Experimental

I generally like fiction where a story is told in an unusual, experimental format. And this story has that in spades. The fact that it revolves around football of all things is more than a little surprising.

At the time I’m writing this, it’s only posted a couple of chapters and I’m eagerly waiting the next one. Hopefully by the time you’re reading, more are up. Go read it and tell me what you think! Trippy, right?

It does make me wonder what the future is going to be like. The long future, that is. Tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years away. Will humans still be here? If we are, will we even be recognizable as humans? Will we have found some way to save the planet or will we abandon it for somewhere new?

So many questions. I can’t even fathom an answer.

Time Enough

I’ve talked about XKCD before, and how it’s not only the best stick figure comic of all time (it certainly puts mine to shame) but also one of the best comics period. And almost as if to prove why, creator Randall Munroe occasionally posts unique…well, they’re a lot more than comics. For example, there’s a long history of the temperatures of Earth, a gigantic scrollable comic, and a straight up hoverboard game.

One of the best, though, is Time, a comic that takes place over, well, time. Every thirty seconds, there was a change in the comic displayed, sometimes subtle, sometimes more major. There was something like a hundred in total, a comic book in its own right, gathered together here to click through one at a time, chronicling the story of a nameless man and woman first building a sandcastle, then going on a journey to discover what’s going on with the ocean near their village.

There’s a lot more going on than just that, and it’s honestly one of the more creative stories I’ve come across. It shows Earth during a different time period accurately, to the point where the stars displayed during the gorgeously rendered night scenes are accurate to the time period and the location.

Anyway, check it out if you’d like a little…I guess you’d classify it as some sort of speculative fiction? You’ll see.

Speculative

As I’m sure I mentioned, I started on a new project and instead of being apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic, it’s urban fantasy (gasp!) with an apocalyptic twist. Now, I’ve written urban fantasy before, but that was a long time ago, before I had a good grasp on writing. I’m still getting a feel for the story, but I like how it’s going. Plus I realized that it was still speculative fiction, which is most definitely my forte.

But “speculative fiction” is a funny title. Yes, what I’m writing is pretty close to what I usually do, but why are fantasy and apocalyptic under the same classification? If you look at something like LORD OF THE RINGS, you’re not going to mistake it for THE HUNGER GAMES. They’re nothing alike.

It happens that speculative fiction is basically the catch all term for any genre with things happening that don’t really happen. Or, as in the case of alternate history, didn’t really happen.

Then you can get into the subgenres and things get even more complicated. The family tree I posted up there hardly encompasses all the speculative offshoots. Science fantasy, dark fantasy (horror fantasy), and all the crosses with non-speculative genres. Suffice to say, it’s one incestuous family tree.

Really, as a name, speculative fiction doesn’t say much. Science fiction is speculative. Horror is speculative. But science fiction isn’t necessarily horror, nor vice versa. Unless the genres are deliberately joined, like the sci-fi horror movie Alien, they are separate creatures that for some reason share the share a genre.

Sometimes I wonder if speculative fiction is needed at all. The term, of course, not the books. I think we all know how important those are! But why such a broad classing? Is it necessary? Or useful? I’m not so sure. What do you think?

Dystopianites, Unite!...s.

It bothers me that Dystopian isn’t considered its own genre in most places. If you go on AgentQuery, a favorite of mine, you see they have genres of Horror, Adventure, Thrillers/Suspense and Science Fiction…but no Dystopian or post-Apocalyptic. Military/Espionage warrants its own listing, but not Dystopian. It’s the same on QueryTracker. They don’t even have a listing for Speculative Fiction!

I feel a bit neglected. Dystopian works are pretty serious contenders these days. Yet almost anywhere you go, it doesn’t merit its own genre listing.

I know, all of these books, as well as the ones I write, can also be considered YA. But to me, YA has always been more of a secondary genre, an audience I’m trying to connect with. I write Dystopian. It just seems to come out YA. Not that there aren’t important adult Dystopians out there. But these days, YA is where most of the fire is coming from.

Fellow YA Dystopian writers, what do you think? What would you want to come first, the YA or the Dystopian (or both equally?)? And what genre do you write?