Just Speculating

This is not Erikka, sad to say. She is currently frolicking in outer Canadia, leaving her weblog operations in the tender hands of others. My name is Jeff Deck. If you have heard of me at all, it's probably because of this. But I am somewhat weary of discussing typos, so I think we should venture out into other realms. I took a peek at the post by Friday's author and saw that the ground I'd intended to cover has already been partially trod, which I suppose is understandable since we're both writing on Erikka's pet topic.

The gears of the world currently grind on the grease of nonfiction. I admit, though, that I prefer writing fiction (though my collection of jeremiads against typos may seem to contradict that), and reading it as well. I like a range of genres, but my favorites tend to be classified as fantasy, sci-fi, or horror, or some grey region in between (the whole mess is sometimes termed "speculative fiction," which, while kind of a clumsy label, seems to me to fit it better than any available alternative). Are these guilty pleasures? For some people, they might be, and I know that I certainly felt that way recently when reading the inherently sexist but immensely entertaining Swords and Deviltry, the first book of Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series. However, I think that it's a mistake to paint all of speculative fiction with the same proverbial brush.

Take George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, for example. The books are set in the imaginary land of Westeros, where a complex feudal system holds sway and undead creatures threaten from the north. Clearly this is not 21st-century America, nor an analogue for it. Westeros does not exist outside the author's head. Yet the world and characters he depicts are as vivid, if not more so, than those found in much of contemporary "realistic" fiction. The rivalries and alliances among Martin's people speak to universal themes.

But a good chunk of the reading population will never give the series a shot, simply because it's found in the fantasy/sci-fi section of the bookstore. (Or just the "sci-fi" section, as stores often dismissively label the whole thing.) Compared to the kind of books that are commonly respectable or fashionable to read, literary fiction and the like, speculative fiction is regarded as either a guilty pleasure--occupying the same camp as chick lit, mass-market mysteries, and romance-- or, worse, as the literature of the Other. The geek, the outcast, the loner. Not our people.

The division seems silly, given that all fiction is, to a certain degree, fantastical. Even if you set your story in Manhattan, in 2008, on 42nd Street, your world becomes imaginary the moment you plop a fictional character down on that street. Your Manhattan splits from the real Manhattan, because someone who does not exist exists there. It doesn't matter how much it may painstakingly resemble our world; it is still an artifice. So why not change the landscape a bit? Why not dream on how a person might act if she lived in the future, or in a world that never existed?

Maybe someday the walls thrown up by popular perception will come down. Maybe they already are, given the creeping of speculative elements into both literary fiction (The Road, The Time Traveler's Wife) and, er... guilty pleasures (Stephenie Meyer, The Dresden Files). Eventually, perhaps, more folks will share my view that taking the time to read any kind of fiction nowadays is an endeavor that should be supported, not judged. Until then, I think I'll still be wondering what exactly that blonde chick sitting across from me on the subway is concluding about my character as I hunch over my copy of Red Mars.