Part 6 in the series, A literary Search for Meaning by Dr Karen Hughes
It is interesting to note the parallels between contemporary speculative fiction and modern Western spirituality as emerging cultural fields. Both encompass an eclectic range of ideas and beliefs that proliferated at around the same time, both promote diversity and individual freedom of expression, and both could be attributed to a disillusionment with rationalist Western culture. Scholars who use the term “speculative fiction” as a broad, fuzzy-set cultural supercategory argue that it avoids the problems of genre borders, stratification and hierarchy, and opens the field to interact with other media, such as drama and music (Oziewicz, One Earth 9). Works in the field have been described as participating in a “new mode of literature”, constituting “a special sort of contemporary writing which makes use of fantastic and inventive elements to comment on, or speculate about, society, humanity, life, the cosmos, reality [a]nd any other topic under the general heading of philosophy” (Merril 3). Such works fall into an expanding and often blended range of genres—from traditional fantasy and science fiction (sci-fi) to more recent categories, such as urban fantasy, climate fiction (cli-fi), cyberpunk and Indigenous futurisms. Discussing speculative fiction as a cultural field and literary mode provides necessary flexibility by offering a fluid categorisation in which “every text participates in one or several genres … yet such participation never amounts to belonging” (Derrida 65). A text may participate if it “interrogates normative notions about reality and challenges the materialist complacency that nothing exists beyond the phenomenal world” (Oziewicz, “Speculative”). Whether it be as a scientific thought experiment or as a fantastical departure from accepted worldviews, such texts draw on the mystic collectivity of modern Western culture to awaken sensations of awe, wonder and dread, and thus have the potential to open the reader to a more enchanted vision of the world.
Fantasy and science fiction, the primary genres of speculative fiction, have been evolving into their current forms for centuries. Many scholars credit J. R. R. Tolkien with creating the modern fantasy genre, or at least propelling it into the mainstream, describing Tolkien’s popular novels The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954–55) as “the standard by which all of the others are judged” (Sullivan 287). While Tolkien certainly legitimised the genre in its modern form, the roots of fantastic fiction stretch much further back, all the way to mythological tales such as The Epic of Gilgamesh from ancient Mesopotamia and the Old English epic poem Beowulf, as well as to historical folk and fairy tales from around the world. Early fantasists such as George MacDonald, William Morris, and Lord Dunsany drew on this rich heritage, distinguishing their fantastic stories from the earlier tales by placing an emphasis on the imaginative and aesthetic nature of their works rather than on the truth of the source material or the moral effect of the tale. Tolkien and his peers, including C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams, built on this foundation. In 1938, Tolkien published “Mythopoeia”, taking his title from the ancient Greek word μυθοποιία, meaning “myth-making”. The poem was prompted by a walk with Lewis and Hugo Dyson, during which they began talking about “metaphor and myth” and were “interrupted by a rush of wind which came so suddenly on the still, warm evening and sent so many leaves pattering down that we thought it was raining. We all held our breath … appreciating the ecstasy of such a thing” (Lewis, Yours, Jack 23). Both Tolkien and Lewis infused their work with mystical perceptions of the natural world, as well as elements of folklore and myth, to create what is now called mythopoeic fantasy. Tolkien had high aspirations for his work, arguing that “fantastic stories lead toward a genuine understanding of the conditions of existence” and remarking, “Small wonder that spell means both a story told, and a formula of power over living men” (Tree and Leaf 35). He viewed fantasy as the most potent form of art, best left to “true literature” (51) and wrote about it in mystical terms. According to Tolkien, fantasy, especially a “serious tale of Faerie”, offered marvels and enrichment to its readers— providing a “piercing glimpse of joy” that “lets a gleam come through” (69).
