Have you ever heard the term, going down a rabbit hole?
When it comes to speculative fiction, I’m not going to waste your time restating the same information that you probably already looked up with a couple clicks of the mouse in your favorite search engine. Just in case you tried this approach, you probably observed as I did—the first three pages of results say the same thing. It’s an umbrella of…various types of fiction…deliberately departs from ordinary reality…blah, blah, blah.
Allow me to give the elusive genre a perspective that makes sense, or at least give you the option of a point of view different from the three pages of definitions.
Basically, speculative fiction is a conspiracy theorist’s—though I prefer the term, contingent thinker’s—dream genre because they don’t believe everything the government tells them. They feel there’s a hidden agenda and only the elite are privy to that info. (Don’t even get me started on the med pods.) That being said, when we create speculative fiction, we utilize World News and create our own versions of the story.
Speculative Fiction is a fun game of What if’s.
What if we’re actually living in a parallel universe and our sleeping time is another realm’s awake time?
What if we were surrounded by a series of zero-and-ones code, similar to an aura, and every person can read any other person’s aura (code) with a key only found in med pods?
What if every time we turned left, we subtract one second from our lives?
When we speculate, we make assumptions. We’re guessing an outcome to something that may or may not exist. Look at some of the decisions we make every day. We review a situation, then assume the results. And those results aren’t always subjugated to data driven information consumed by the masses, but by our nurtured environment. [No, Suzy wasn’t avoiding you because of the zit on your nose; she had a deadline with the architects.]
We, writers, do just that. We create an imaginative story in our head that doesn’t necessarily make sense to the scientific or cultural norms that occur in our daily lives. There are no data consensus boards reviewing our hypotheses. We see societal norms from a different perspective, one of hardship, or economic, and take those concepts to an extreme—Unwind by Neil Shusterman. We understand fear as a psychological advantage—Stephen King. We see possibilities of tech gadgets as though we’ve dreamt of the future—Star Trek. And after all that, we research basic personalities, and create a world around those characters.
We’re writers. We make stuff up and awaken the senses to those who are paying too close attention to social trends and societal mindsets. That’s speculative fiction; the power to take the information we’ve obtained from the rabbit hole and tell the world our news from a different lens.
-RADolence