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Why Speculative Fiction?

6/1/2024

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Human beings, and I expect many our hominid ancestors and relatives, have indulged in sharing speculative fiction for as long as we’ve spoken stories. We created myths and legends to explain the world around us – to rationalise what we saw, felt, heard, tasted, and smelled. We’ve always speculated about things that lie beyond our understanding. It’s in our very nature to ask, ‘What if?’

We love reading speculative fiction. According to Wikipedia – if we ignore religious texts (I have thoughts), comics and textbooks, and add Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (reportedly over 120 million copies sold in different formats) – 5 of the 8 best-selling books of all time are speculative fiction (and, yes, this is a western-centric assessment).

When we engage with speculative fiction, we’re not just entertained, we’re taken on a journey into the unknown. It allows us to indulge our desire for the extraordinary. It’s an invitation to dream and question.

Speculative fiction offers us an opportunity to interrogate the real world from a safe distance. We can investigate what it means to be human. Most of the stories in ‘Letters From Elsewhere’, my collection of speculative short stories, explore what it means to be monstrous. What better way to do that than from the perspective of a so-called monster. Who was more monstrous – Mary Shelley’s Dr Frankenstein or the monster the he created?

Another favourite character of mine, who offers a unique perspective on humanity, is the cyborg, Murderbot (The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells). Much of Murderbot’s understanding of humanity comes from streaming soap operas, but when they work alongside actual living humans the reality is quite different. Through internal, and often comedic, dialogue, Murderbot provides a running commentary on the dangers of human emotions and how they compromise our motives and behaviours.

Through speculative fiction, we can hold a mirror up to ourselves in a manner that isn’t dangerous or confronting but gets to the truth of who we are. It allows us to confront our deepest fears, desires, hopes and wildest dreams from within the safety of fictitious construct.

Think of how ground-breaking ‘The Left-Hand of Darkness’ (Ursula le Guin) was in challenging the concept of binary sexuality, and ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ (Margaret Atwood) was in exploring the rise of fundamentalism. Both books brutally critiqued society. That’s what speculative fiction can do.

Sometimes, the answer to ‘What if?’ isn’t happy. I wrote ‘Rose Moon’ in response to the election of Trump as President of the USA. I imagined a human world darkened by repression, cruelty, environmental damage, and religious extremism – tragically, that didn’t turn out to be the speculative component of the novella!

In the upcoming ‘Ghost Assassins of Bijou’ collection of novellas, I’m delving into misogyny, repression and the patriarchy. To lighten the tone, I’m telling the stories in the form of a Space Opera with humour woven through the prose. The messages are no less confronting, they’re just delivered in a more palatable package.

In speculative fiction, we can imagine how different environments, technologies, or societies might alter the human experience. Speculative fiction can foster discussion about socio-political issues, encourage diverse thinking and offer concepts for technological innovation. Submarines, space travel, computers, cell phones and virtual reality all featured in speculative fiction before existing in reality.

Speculative fiction taps into our curiosity about the future, the supernatural, and the abstract possibilities that lie just beyond our reach. It’s also fun!
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A Leap

3/1/2024

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It’s a leap year!
An entire extra day to do whatever I want with…except…I’m on a mission.
 
I’ve received an expression of interest from an Australian publisher of speculative and dark fiction for a five-book series of speculative feminist novellas/short novels. The five manuscripts are to be delivered late 2024, early 2025, for quarterly release. I’m so excited, but also a bit daunted.
 
One of the novella’s is complete, the second almost half written and the remaining three are planned out. So, I’m on a mission to write like the wind…not the turtle of habitude!
 
One of the joys of writing them all before delivery, is having the ability to tweak details. I’ll be able to adjust each of the individual stories as the over-arching plot is revealed. It also gives me laser focus on writing to a schedule – something I’m not very disciplined at.
 
For readers, this approach will guarantee the series is complete. There’s nothing worse than committing to a series only to discover it was never completed. It will also mean the books will be published on a schedule close enough together, so the story remains fresh.
 
So, my focus is on writing. I’ll still do my best to write a blog at the start of every month, and in between will send out a newsletter (Click on the Contact tab to subscribe).
 