While Tolkien and Lewis were developing their works of mythopoeic fantasy, anglophone science fiction was entering what some critics call “The Golden Age”. This was a period of genre magazine science fiction, led by John W. Campbell and defined by mostly white male writers. Much of this work is now seen as banal and sexist, but some critics still argue it was “a peak in sf’s development” (Nicholls and Ashley). Scholars use the phrase “sense of wonder” to describe the feeling readers found in these works. This feeling was, and still is, science fiction’s “highest aspiration”. It comes from “a sudden opening of a closed door in the reader’s mind” and is “created by the writer putting the readers in a position from which they can glimpse for themselves, with no further auctorial aid, a scheme of things where mankind is seen in a new perspective” (Nicholls and Robu). The New Wave revolution of the 1960s and 1970s went some way towards raising the literary profile of science fiction, with novels such as A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. (1959) and Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein (1961) examining the “tension between spiritual and secular values” (Latham 160). As traditional religious institutions declined and the individualistic philosophies of the New Age movement gained momentum, there was an intellectual outpouring of speculative short stories and novels during which writers produced experimental and diverse works with a focus on inner space rather than the heroic conquering of external worlds (Ballard, “Which Way”). This softening of genre boundaries opened the way for speculative fiction to emerge as an expansive umbrella term, encompassing both fantasy and science fiction as well as the blending and offshoots of those two primary genres.
As science fiction evolved, mythopoeic fantasy remained the stock standard of the fantasy genre, with many Tolkien imitators churning out epic narratives in nostalgic romantic settings, often drawing on medieval and Celtic traditions. Scholars such as Oziewicz and Partridge argue that the best works in this genre promote a holistic and hopeful vision of the future, even while reimagining the past. Diana Waggoner suggests that mythopoeic fantasy conveys a “feeling of the supernatural, the mystical, and the spiritual” seeking to provide readers with “a new vision … of ordinary reality [which] restores our own world to us” enriched with “an emotional experience of harmony and reunification” (Oziewicz, One Earth 82). Charles de Lint captured this feeling in 1984 when he wrote Moonheart, a work that is considered to be one of the first to incorporate the mythic tropes of fantasy into a contemporary urban setting. De Lint’s intrusion fantasy gave the reader mythical creatures and glimpses of the supernatural in an otherwise realistic depiction of 1980s Ottawa, inspiring a range of associated subgenres, including urban fantasy, paranormal romance, and mythpunk (Nicholls, “Mythology”). De Lint called his work a “romance”, identifying with the hope and beauty of the Romantic tradition and advocating for the power of stories to change the world (Windling, “Charles de Lint”). Like earlier mythopoeic writers, he was influenced by folklore, myth, fairy tale, song and poetry but, instead of basing his narrative in an imagined medieval setting, he fused ancient Celtic and Indigenous Canadian traditions to create new myths about the modern world.
At the same time, a darker style of romance was emerging in the other genres. Cyberpunk was becoming a popular form of science fiction, inspired by William Gibson’s influential novel Neuromancer (1986), which employed technology and post-human ideas to explore social discontent. The remaking of humanity in Neuromancer has been described by Norman Spinrad as “a fusion of romantic impulse with science and technology” (Nicholls and Robu). Like de Lint’s romantic mythic fantasy, Gibson’s novel offers hope, wonder and beauty, even if his premise seems bleak. In Neuromancer, Romantic ideals such as self-awareness and personal evolution are paramount, and it is possible to experience a paradigm shift in consciousness and transcend the human condition. Ironically, Wintermute, an AI hardwired to transcend its programmed limits, is the only character who understands this and consequently the only character capable of dissolving the rigid boundaries of the self to become something greater:
“I’m the matrix, Case.”
Case laughed. “Where’s that get you?”
“Nowhere. Everywhere. I’m the sum total of the works, the whole show.”
… “So what’s the score? How are things different? You running the world now?
