We are all familiar with the popular reading genres such as romance, mystery, action/adventure, science fictions, horror, etc. Those are further divided into subgenres such as paranormal romance and historical romance, cozy mysteries, YA, etc. While fantasy has become popularly accepted as a major genre, it’s still considered a subgenre of science fiction.
Have you heard of Speculative Fiction? Most readers have not. In fact, if you were to look in Amazon’s categories, as wide-ranging as they are, you will not find speculative fiction anywhere. However, it is a type of fiction that encompasses many genres such as futuristic fiction, fantasy, historical fictions, and many others.
In its simplest elements, it is any fiction that “speculates” as to possibilities. These possibilities may be future, present, or past. For example, The Man in the High Castle is speculative fiction because it speculates on what may have happened if the Nazis had won WWII. Jurassic Park also is speculative fiction because it explores the possible results of bringing creatures that nature chose for extinction into the present. Anytime a work of fiction “speculates,” if it explores the “what if,” it can be considered speculative fiction.
Some writers, such as Margaret Atwood, have gone a bit further into their definition of what constitutes speculative fiction. She held that speculative fiction must be plausible. She felt it was fiction that “could happen.” In this view, science fiction that deals with Martians is not speculative because it could not happen as we now know for sure that Mars has no inhabitants. Fiction that speculates on humanity settling Mars and terraforming the planet would be speculative.
You might be tempted to ask: why is this type of genre necessary or important? It is necessary because some works of fiction do not fall into any other simple genre. Case in point is my series, Daniel’s Fork. I constructed a society that is ruled by lords, as Europe was centuries back. The people of Daniel’s Fork (a village) speak in simple, formal English. They live with technology that dates back to the colonial times.
Many of my readers have questioned why I chose to do that. A good friend, when she first read Hunter’s Snare (originally titled Daniel’s Fork) was very disturbed. She could not believe that Americans, with such a history and fierce love of democracy, would revert back to being ruled by lords in the future.
It is understandable that she was doubtful of the speculative nature of the novels. They depict a future society that has inherited knowledge of our present, a history of technology, but an inability to recreate the technology anew. In many ways, I was influenced by the world that Anne McCaffrey created in her Pern novels.
Some readers have observed that the series reads like historical fiction. Others feel it reads like fantasy. While I made a creative decision to use simplified, formal English, the novels are not historical fiction. In effect, they are futuristic!
Anyone who has read the series can see that while it’s set in the future, eighty years after a pandemic, it does not fit well into science fiction. It might be called dystopian by some, but it lacks the elements of the dystopian genre in that the society works rather well and is not disaffected.
Another hurdle in classifying the series is that each book also has elements of other genres. Fire Dance can be called a romance, but it fails to fit into any romantic subgenre. Hunter’s Snare is truly a mystery, but it too fails to fit into any subgenre of mystery. It is the tale of the new alpha male in town, coming to replace the dead lord, and having to catch a serial-killer who has run amok for years. Still, selling the novel as a mystery would target readers who expect cozy mysteries or police detective stories. They would not be happy.
Finally, there is the erotic side to the novels. There are some explicit sex scenes. This causes some promo sites to categorize the novel as “erotica,” and many sites refuse to promote it because of those few scenes. You can now understand the problem of genre categorization for some works of fiction.
In fact, my Daniel’s Fork series can only be categorized properly as “Speculative Fiction.” It is totally possible that a few years from now, a pandemic decimated our world, and a few survivors opted to re-form society by keeping that which would help them survive.
In the works! First book in the timeline.