Does it Distract From the Story? Romance is the world’s most popular genre. Readers love to fall in love alongside those characters and live all sorts of fantasies. People still believe in love. In speculative fiction, love as a theme is complicated. Some fans think it does not belong or distracts from the main story. […]
Meet the Sage Archetype These days, everyone preaches about the importance of mentorship. Meanwhile, for science fiction and fantasy characters, is nothing new. All writing, even speculative fiction, uses archetypes. Archetypes are universal images representing ideas as well as literary devices. The mentor is one. Homer‘s Odyssey gave us the character Mentor, who advises Odysseus’ […]
What Would a World Without Speculative Fiction Look Like? As someone who loves speculative fiction, and writes it, I wonder, what would a world without speculative fiction look like? In brief, boring. To begin, speculative fiction is for most of us, our first literature. Fantasy, fairy tales, and picture books with monsters and ghosts. Comic […]
Unforgettable Characters They are eccentric, courageous, and highly quotable. Some of them are not even human. Of course, I am talking about science fiction and fantasy characters. We, readers, love novels that give us relatable and unforgettable characters, the quirky the better. Some characters become part of pop culture. Daenerys, anyone? As an aspiring author, […]
Because Speculative Poetry Should Have a Message Speculative poetry is about painting the future or the impossible in colorful strokes. But I would add, these images must tell a story and a message. Post-apocalyptic fiction is mega-popular. But, after the apocalypse, who gets to rebuild? Should we? Who suffers more, the dead or those alive? […]
A Bad Year for Us, A Good Year for Pop Culture 2022 was a horrible year for humanity. So bad, I am happy to see it go. 2023 does not look promising either. War, plague, record gun violence, climate disasters, inflation, etc. Nevertheless, a bad year for humanity does not mean it was a bad […]
How it Came to Be? Speculative fiction is an umbrella term for science fiction, fantasy, horror, superhero fiction, dystopian fiction, alternate history, slipstream, and other subgenres. In brief, it is a recent name for something older. Indeed, a primal form of literature. After all, civilization was built one myth at a time, with one hero […]
Risky Literature for Modern Times How transgressive are science fiction and fantasy? Speculative fiction is an umbrella term for those stories that begin with a what-if proposition and explores its repercussions. Science fiction, fantasy, horror, dystopian, slipstream, alternate history, superhero fiction, and weird fiction are some of the genres encompassed by speculative fiction. Speculative fiction has […]
It is the End of the World and I Feel Bored Writing experts debate whether there are three, seven, or thirty-six writing plots. In speculative fiction, sometimes it feels there is only one: to save the world. Do every science fiction and fantasy novel need to be about the end of the world? Don’t readers […]
Speculative Fiction Can Be Literary One response I often get when trying to recruit members for my writing group (Curiouser) is, “sorry, I only write literary.” It is not so much the comment but the tone of voice. Like science fiction and fantasy are some kind of dirty words not worth literary value. I am […]
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