersion is the use of emotional realism, where characters experience the fantastical world with familiar human emotions and reactions, anchoring the fantastical to relatable human experience.

Viewpoint characters are essential in conveying this emotional realism, providing access to their thoughts, feelings, and physical reactions. By focusing on the viewpoint character's emotional journey, writers can create a powerful connection between the reader and the fantastical world, grounding the story in relatable human experience.

Writing Exercise

Recall a recent experience of fear and describe it in detail, focusing on the physical and emotional sensations associated with it. This exercise can help writers understand the emotional realism required to effectively engage readers in speculative fiction.

What is speculative fiction?
Speculative fiction, one might argue, provides almost infinite scope for put￾ting elements in play because it deals openly with that which is fantastic and
unfamiliar. Speculative fiction, as its name suggests, speculates in a fictional
way on things that are not true. I am sometimes told that all fiction speculates
and that is correct. But speculative fiction is distinguished by the use of the
fantastic mode. Ruth Rendell creates a not-true person in Inspector Wexford
and then goes on to speculate about how he may act in certain situations. But
in these situations he never reaches for a sonic screwdriver, does battle with a
dragon, nor banishes ghosts from a haunted hotel: Ruth Rendell’s crime
fiction uses the mode of realism. Futuristic technology, magical beasts and
spirits of the dead are generally held to be not of the real world, but of the
fantastic imagination (in the case of technology, of course, what is true is
constantly changing; and many people believe in spirits, though dragons,
unfortunately, do not really get a look-in).
Speculative fiction is usually broken down into three distinct subgenres:
fantasy fiction, science fiction and horror, though this breakdown is inade￾quate to anyone familiar with the genre. Hybrids abound (my own work has
Genre and speculative fiction

mixed fantasy and horror); short fiction may use different forms (high fan￾tasy, for instance, is very rare in short fiction); subgenres proliferate (within
science fiction we find cyberpunk, steampunk, space opera, alternative history
and others); new subgenres form, grow popular, then subside (for example, the
‘new weird’); while other subgenres arguably do not fit under the umbrella term
at all (for example, slasher horror, which may not turn to the fantastic mode
and, in fact, may be more usefully conceived as a subgenre of crime).
Of course this inability to define the limits of the genre is in keeping with
what I have written above. And yet speculative fiction is a coherent genre for
the devoted and active fan community that surrounds it. Readers in the genre,
like readers in any genre, know it when they see it. It interpolates its readers
effectively even as it excludes the non-readers (‘those wizard books’ as a
reader of realist literary fiction once said to me). It is inadvisable to approach
writing in this genre without having read in it widely, understood fully the
depth and breadth of it and developed due reverence for the fantastic mode:
how it is created and what pleasures it provides the reader. The rest of this
chapter offers a place to start writing, but below are a few suggestions of
where to start reading.
Classic: Beowulf (anonymous), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (anon￾ymous), Macbeth (William Shakespeare), The Monk (Matthew Lewis),
Frankenstein (Mary Shelley), Dracula (Bram Stoker).
Contemporary: Consider Phlebas (Iain M. Banks), American Gods (Neil
Gaiman), Assassin’s Apprentice (Robin Hobb), Brown Girl in the Ring (Nalo
Hopkinson), Duncton Wood (William Horwood), Ethan of Athos (Lois
McMaster Bujold), Perdido Street Station (China Miéville), The Earthsea
Quartet (Ursula Le Guin), Moonheart (Charles de Lint), The Baker’s Boy
(J. V. Jones), Bold as Love (Gwyneth Jones), The Lord of the Rings (J. R. R.
Tolkien), City of Saints and Madmen (Jeff Vandermeer), The Crooked Letter
(Sean Williams), The Doomsday Book (Connie Willis).
Contemporary short-story writers of note: Octavia Butler, Ted Chiang,
Greg Egan, Jeff Ford, Margo Lanagan, Kelly Link, Robert Shearman, Lucius
Shepherd, Angela Slatter, Michael Swanwick. Swanwick, Zoran Zivkovic.
Approaches
Realism
One of the chief pleasures of a speculative fiction narrative is the use of fantastic
elements, for example magic, futuristic technology or paranormal occurrences.
The paradox remains that those fantastic elements must be represented in a
realistic way if they are to be effective. Henry James remarked that.Not every speculative fiction novel has a real-world counterpart for con￾trast against fantastic events and images. A great deal of work in this genre
creates new worlds entirely. Once again, realism plays its part in making a
fantastic secondary world convincing. I want to concentrate in this section on
the idea of emotional realism. My contention is that the best way to describe
fantastic ideas is through the viewpoint of characters who have realistic and
familiar reactions to the world around them, even if that world is unfamiliar.
In fact, it is arguably more important for the characters in fantastic secondary
worlds to have realistic reactions, to keep the fantastic elements anchored to
lived experience.
In fact, one of the most powerful tools in the toolbox of writers in any genre
is the ability to make viewpoint work. Your viewpoint characters are the
characters whose thoughts and feelings you will represent in narrative, whose
heads the reader will have access to and who experience the story for the
reader. Viewpoint is a limited word because your characters offer more than
view (sight); they offer access to a full physical and mental response. They
experience the fantastic story in their minds and bodies, just as real people
experience real lives in their minds and bodies.
You should aim in every scene to be tracking your viewpoint character’s
experience of the story. By this I mean their emotions and introspections, but
also the material effect the story has on their body. Perhaps your character is an
alien child who loses his mother in quadrant four of the Jupiter colony: if you
describe that child’s panic in ways that are familiar to your readers, you create a
sympathetic connection between character and reader that deepens the reader’s
experience of the story because it has the ring of emotional truth about it.
Writing exercise
Remember last time you experienced fear. Now write down how that fear