Vishal Patel: "Dear Michael Damian and Lynne Thomas: Why I Read Speculative Fiction"

 Dear Michael Damian and Lynne Thomas: Why I Read Speculative Fiction

By

Vishal Patel

Our world has certain rules, laws that decide what is and isn’t possible. As a species, we exploit those rules as much as we possibly can. It’s one of the most useful abilities that we have. For me, the reason I have read and will continue to read speculative fiction is as a way to exercise that ability. It is plentiful, with hundreds if not thousands of rule systems in a wide variety. The story and the characters facilitate your learning of the rules and your understanding of a few basic uses of them, giving you a framework for finding additional exploits. It’s entertaining and good training, a perfect combination. The key, then, to enjoying speculative fiction is matching what you read with what you want to learn.

One of the best ways to find the right fiction is by genre. Fantasy tends to create rules that are very different from our world’s. It requires the reader to build his/her understanding of the world nearly from scratch. This is evidenced by the fact that fantasy is considered “higher” the more different the world is from our world. However, fantasy rules tend to be on a human scale. Magic is limited to certain beings or locations or requires specific rituals that would never occur on their own. The powers are simple and powerful, making the exploits relatively simple. However, the completely different world requires the reader to contextualize all of those things in a completely new way.

As you get deeper into fantasy, you also have a lot of rules to deal with. Either there are many specific spells or types of magic or each individual has powers that are entirely unique, sometimes both. Because of that, there are a huge number of different powers and an even larger number of combinations that lead to an unfathomable number possible exploits. As the magic gets more powerful (and it inevitably does), the interactions between the exploits become more complex and difficult to understand. This makes fantasy perfect for learning to learn this skill. The complexity builds in a way that is easy for the reader to keep up with, but still takes the reader very far.

To contrast with this, science fiction expects a lot of the reader if he/she wants to understand its rules. Unlike fantasy, science fiction is about slightly changing or extending the rules of this reality. Instead of low to high, science fiction ranges from hard to soft; science fiction is considered “harder” as it follows reality more closely. The challenge of science fiction is two-fold. First, you have to know enough about the science that is being used. Since science fiction constantly reaches for the very edges of science, this means relativity and quantum mechanics, advance materials and nuclear chemistry, genetic engineering and exobiology. While a normal reader can glance over these things, simply accepting what the book says, when you are reading to understand the rules of the story, you have to learn those rules as well. This makes it more difficult, but it also allows you to carry ideas from each book into others that use the same or similar technologies.

As you go deeper, this extensive knowledge becomes even more critical. Science fiction rule changes tend to be on a much lower level. A small technological change can have consequences across an entire civilization. Similar to fantasy, there are an uncountable number of interactions between different rules. This time, however, those rules are below the scale of humans, making the human scale consequences difficult to trace. Through this difference, science fiction trains you to use you rule-exploiting abilities in a much more realistic way. In fact, this is the same way that you would use when learning real science: looking through all of the potential useful interactions that each new rule has as you learn it.

Of course, there are many other reasons to enjoy science fiction. The characters are unique; the worlds are expansive and interesting, often larger than our own world; and the circumstances and relationships between characters can be completely different than those that we experience. For me, though, imagining how I could live in so many fictional worlds, seeing how just thinking about the rules can get you to incredible results, has been a constant source of enjoyment and personal growth. For that reason, I will always read speculative fiction.