Some Thoughts on Speculative Fiction ~ guest post by Kathy DiSanto

We're pleased to welcome speculative fiction author Kathy Disanto to the Salon today, giving her take on Speculative Fiction. Be sure to check out her latest release, Amanda's Eyes.

Some Thoughts on Speculative Fiction

Kathy DiSanto

I’ve been thinking a lot about speculative fiction lately. 

According to Wikipedia, the world’s would-be authority on just about everything, “Speculative fiction is an umbrella term encompassing the more fantastical fiction genres, specifically science fiction, fantasy, horror, weird fiction, supernatural fiction, superhero fiction, utopian and dystopian fiction, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, and alternate history ….”  Etc.

My first thought was, “Who knew weird fiction was a genre?”  But I was afraid that would make me look ignorant, so I decided to run with my second and third thoughts here.   Nobody wants to come off dumb when they’re guest blogging, right?

Speculative.  As in, speculation.  Bottom line, isn’t that what all fiction is?  You see a woman running in the rain, desperately trying to catch a bus already pulling away from the curb.  If you’re a writer, you might start to speculate.  Where was the bus supposed to take her?  What happens now that she’s missed it?  Does the tall, dark, handsome stranger sitting near the back hook up with someone else?  Does she arrive late for that job interview, lose out, and wind up living in a Pontiac?  Or does she miss the hijacking and live to run in the rain another day?  If you speculate long and hard enough, you might end up with the next New York Times bestseller.

So if all fiction is speculation, what makes us so special?  Why do we get to be speculative?  Fantastical?  (Gosh, that sounds neat.  I could really get into being fantastical.)

Here’s my take on that.   For what it’s worth.

Human nature is complex, fascinating and, at the root, unchanging.  We’ve been story-tellers, artists, lovers, scrappers, thieves, and liars since Adam.  We’re continually curious, forever intent on finding a better, easier way to do whatever.  We get proud of ourselves and down on ourselves.  We’re noble and depraved and kind and self-serving.  Just like we’ve always been.

That’s my theory, anyway, and I’m sticking to it.

IMHO (not bad for a junior senior citizen, eh?) speculative fiction looks at human nature and says, “What if?” in a big way.What if he could fly?  Or read minds?  What if she came face to face with the dead-slash-undead?  What if our enemy had weapons so powerful, we had nothing that could withstand them?  What if he woke up as a six-foot cockroach?  How would human nature express itself then?  Would we triumph, or would we all fall down?

As speculative fiction writers, we take our readers on journeys of exploration by unleashingfantasticalpossibilities.  We teleport folks to places they’ve never gone and drop them into situations most of them couldn’t have imagined without us.

Listen, people.  Do we know how to push the envelope, or what?

Now here’s the best part.  The morefantasticalthe story, the more our readers are liable toget in touch with who and what they are.  With who weare collectively.  Whether they know it or not, they’ll be faced with questions about what it means to be human and to live among other humans, then and now.They’ll visit worlds where they cancontemplate the boundaries of our shared humanity andour place in the universe.  Maybe beyond.

“But wait,” you say.  “All I ever wanted to do was spin a whopping good yarn.  Scare the pants off them or weird them out or transport them to a galaxy far, far away.”

That’s all right.  Just because you don’t mean to dig deeper, doesn’t mean you’re not.You are, after all, fantastical.

Amanda’s Eyes

Waking up is the pits when you come to in a hospital with a broken arm, a colorful assortment of abrasions and contusions, and a face swathed in bandages.  It’s even worse if you can’t remember what hit you.

The bad and the ugly are crime reporter Amanda “A.J.” Gregson’s business.  But learning she had a ringside seat for an explosion that killed two agents of the Continental Intelligence and Investigative Service (CIIS), incinerated an entire block of warehouses, and did so much damage to her eyes they had to be surgically removed?  Well, that gives the darker side of life a whole new meaning.
Haunted by elusive nightmares, A.J. waits for her transplant and struggles to remember the events leading up to the fateful night of September 4, 2075.  Weeks crawl by without a glimmer, before memory finally floods back the night before surgery, every detail brutally clear.
The explosion had been the work of the Ferrymen.

“The Ferrymen.  My not-so-magnificent obsession for more than a year.  Only a cataclysm could have made me forget.  I guess you could call them hitmen.  You could also call Einstein a math whiz.  Think ruthless.  Think unstoppable.  Think killers so proficient ‘caught the ferry’ was fast replacing ‘bought the farm’ in common usage, and you have the Ferrymen in a nutshell.”

The transplant surgery goes off without a hitch—welcome news, because A.J. is raring for a rematch with Hell’s Boatmen.  But contrary to popular belief, what you see isn’t always what you get.  Take her new eyes, for example.  Those baby blues may look perfectly normal, but they possess a power that turns her world upside down—the power to see into the hidden dimensions of the human heart.
When the Sight unmasks the mastermind behind the Ferrymen, the unveiling is as stunning as it is unbelievable. The revelation sets her on course for a second head-collision with evil.  Will she survive the final encounter?

Kathy DiSanto writes speculative fiction, specifically, science fiction with a paranormal twist.  Her near-future thriller, Amanda’s Eyes, is currently available for download through Amazon.  She will self-publish a straight sci-fi novel, Why Live?, this December.  Mind Games, the second book in the A.J. Gregson series, is already in the works.  Find out more about Kathy by visiting her website.

