On Books

Speculative Literature?
by Norman Spinrad

It is easy enough to define speculative fiction as fiction that speculates in the imaginary possible within the known rules of mass and energy. But what makes some fiction literature and other fiction not?

Fiction that has continually been read for long enough? Fiction that has been declared as literature by critics who declare they are important enough to say so, at least by themselves? Such as me? After all, I’ve been a critic of speculative fiction for half a century.

Well, I was more recently commissioned to give it a try by the French publisher Belles Lettres. What would “Belles Lettres” mean in English?

Hard to translate simply. The self declared name of the publisher means what they themselves have been publishing for one hundred years is Literature, as far as they are concerned.

For their hundredth birthday, they were going to print a book entitled “Les Futures des Belles Lettres” meaning three things—the name of the publisher, its future a century from now, and the future of literature itself.

And the story I wrote for this was “Belles Lettres Ad Astra,” meaning that the central literature of the future would have to be speculative fiction and why. That was also the title when it was published in English. Was what I wrote speculative literature? That was what I was told to write, the future of literature itself as speculative literature, as the future of literature. “Belles Lettres” the French publisher believed I did it, and Analog published it in English.

Time will tell—that is, the critics will tell a hundred years from now. If there are critics a hundred years from now. If there is literature a hundred years from now. If there are homo sapians a hundred years from now.

¿Quien sabe?

But the question is whether speculative literature still exists now, and will it survive what is now being published as genre SF? Genre fiction, and arguably all fiction, must have a plot for there to be a story at all. Add one or more positive characters that the reader identifies with, and one or more characters that the reader and the positive characters oppose. Good guys versus bad guys.

The simple plot of a simple story, but not necessarily “literature.” The classical Greeks took it further. A comedy was not necessarily funny, but a story in which a good character triumphs. And tragedy is a story in which the hero fails, as often as not due to a personal moral failure.

That, arguably, when gracefully written—be it classical Greek plays, or Frankenstein, or many of the songs of Bob Dylan, or Lawrence of Arabia, or the original story of Dune—is literature.

But while literature needs a plot, even a well-written and satisfying story is not necessarily literature.

I was once talked into teaching how to write novels in two weeks. The only way I could see how to do it was musical. Specifically, Bach’s fugues, in which multiple musical lines eventually come together in a final epiphany. I drew this on a blackboard and told the writers that this should be the ideal structure of the novel. Multiple lines of character, plot, morality, love and/or hate, and so forth that join together in an epiphany.

With the talent to write this, as Bach had with musical talent—that would be literature.

This is more or less why published genre series novels can almost never be literature. Each novel in a genre series, however well written, by definition cannot end in an epiphany.

The Old Testament is a series of literary novels usually ending in their own epiphanies, but the New Testament is a single literary novel ending in the death of Jesus and his rise from the grave.

Which is not to say that every time a writer tries to write a good literary novel he will succeed, or even that a novelist who has already succeeded writing one or more will succeed the next time. The greatest baseball hitters of all time could not even get a lifetime batting average of .400 percent, meaning they knew they would fail more than half the time.

And no speculative novelist who tries to write satisfying speculative literature is necessarily going to succeed. But any novelist who doesn’t try and isn’t encouraged to try, let alone is discouraged to try by the SF genre publishing industry, is unlikely to succeed—and that is what is now happening.

The price of liberty may be taking care of business, but the price of putting business first can be the cost of artistic liberty. Follow the bottom line. The SF genre publishers do, as does Amazon, and, alas, SFWA.

The last time I had to use Amazon to find novels to write about here, meaning novels that I might like to read myself, Amazon was offering about fifty thousand “SF” titles, broken down into various subgenres: hard SF, adventure SF, fantastic SF, and oh yes, “free-standing SF novels.”

Meaning everything else is series SF in their various other SF subcategories, with the number of novels of each book in the series announced.

Why does Amazon do this? Because that’s what sells. Why do novel series dominate the SF publishing industry? Because that is what sells on Amazon, Why do both businesses do this? Because it’s what sells best, of course. And it’s what can be easiest and cheapest to sell through SF fandom.

Alas, SFWA, once the Science Fiction Writers of America—a semi-union for the business well-being of its members, to be sure, but also for the bettering of the literature—has now descended to becoming SFWA Incorporated, with membership of just about anything it can grab under the SFWA logo—fantasy, horror, comics, TV, whatever it can sell to SF fandom.

However, there are still some lone singular writers who are taking their chosen speculative fiction literature seriously, for the ding an sich, sure to be found in the fifty-thousand-book haystack if you look hard enough. Which is what I have to do, like it or not—which I don’t, but I keep doing it because while I don’t hit .360, sooner or later I seem to hit maybe .150. Which makes it worthwhile when I do, such as these three novels:

The Downloaded, by Robert J. Sawyer, The Object, by Joshua T. Calvert, and Carpathians, by Paul Dixon.

