Liam McParland: "Dear Chuck Wendig: SpecFic: The Rollercoaster of the Soul"

SpecFic: The Rollercoaster of the Soul

By Liam McParland

When I was about six years old, I had a recurring dream that global warming would cause all of the ice in the world to melt at once, flooding my hometown, which is in the exact middle of Illinois. About as far away from a large body of water as you can get. Nevertheless, every night I would wake up scared for my life, and my parents would have to calm me down and tell me that we were in no danger of terrible liquid death for the “foreseeable future”. Despite their not-quite reassurance, this irrational fear was the one that my immature psyche latched onto to replay over and over in my head. This lasted until we realized that my new allergy medicine was causing my night terrors, and I had it switched for one that was slightly less psychoactive. I don’t know why my chemically imbalanced brain didn’t dream about things that actually had impact on my life as well as being legitimately scary, like the mean old cat which lived in my basement or the creepy school down the street. This seemingly illogical situation makes a lot more sense, however, when I think about which specific fears and beliefs that people choose to write about in speculative fiction. Humanity is collectively interested in exploring the future through examination of extreme fears.

The trials and tribulations of most people’s lives are genuinely uninteresting in a speculative context.  Everyone likes to think of themselves as the protagonists of their own story, but few would care to consider just how many people would walk out of that story’s movie adaptation. Speculative fiction combats this by elevating the normal to the extent that it becomes extremely terrifying or otherwise beyond conceivable recognition. No one wants to watch or make a movie about a boring object like a car tire just rolling around (Unless you’re Quentin Dupieux, in which case you definitely do). It takes a movie about “A homicidal car tire” which discovers it has “destructive psionic power” to make this premise even worth considering, as is found in Dupieux’s movie Rubber.

The extremes to which humanity’s fears, beliefs, and interest can go are often, and perhaps best, explored through speculative fiction. This includes my personal fears, as the movie Waterworld explores a devastated world in which all polar ice-caps have melted, proving that I was not alone in my childhood terror. For me, science fiction’s and fantasy’s capacity to explore that which is scary and why it is so makes them engrossing and relevant genres. The thing that interests me is the interaction that humans will have, both which each other and the environment, as a result of these fear-based expansions.

One of my favorite fantasy authors from my grade school years, T. A. Barron, once said that “Some say ‘The end is near,’ as if that is shocking news…What is actually shocking is that we, ourselves, can help to choose which end.” In recent years, SF has taken a decidedly dystopian turn, as young adult fiction promotes the general form of a young, somehow “special”, protagonist fighting an individuality-destroying power. In a time of NSA spying and repeated attacks on Net Neutrality, these are very relevant issues.

The end of the world can come in any number of ways, and is certainly an exciting premise for a story or novel. This excitement comes precisely because it is a very real possibility that plays on primal fears that are true for all people. Whether Tolkien plays with arachnophobia by including Shelob or Star Wars writers work with the idea of an anatagonistic Other with the invasion of the Yuuzhan Vong, sci-fi makes it increasingly clear that if something can go wrong, it will.

Fiction creates conflict by addressing basic questions, like “What would happen if this changed?” or “How would people react to this situation?”. When elements of reality are changed in these stories, they are also forced to address the questions “How can this go wrong?” and “Oh my God, are we all gonna die?”. For me, SciFi allows a healthy expression and exploration of fear in a safe environment, like rollercoasters and extreme sports for the more physically inclined. Fear is what troubles me, and I can face it through genre fiction, which is what will always bring me back to it.