Genre – Jenny Arch

Most kids learn at least a little about genre in school; they can probably name a few, like mystery, historical, fantasy, and science fiction. I, too, was familiar with the traditional genre labels, until I took a workshop with Joyce Saricks, author of The Readers’ Advisory Guide to Genre Fiction, while I was working at the Robbins Library in Arlington. In her book, and in the workshop, she examined books through the lens of appeal factors, and divided them into the adrenaline genre, the intellect genres, the landscape genres, and the emotion genres.

I no longer have my original notes on the workshop, but I believe it was Joyce Saricks who used the term “speculative” as well, for books that ask “What if…?” Although she classifies fantasy as a landscape genre and science fiction as an intellect genre, both imagine worlds different from ours in some way. This, for me, is a reading sweet spot: not space opera or high fantasy (though I read those too), but a world that’s like ours, but with a twist: there’s time travel, or a coup changes the political landscape, or there’s been a climate catastrophe, or a lethal pandemic, or women are more powerful than men. Or humans have disappeared altogether! They are alternate histories, dystopias, or futuristic stories. These books challenge and stretch readers’ imaginations, encouraging us to place ourselves in that situation and imagine: What if?

Speculation has value as rehearsal; reading is a way to experience something and think through your responses and reactions without having to experience the situation in real life. Here are some of the speculative books I’ve enjoyed over the years. Some are lighthearted, some scary, some a little too close to reality for comfort.

Nonfiction

The World Without Us
What If We Get It Right?

Fiction

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub
The Husbands by Holly Gramazio
Famous Men Who Never Lived by K. Chess
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
The Future by Naomi Alderman
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon
The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
Moonbound by Robin Sloan
The Night Bookmobile by Audrey Niffenegger

Fiction (in which things are very different for women, specifically)

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Power by Naomi Alderman
When She Woke by Hillary Jordan
Red Clocks by Leni Zumas
When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill

Young Adult

The Loneliest Girl in the Universe by Lauren James
Unwind by Neal Shusterman

Children’s

We Are Definitely Human by X. Fang
Journey by Aaron Becker
When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead
We’re Not From Here by Geoff Rodkey
Finn and Ezra’s Time Loop Bar Mitzvah by Joshua Levy
The Color of Sound by Emily Barth Isler
The First State of Being by Erin Entrada Kelly
The Last Cuentista by Donna Barba Higuera

What are your speculative favorites? What do you like or dislike about the genre?

Not everyone is familiar with the term “speculative fiction”: generally, it’s an umbrella term that includes both fantasy and science fiction, but I also describe it as fiction that asks, “What if…?”

Cover image of The View from the Cheap Seats Back in 2016, I wrote a post quoting Neil Gaiman extensively: “Fiction is the lie that tells the truth.” In 2013 (and before that, and since then), he spoke about the power of fiction on empathy and imagination; he wrote, “The world doesn’t have to be like this. Things can be different.” In his collection of nonfiction essays, The View From the Cheap Seats, he wrote more on the same theme:

“There are three phrases that make possible the world of writing about the world of not-yet (you can call it science fiction or speculative fiction; you can call it anything you wish) and they are simple phrases:
What if…?
If only…
If this goes on…”

In a recent discussion of speculative fiction (including fantasy and science fiction), a classmate linked to a related piece of writing on the idea of “what if”: in her 2015 essay “Rewriting the Future: Using Science Fiction to Re-envision Justice,” Walidah Imarisha writes,

“For all of our ability to analyze and critique, the left has become rooted in what is. We often forget to envision what could be. We forget to mine the past for solutions that show us how we can exist in other forms in the future.

That is why I believe our justice movements desperately need science fiction. Stay with me on this one…”

octaviasbrood She writes that science fiction “allows us to imagine possibilities outside of what exists today,” and asserts that science fiction is the only genre that “allows us to question, challenge, and re-envision everything all at once.” Imarisha uses a new-to-me term as well: “Visionary fiction offers social justice movements a process to explore creating those new worlds….This term reminds us to be utterly unrealistic in our organizing, because it is only through imagining the so-called impossible that we can begin to concretely build it. When we free our imaginations, we question everything….That is why decolonization of the imagination is the most dangerous and subversive decolonization process of all.”

Imarisha writes that “visionary fiction centers those who have been marginalized in larger society, especially those who live at the intersections of identities and oppressions.” It takes a visionary – often an outsider, someone young or marginalized or discounted by mainstream society – not just to see what is wrong, but to imagine alternatives that seem impossible at first.

Some people may discount the fantasy and science fiction genres out of hand, but writers of speculative fiction are some of the most creative writers and thinkers of their times. They often use their invented worlds to help readers see the problems with our own world by taking them to extremes (“If this goes on…”) or making radical changes to societal norms (“What if…?”). Imarisha writes, “Whether it’s Hunger Games, Harry Potter, or Star Wars, these fantastical worlds end up exploring issues like war, racism, gender oppression, power, privilege, and injustice.”

It’s not all space operas and dragons and unicorns (although so what if it is?) – sometimes it’s using fiction as a sandbox to imagine and envision ways to improve the one real world we do have. I’m planning to read Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements later this month and get some new ideas. What if…things can be different?