It may or may not be significant that the Canadian author Robert J. Sawyer’s latest novel, The Downloaded, was published by a Canadian publisher rather than a major American genre SF publisher. But it does seem significant that it was not released by a U.S. genre SF publisher seeing that Sawyer was a multiple Hugo and Nebula winner and a past president of SFWA, a significant member of the speculative fiction literary tribe from back when there was such a thing.

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There is literary speculative fiction that not only stays within the known scientific reality of mass and energy but is also science fiction, in that it is centered around scientific speculations and how they relate to cultural, moral, and personal matters. This sort of speculative novel, even when it is literarily successful, seldom becomes a best seller or achieves acclaimed general literary stature, because to fully enjoy and understand it requires a certain level of reader sophistication.

And while I have already written that the scientific certainty of life outside our planet and intelligent life in the Universe will soon inevitably lift such literature front and center, AI as electronic beings and notions of scientific downloading of consciousness are already common in science fiction, literary or not.

In The Downloaded, convicted murderers have their bodies frozen into hibernation and their minds downloaded into computers so their consciousnesses can serve out their legal sentences, along with a team of astronauts preparing for a long interstellar voyage.

Hard science fiction. That hibernation and reawakening the body is possible within the known rules of mass and energy. And given the reality of AIs these days, one might consider that consciousnesses could be uploaded and then downloaded.

But the multiple disasters that are all too common in speculative fiction these days, and all too possible in current future realities, have laid waste to the Earth to the point that when these limited groups of murderers and astronauts are downloaded from hibernation and electronic consciousness, they seem to be all that is left of the human race.

So while The Downloaded may even be hard science fiction, it is also literary speculative fiction, centered on how these very different psychic, social, and moral characters do or don’t manage to keep the last humans from killing each other and finish the job.

So this is also literature in the sense of comedy and tragedy, because it deals with the ultimate moral question, whether what is left of the human race deserves to survive at all.

Robert Sawyer first says that we probably don’t, but then hedges it when his murderers and astronauts find some Mennonites that have survived and are pictured as simple, but morally worthwhile.

But then he seems to turn it about again, when descendants of humans arrive from Mars who are perhaps morally superior, but also ruthless. They first do not want to allow the last of the humans to come to Mars because the human race deserves extinction, but then decide to make the Mennonites an exception. Who then decide not to leave their home.

So Robert Sawyer goes back and forth between tragedy and comedy, asking the ultimate moral question, but not really answering it. Perhaps the unanswered question makes The Downloaded literary speculative fiction

Very few speculative fiction novels finish the plot more or less satisfactorily, but leave the moral question for the reader to consider.

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The Object, by Joshua T. Calvert, is a novel that is as hard as science fiction can possibly get all the way through, and yet is much more.

The novel seems to be set in the near future, and yet somehow in a sightly alternate past.

The Object is something that has been found moving toward our Solar System from somewhere unknown and moving at a speed that will cause it to arrive in four years. When it gets past Pluto it changes course like a spaceship to head straight for Saturn. When it somehow passes around or through Saturn, it embarks upon a Martian orbit.

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This is the four-year story of NASA finding the Object, its astronaut team going to it, and what they find and do there.

The heroine and third person is Melody, an astronaut who never quite got into space due to some complex NASA politics, and who wrote a best-selling book about theoretical intelligent life in space while still a member of NASA high on the totem pole. She was the first to see the Object as it was approaching our Solar System. She insisted that it had to be a first contact alien spaceship. NASA was skeptical, but when the Object passed around or through Saturn and changed orbit to Mars, NASA had to agree that it was an alien spaceship and could not help but send a ship to intercept its Martian orbit and make Earth’s first contact with aliens.

Melody ultimately becomes the captain of the spacecraft NASA sends to the Object in its Martian orbit, via more complex NASA politics. The mission eventually gets us there, but with more than one astronaut killed on the way. And the rest of the story is about what they find.

That is the story, that is the plot. But Calvert’s novel is much more—hard science fiction, political speculative fiction, economic speculative fiction, fascinating speculative science, personal sexual and platonic relationships. And, while Melody is not one of them, some important positive characters die, and even she makes some bad choices.

What the Object turns out to be is something unexpectively unique that answers Enrico Fermi’s question of why, with so many Solar Systems in the Universe, no alien civilization has ever made contact with us.

And all this takes four years to happen because there is no faster than light rubber science here. From the time Melody first sees the Object, the Object takes years to get to its orbit around Mars, and something like two years for the NASA spacecraft to get there.