Guest post: The Lure of Fantasy by Jane Toombs

THE LURE OF FANTASY  by  Jane Toombs

  Never mind that all fiction essentially is fantasy in that it isn’t “real” but created by an author.  Even as I child I knew the difference between fiction and true fantasy. I was taught by a master--Edgar Allan Poe.  

   My parents never restricted my reading, something I’m eternally grateful for.  I must have been about ten when I pulled Poe’s book of poems from the family bookcase.  It was a small black book and the printing was tiny, but I persisted. I soon realized I held magic in my hands.  I don’t claim to have understand exactly what he meant at that age, but loved the mystery of  words like “the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.”

I believe the mystery is what I enjoy the most about fantasy.  Not mystery as in who killed whom, but a speculative kind of mystery that Poe must have loved as much as we do.  As readers we can enter worlds that never were and enter lands that never were, but we believe in those lands, those times, and what‘s happening for the time we’re happily engrossed in the book.

I  can’t be sure when I changed from simply enjoying speculative  fiction to wanting to write it.  The first book I sold in 1973 was a gothic and was loaded with weird stuff.   I had made the heroine  of Tule Witch a nurse who was at work in an  ER in the basement of an old hospital where water dripped from pipes running across the ceiling.--a setting that actually existed at the time, but suitably spooky.  

Still, a nurse heroine doesn’t sound like fantasy.  And what I wrote didn’t seem too weird until a bit later on in the book.  I was thrilled with the sale and wrote six or seven gothics after that book which also sold, every last one of them a fantasy.    What happened?  Well, I sold another of my weird gothics to  Harlequin so long ago that they still referred to that book as a “product.”  As a matter of fact I have the rights back and eventually will scan it. But now I was a Harlequin author and I quickly discovered they wanted no part of anything weird or spooky (these were early days.)  So I had to fit in a “line.”    

Yes, I confess I did what they wanted me to.  Hey, the money was good and kept coming.  Who turns down money?

I didn’t foresee the day when I couldn’t stand to do this any longer and need to immerse myself in weirdness again. But here I am happily writing fantasy for ebooks and not making all that much money--but I’ve reached an age where I have to love what I‘m doing.  

And now, once again, I do.  Fantasy is always just beyond our reach in real life, but easy to find in books, thank heaven…  And yes, I’ve written about that ghoul who lives in a cemetery called Weir.  He’s green and in love with a human. The story is called “It Can’t Be Mine!” and is in an ebook called TEN PAST MIDNIGHT.

Ten Past Midnight Blurb:

An awkward heroine who has no sense of smell and wants to be loved. Her so-called friends pull a prank on her, which makes her so angry that when she passes the Weir Cemetery on her way home and sees someone green, she believes it's some guy dressed up for another scam and is determined to confront  the prankster. 

A hero who is a starving green ghoul living in a cemetery called Weir. He can't believe it when a human woman actually talks to him. Is it possibly she can't smell his scent, which is foul to humans?  

This is one of the weird stories in Ten Past Midnight, but it does end happily, unlike some of them,  all my books can be found at my website with buy links, or Amazon.

Ten Past Midnight may be purchased at Amazon.

website: www.JaneToombs.com

Author Bio: Jane Toombs, author of ninety published books if you count novellas, lives across the road from Lake Superior with her calico cat, Kinko, in Michigan's beautiful Upper Peninsula wilderness. She writes in most genres, but fantasy is by far her favorite.

A Romance

My romance with speculative fiction started with science fiction. This was the one place where people seemed to ask the kinds of questions that permeates my own thinking. When I say “permeate” I think I really mean "makes my thinking soggy", "distracts me for hours on end".

When I was in second grade, I remember asking the teacher why is two and two four. I’m sure she had not been asked that particular question before because she proceeded to explain how to count or add. That wasn’t what I was asking. I wanted to know how we came to figure out adding in the first place, who named it “two” and “four”, things like that. It turns out that it wasn’t a bad question. A couple of guys asked the question about 20 years ago, now and had were, admittedly, challenged to answer it. They wrote a book called Where Mathematics Comes From.

Did you know that there are people in the world who don’t count past three or four? They just have words like our “some”, “several”, “many” and “lots.” Have you considered the word “ginormous?” Or, the favorite topic of our now-defunct cafe tribe--a butt load? These are concepts we don’t consider, usually. One of the writers that has inspired me is Ursula Le Guin. She has been my educator in thinks like magic (The Earthsea Trilogy), shamanism (The Lathe of Heaven), gender (The Left Hand of Darkness). However, she wrote a short story that I remembered as being about the person who discovered the number “0” (zero). Did you know there was a time when we did not use zero as a place holder? Or negative numbers for that matter. But the idea of someone trying to persuade a world that there is a state of nothingness, that was an intriguing idea.

I haven’t provided a title because I’m not even sure the story is real. I could just be an idea that she inspired. But that is exactly the appeal of science fiction, in particular and speculative fictions in general. It’s an environment in which we can grow the things that the physics of the world we experience everyday does not allow. We can explore ideas about society, about ourselves and about the way the world works. For me, this is greater than the simplicity of just asking “what if”. Why? How? Who said? Why not? There are also the explorations of speculative fiction.

What kinds of questions does speculative fiction inspire you to ask? What kinds of questions do you ask that you find explored in its genres? Do you have authors you go back to, like favorite teachers?