Speculative what?

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.