At the very least this is true ultimately hard speculative science fiction. Maybe it is even too-technological fiction, slowed down by the details, but on the other hand telling what it would actually be like for a handful of people living together in something less than the size of a large bus.

Certainly not mere genre SF. And probably never even a Hugo or Nebula candidate, because such a novel needs especially sophisticated readers to fully enjoy it.

And what first seems to be a fantasy element that doesn’t belong in Calvert’s hard science fiction reality turns out to be central at the end—lucid dreaming.

The novel actually opens in Melody’s lucid dream, and she can call up lucid dreams to help her when she wants them to, or sometimes does not. She lives in such alternate realities throughout. And her grandmother taught her how to do this.

Actually, calling this “lucid dreaming” is not quite right, though Calvert otherwise gets it quite right. The original Australians call it the walkabout in their dreamtime, their own dreams and possibly of others, and they regard both awake and the walkabout as “real” realities.

Probably more readers here than not might regard this as a fantasy element that does not belong in a novel like this, let alone turn out to be central. But my partner Dona and I did some research about “lucid dreaming” for an article about consciousness and learned that certain Australian cultures believe that they do live in their dreamtime as well as their awake times. And we tried it a little ourselves and it sometimes worked.

And at the end of The Object it becomes central to what the Object is timewise and what it actually is and the mistakes that Melody makes. If you read the novel to the end you will see that it does make both hard science fiction and speculative literary sense.

However, Calvert does go beyond his hard literary ending to drag out a happy ending, just as Sawyer does in The Downloaded. I have often said that novelists in general should not leave the reader feeling worse after having read the story. But while genre fiction and its publishing industry have reason not to finish the story without a happy ending, on second thought, the classic Greeks maybe knew better. Their tragedies did okay in the box office, and so do most of the tragedies of Shakespeare even now.

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Carpathians, by Paul Dixon, is also centered around a mysterious alien object in a future in which no living alien cultures have been discovered, but that’s where the similarity to The Object ends.

Carpathians takes place a few thousand years in the future in a galactic human culture where no living alien culture has been found, but about a dozen planets have been found whose cultures have been destroyed by their bygone inhabitants, mostly by nuclear wars.

But other planets have also been found, with complex living biospheres. These planets are economically valuable for colonizing, as are the medicines and other chemicals that can be created from their biospheres, and three main companies, plus minor ones, are competing for the spoils.

This sometimes results in warfare, but there are certain sort of semi-legal rules, not really interplanetary law, but following the capitalistic understandings of the business bottom line. And this novel rides into the capitalistic competition with knowingly sophisticated reality.

Carpathians reads like our twenty-first century reality extrapolated to its logical future extreme but somehow all too knowingly familiar economically, capitalistically, morally, politically, ironically, and so forth. Written by a writer openly engagé as the French put it, but not flatly utopian or dystopian.

The several main characters are four-dimensionally real, with loves, hates, fears, evils, and heroics. Then, too, Dixon is very real indeed with the battles and action, with the geography and so forth, and with technologies up to a point.

Carpathians is true literary speculative fiction to the max. Carpathians, it might be said, is a great literary speculative fiction novel, as good as any such thing that I have read for a long time.

However . . .

However, it might be argued that it is not really true speculative fiction, because it is not written without denying the known laws of mass and energy. But it could not have been written at all without denying the speed of light barrier.

But of course science fiction writers have done this, knowingly or not, from the beginning. Think of the decades of great and not so great SF novels and stories that could never have been written without doing it. It’s fair to say that breaking the known laws of mass and energy has always been central to speculative fiction. Even novelists who call and consider themselves hard science fiction writers have done it.

Have had to do it, knowingly or not. “Rubber science,” I have called it with a shrug and a wink of the eye.

But without it, I am now coming to realize that full speculative fiction as literature cannot really live and prosper and evolve. And future literature cannot be complete without speculative fiction.

Call it fantasy in speculative fiction clothing if you must, it is still speculative fiction in literary terms—the only possible fiction of the future, and after all science has now revealed of what the Universe really is.

Trillions of galaxies with trillions of solar systems in each one. And can that really be the ultimate reality? Is our Universe not only more likely to be but one of many bubble universes in . . . in what? And even that is ultimately what?

How can anything at all possibly exist without being in some context? Even if there might be a God who created not merely our universe, but all universes, how can that God exist without a context?

How can there be something instead of nothing?

And yet the one thing we all know, as any conscious being anywhere and anywhen must know, is that it does.

And as long as science or religion cannot answer that, call it what you will, there will always be speculative literature.

 

Copyright © 2025 Norman Spinrad