Wish me luck!
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Creating A World

9/21/2023

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All forms of writing require some level of world building. This is especially true in speculative fiction. The reader needs to have a sense of the environment within which the story takes place. That environment is wider than just the physical setting, it includes all the trappings of a society: art & culture; food & drink; politics & religion; fashion; science & magic; infrastructure & transport; technology & structures; languages & class structure; flora & fauna; disease; races of humans, monsters & aliens; and rules & laws – amongst other things.

BUT (that’s in capitals because what follows is very important) …all the details of the world you create don’t need to be included in your story. I know it’s tempting to include it all that gritty minutia you spent hours, days and even weeks researching and thinking about, but just don’t. Only include enough to provide a scaffold for your reader’s imagination, context for your characters, and to move the plot forward.

Because I’m a discovery writer (I discover the story as I write it), I don’t do a great deal of world building before I start writing. I’ll just do enough to get me going. My typical approach for developing a world is very organic. I start with the main character. Once I understand who they are and what drives them, I can start to write the plot around them. The final step is to construct the world in which the character and the plot exist. This means my writing is often interrupted by periods of research.

For The Grotesque Wars (novelette in Letters From Elsewhere), I spent a lot of time researching castles. The final story only carries a glimpse of all that research. I’ve included just enough so the reader can picture a castle, but not be bogged down and distracted by in-depth descriptions. I know the exact layout of the castle and even details of the materials used in its construction, but these have no bearing on the story. Specifics, where needed, are woven into the story, rather than dumped in as a chunk of exposition.

In my novella, Rose Moon, the story moves between three realms: a fantasy realm; a human realm; and the realm of the seasons. Each needed sufficient depth and vibrancy to make them real. Most of the action occurs in the human realm, so that’s where I needed the most detail. I had to consider politics, religion, laws, technology, magic and the setting. Then, determine how the realms interacted.

In the above examples, the worlds were built on an earth or earth-like reality, but that’s not always the case. I’m working on a series of space opera novella’s, Ghost Assassins of Bijou, where almost nothing about the series universe is familiar. I’ve had to build almost everything from scratch, but I start with the known.
  • The assassins and their targets are human, but different races.  
  • Societies are versions of democracy or autocracy.
  • Religions have distorted to fundamentalism and misogyny.

After that, and because I’m not bound by hard science, I can let my imagination riot.
  • Spacecraft are mechanically enhanced, sentient cuttlefish-like creatures.
  • Intergalactic travel is possible via ‘Punch Flight’.
  • There are multitudes of sentient species other than humans.
  • Universal translators are glitchy, but exist.

Worlds don’t need to be based in reality, but they do need elements of fundamental truths. Readers need to have something or someone they can identify with or understand.

There’s a whole bunch of stuff I have high confidence writing about: women; sexuality; animals; habitats; politics; and the logistics involved in managing large-scale international projects. There’s a much larger list of things I have less confidence about, including: technology; physics; strategies of war; legal systems; and medical procedures. Those differing levels of confidence will dictate how much research I may need to do, which facets of a world will be more important to my story, and whose perspective the story is being told from. For example, if I have a scene set in a hospital, it will be told from the perspective of a visitor or patient, not from that of a surgeon or staff nurse.

Setting is a critical component of world-building. All too often it’s one dimensional – visual. Add richness with the other senses. The stench of rancid milk evokes an almost involuntary gag reflex in most of us. That first mouthful of rich, bitter coffee in the morning is nirvana to some of us, and repulsive to others. Aromas and flavours are powerful drivers of emotion, as is sound. The mewl of a kitten, the screech of brakes, the scream as you plunge a knife into someone’s stomach. Don’t forget the feel of the warm blood as it splatters on your face, the silk smoothness of the dress you wear, and the irritation of the sand in your eyes. Use all the senses to draw your reader deep into your world.

​Finally, it's important to remember that no world is perfect. There will always be dissent, crime, and inhabitants of societies fringes. Recorded history doesn’t always align with reality, it usually suits those who are in power. The same applies to the interpretation of the tenets of religion, think about the difference between a zealot and someone with faith. We’ve bred thornless varieties of lemon trees but left to themselves, they revert. Animal species aren’t meant to be able to interbreed, yet there are numerous examples of hybrids in nature. Don’t limit your world to one dimension – allow it to be full and rich.
 
Here are some of my favourite worlds.
  • Pern – Ann McCaffrey
  • The Dandelion Dynasty – Ken Liu
  • The Murderbot Diaries – Martha Wells
  • Binti – Nnedi Okorafor
  • Discworld – Terry Pratchett
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