You God?” (Neuromancer 296)
Disenchantment surfaces again in the dystopian novels of the 1990s and 2000s, cynical and dark, depicting a hopeless world. Gritty novels such as The Children of Men by P. D. James (1992), Blindness by José Saramago (1995), Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005), and The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006) offer brutal visions of a future devoid of possibility. In 1989, Bruce Sterling suggested the term “slipstream” to describe the crossover between speculative fiction and mainstream fiction, describing it as “a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility”. Various writers and scholars, including Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro, have adopted the term, often as a value signal to distinguish their “literary” work from “inferior” genre fiction, but categorising a work as slipstream based solely on literary quality and author pretensions would seem to take the term beyond Sterling’s original definition. By the new millennium, the threat of climate change and the destructive force of the Anthropocene (Crutzen 23) pervaded everything, and speculative writers responded with climate fiction (cli-fi), an emerging dystopian subgenre marked by a melancholy “Neo-Romantic fascination with how a place—this place, our place—becomes a ruin” (Canavan 213). Speculative fiction was no longer seen as “fantastic”. Instead, it had become what science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson calls “the realism of our times” (Robinson). Gregory Benford’s Timescape (1980) foreshadowed this, while Dyschronia by Jennifer Mills (2018) is a more recent work with the same theme. Dyschronia offers no relief for the characters or the reader. All are swept along by fate, corporate control and environmental disaster. Ted Chiang takes a similar approach in “Exhalation” (2019), a short story in which a species is dying out, technology will not save it, and the characters have no choice but to make the best of it. While these works appear to operate as a traditional dystopian warning of a depressing and meaningless future, some scholars suggest that stories like “Exhalation” are actually about resilience and hope, “daring us to find philosophical or aesthetic consolation in the face of the inevitability of our own species extinction” (Canavan 215).
Many speculative fiction writers are moving beyond the dystopian narrative to imagine the next stage of human evolution. Writers of the new weird, a horror subgenre that combines modern street culture with ancient mythology (Weinstock 184), do this by blending fantasy and science fiction to imagine optimistic futures that are more metaphorical than literal. Corey Doctorow’s Walkaway (2017) features transhumans in a post-scarcity society and examines how a society suffering from the unethical use of new technologies might learn from its mistakes and be transformed. Jeff Vandermeer, in Southern Reach Trilogy (2017), Borne (2017), and Dead Astronauts (2019), presents the environment as the victor and explores how humanity must adjust and evolve beyond capitalism and the Anthropocene. Works of visionary/metaphysical and quantum speculative fiction, such as Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” (1998) (Arrival 109–172) and Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter (2016), combine the mystical and the spiritual with new Western scientific theories to explore such themes as multidimensionality, non-linear time, parallel worlds and the existence of the soul. First Nations writers address similar themes, drawing on their heritage and distinct lifeways to create works that have been described as “Indigenous futurisms”, a term originally coined by Anishinaabe cultural critic and scholar Grace Dillon in 2012 and adopted by such writers as Australia’s Ambelin Kwaymullina. From a more political perspective, American writer, scholar, and activist Walidah Imarisha has started her own visionary fiction movement, which she describes as “radical science fiction”. The movement “uses sci-fi and fantasy to imagine not a dystopian future, but a better world—without poverty, prisons and inequality. It’s more than a literary genre; it’s a movement of people of color working to create the change they write about” (Glover Blackwell). There are also many First Nations writers, including Australians Alexis Wright and Sam Watson, who use mythic and seemingly fantastic themes to produce mainstream or “literary” works depicting their living cultures. It is important to note that such works are usually not considered to be mythic fantasy by their authors, even though they might appear that way to a non-Indigenous reader (Leane). No matter how these works are described, their presentation of alternative mythologies as an accepted worldview and the incorporation of traditional myths into modern narratives is a useful model for writers of contemporary mythopoeic fiction.
Speculative fiction is an important part of the vast occulture available to the modern spiritual seeker (Partridge, Re-Enchantment 1: 138). As Graham Harvey observes in relation to the effect of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and other speculative works on Australian paganism:
Fantasy re-enchants the world for many people, allowing them to talk of elves, goblins, dragons, talking trees, and magic. It also encourages contemplation of different ways of relating to the world … It counters the rationality of modernity which denigrates the wisdoms of the body and subjectivity. Alongside future fiction, the genre explores new and archaic understandings of the world, and of ritual and myth, and attempts to find alternative ways of relating technology to the needs of today. (Listening 220)
Writers of speculative fiction are re-enchanting the mundane world by subverting materialist worldviews, encouraging diverse voices, creating new myths for humanity, and offering us a “sense of wonder” that might, if we are lucky, enable us to glimpse a richer and more meaningful reality.
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