Speculative Fiction.
What does that even mean? Fiction doesn't speculate. It can't wonder or dream.
Oh, but it can. It is as alive as you or me, with a beating heart and a thinking brain, and it is growing, always growing, right along with its creators. Speculative Fiction is the youngest, brightest, stuff you can read. It comes from the minds of authors who've shrugged away the chains and tethers of convention and advanced into the dark unknown. Sometimes the fiction fails and dies. I've read stuff by brilliant minds that just doesn't work. And that's okay. It's healthy. If stuff didn't die every so often, nothing else could appreciate being alive.
The cyber-punk genre used to be "Speculative." It came from the minds of authors who dreamed of the grit and grime of the not-so-distance future. It merged today's gutters with tomorrow's space stations.
And then a hundred others fell in step and made it a convention. Again, this isn’t bad. People embraced the look and feel of the genre, they explored it and made it their own. They established it. Now it's a niche of the sci-fi genre that is distinctly its own. Those stories are about the criminal underground of Jupiter's moons with their cybernetic limbs and super drugs. These stories are roped in; unchangeable.
The concept I'm talking about doesn't, to my knowledge, have a word. Fiction settles in. Look at Bram Stoker's Dracula. That was speculative fiction, once. It was unprecedented, unique, and the high-brow reader of the time considered it trash. (Authors: when the elite of society call your work garbage, but no one else does, take heart. It means you've done good.) From Dracula was born a new genre of horror. The Vampire Tale. Sure, vampires existed before Dracula. Stories of vampires can be traced well into the fourteenth century, but it was a piece of speculative fiction that made the idea of vampires real.
And it was the natural evolution of things for authors to explore this genre and make it their own. And in the process, the genre settled. Stories about vampires became trite: they were always about the sexy undead, and today everyone knows certain things about vampires. They can't step into the sunlight, they can't cross running water, they can't face the power of a cross, etc, ad nausium, and these rules shaped the genre. It became so popular that the whole idea of the sexy undead is now a cliché. So Dracula was a piece of speculative fiction, but Anne Rice's Interview With a Vampire was merely genre fiction, and if I were to write a novel about vampires, it would be pigeonholed as a cliché before I could even finish typing the query letter.
And yet, vampire fiction can still be speculative. The right author with the right idea can still breathe life into this old concept and make it dance for us, just as Bram Stoker once did. Don't believe me? Go pick up Salem's Lot by Stephen King.
King. There's a name that gets a lot of different reactions. But the fact is, like him or not, he writes one "genre" and one alone. Speculative Fiction. He's written westerns with magic in them, horror about clowns, he's taken the mundane and made it terrible, he's breathed life into the vampire, and everything he's published has been its own unique thing, its own organism. He even delved into Sword-And-Sorcery fantasy and wound its handle up until its springs were reloaded, and the whole thing moved again, alive.
Speculative fiction.
What does that even mean?
It means that the genres are alive, but dying, and that the authors of the future will make their own genres. That first shovel of dirt is the speculative fiction. Everything after that is reinforcing. Building on someone else's ideas. Adding cornerstones and cement and bricks until you have a finished building. We can always go into a building for shelter, but we can't call the building alive. A construction site, though? That's alive, and breathing, beyond any doubt.
That first shovel of dirt is what makes fiction grow. It's what kept people writing and reading long after the days of Dickens and Melville. It is the infinite depths, unexplored and dark, where we can always find new fiction. It is the stuff of dreams.
It is what makes the Coyote Wild.
I just finished wading through my very first slush pile. I feel so… so happy. And at the same time, I want to kill every writer that ever lived. A lot of the stuff I looked at was really good. A lot of it really wasn't. I feel a lot better about my own writing now, though. I'm on par with the best stuff I saw in the pile, and heads & shoulders over the stuff that was bad.
Beyond this point, I am talking about the meat of the book--its blood, bones and bile. If you haven't read it, don't go any further down, because I'll likely ruin the whole thing for you. Just take my word for it. The book is delicious: an absolute embodiment of Yum.
"The storm came up out of the southwest like a fiend, stalking its prey on legs of lightning."
That's the first sentence. It breaks every arbitrary rule of thumb I've seen about fiction. It's in a prologue (a thing generally shunned by writers) and it is describing the weather. But the weather is not a passive entity here--it is a fiend and it stalks and it has legs of lightning. The line is magic, and it sets up the very premise of the prologue--that certain characters on a certain ship are having a rough time at sea. We're shown that the storm is a hostile living thing, and it becomes the antagonist of the scene.
Beyond that, though, The Abarat is an odd place. The opening region--a dull slice of hell called Chickentown, which I more or less relate to, living in
Barker presents a brilliant sepia photograph of small town
Barker builds his world with characters. Even the most miniscule of people in The Abarat is full of life and color. Officer Branx, for instance, who gives the Johns chase. His flustered way of speaking builds his image in our minds immediately. And it doesn't just build him--it builds the entire dockside area. Subconsciously, seeing the infuriated police officer screaming, trying to remember John Mischief's name(s), we also are given an idea as to why he is so frustrated. The captain of the fishing boat that refuses to let his ship be commandeered; the mob of people milling to the dock to see what's wrong--Officer Branx's world is one of irritations and setbacks, and Barker shows this to us with a handful of well chosen, active sentences, and delicately crafted dialogue.
For every detail we're given, our mind creates a thousand more. But if we get caught up in reading details, we get bored quick. World building is an art. The sky above the Abarat is shown to us in vivid detail with a few quick words. Candy looks up and notices that it has a different night-sky than the one she's grown up seeing. That’s all it takes for each individual reader to generate their own sky for the Abarat. A great glowing cosmos appears before the minds eye, and all Barker did was show the significance of the detail, and relate it, subconsciously, to his reader.
Candy notices that the sky is different. That's something you and I would likely notice, and we don't have to be told how it's different in any detail. Our brain does it for us. We explore this sky through Candy's emotions in relation to it, not a description of stars and constellations. We're shown a new world with a handful of simple sentences.
Clive Barker would be a good author to study. He's full of tricks--and they aren't cheap ones. When Shape is reading the strange little nursery rhyme from one of Carrion's books, the rhyme seems a natural progression. Most poetry in novels falls flat, but not here. They're simple poems with a pulse that jumps out at you, and the one Shape is reading in Carrion's study is a decidedly grim one.
We're reminded that life does not wait for the end of poems, though. When Carrion interrupts the rhyme, clearing his throat, it jars Shape from the nostalgia of his childhood back to the present moment, and it jars the reader from the almost lulling rhythm of the poem, to a nightmare reality where the cold calculations of Christopher Carrion are law.
I don't have enough good things to say about this book, but I do have one complaint. However creatively Barker used it, the word "Fat" appeared as a descriptive word for how things looked or felt once too often.
If you don't go read Abarat--at least the first one--you're truly missing out.
