All fiction is speculative so why is there a genre labelled speculative fiction?
According to Wikipedia (the authority on everything) speculative fiction tells stories that take place in non-existent realities whereas realistic fiction tells stories that are ‘faithful to reality’. That's a pretty broad category. So broad, in fact, that it basically means nothing. For readers deciding what they want to read, that delineation is about as useful as the one you find in the library that segregates fiction from non-fiction. It sends you in the right direction but doesn’t necessarily help you find what you’re looking for.
Fortunately, when it comes to non-fiction, we have the Dewey Decimal system. It’s a system that goes back to the 1870s and is now used by every library to categorise non-fiction by subject matter. There are nine major categories starting with 000 for general non-fiction and ending with 900 for geography, history and biography.
Looking for fiction is completely different. Libraries sort fiction by author’s last name rather than genre. There’s a couple of good reasons for that. First of all, we often hear about a writer either from friends, reviews or through the media. If we’ve read an author’s book and we like it, we may want to find more books by that author. And if the author has written a series, its easier to find the other books in the series if they’re all grouped together. For me, Philippa Gregory, is my go-to author when it comes to historical fiction. Her name alone, sets an expectation in my mind. Similarly when I’m in the mood for a good spy thriller, I think John Le Carre. Before I even read the blurb on the back of the book, I know what to expect. Hear the name Stephen King and the word horror comes to mind, Tolkien, think fantasy, Agatha Christie, murder mystery and Bradbury, science fiction.
Most fiction can be classed as either realism or non-realism. Realism being books that mirror reality as we generally accept it. Historical fiction, romance, literary fiction, all tend to fall under the umbrella of realism.
Non-realism introduces the supernatural, the other worldly, elements that don’t exist in our every day world. Whether its fairies, dragons and witches or aliens, robots and interstellar travel, readers of non-realism expect to discover things out of the ordinary.
But the lines between realism and non-realism get blurred when you start talking genres. Genre readers, have preset notions about what they want from a book and genre writers know this. The successful ones also know which rules they can break and which ones are inviolable. Publishers who specialise in romance novels have been known to give their writers very specific rules but good romance writers know how to break the rules and still give their readers what they want and it doesn’t need to be realistic. In a romance novel, the protagonist can fall in love with the neighbour next door, feel torn between a vampire and a werewolf, or discover their worst enemy is their true love, but if the lovers don’t end up together, (in some way, shape or form) you don’t have a romance novel. If only Romeo gave Juliet the antidote in time, the play would have be a romance. In other words, all love stories are not necessarily romances but all romances are love stories.
Which begs the question are all non-realism stories, speculative fiction? Do fantasy readers have the same expectations as hard-core science fiction readers? Or is speculative fiction a genre that sits separate to both of these genres. The answer to this is important to readers and writers because readers want to have their expectations met and writers want to put their books into the hands of readers who are likely to enjoy them. Don’t get me wrong. Classifying a book in the proper genre doesn’t make a bad book better but it’s not unusual for a good book to get a bad rating from a reader because it didn’t fit their expectation.
When I wrote my first novel, When All Hope Is Lost, reviewers such as Kirkus, Blue Ink and Forward, classified it as science fiction and fantasy. More than a few science fiction aficionados pointed out that my future world lacked the technology they expected. Fantasy readers were quick to note that there was no magic. What I had written was a novel about a society that mirrored our own under different conditions.
Another genre often applied to my first book is the post-apocalypric category. When All Hope Is Lost is set in a future that has been altered by an apocalyptic event. There’s a pandemic that kills all adult males but the pandemic defines the world, not the story. Readers who choose a post-apocalyptic book expect chaos, a changed world order. There may not be zombies, mad-max characters or landscapes devastated by an atomic blast, but civilisation as we know it, must cease to exist. My book fails to deliver on that score as well. It talks about a period of chaos but it’s set in a world that has pulled back from the brink. The pandemic flipped the social order but it didn’t destroy civilisation nor did it create a new social order. When all Hope Is Lost shows how patriarchy survives even though the males are gone.
But back to genres. I latched onto the term speculative fiction to describe my book. The readers who enjoy When All Hope Is Lost and the others in the series are people who like to speculate on change. The mysteries to be solved, the suspense, the love stories are all elements that move the stories along but what most readers remember about the books is that they make them think about issues of gender, political power and manipulation of information. I would argue that ideas, rather than magic or whizz bang technology underpin speculative fiction. The setting is ‘non-realism’ but the issues are often relevant to the world we inhabit and like literary fiction, speculative fiction is less formulaic and more focused on thematic development over standard plot tropes.
What I find exciting about books like, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Hunger Games, Fahrenheit 451 and the Left Hand of Darkness (to name a few), is their ability to look at our preconceived notions, our cultural taboos, and our social constraints, and stretch them into new territory. They can place us in a future or under a microscope or on a far-off planet but in the end we are really looking at ourselves. The difference between realism and non-realism is that we are looking at ourselves from a safe distance.
In today's environment, where we are confronted by so many divisive issues, it’s hard to talk objectively about any of them and that's unfortunate because we are living in a time of change. Not only is there no clear road map to follow, we can't even agree on where we are going. This, I think, is where speculative fiction plays an important role. In taking our world and saying, if we were to go in this direction, this is what might happen but if we went another way, there might be a different outcome. Fahrenheit 451, 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale – are all examples of futuristic stories that have now become all too real. In that regard, I like to think that speculative fiction, more than science fiction or fantasy, can function as a sign post warning of dangers up ahead and at the same time it posit solutions.
What do you think? Drop a note in the comments.