“People who view fantasy as second rate or childish are usually people who don’t read or understand it. I like to tell them that good fantasy is social commentary combined with good storytelling – Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, the Oz stories and so many others. Sure, the stories take place in an imaginary world. But those worlds mirror our own and tell us things about ourselves that need to be said and understood. I also like to tell them how often other forms of literature use fantasy as the bedrock of their own stories. Fantasy transcends its own form in wider scope than any other type of writing. So those who don’t like it probably haven’t found the right story or storyteller and need to give it another shot.” – Q& A with Terry Brooks.

So I’m asking myself, when did I understand fiction could function as philosophical literature? Since I cannot point to a certain event or realization, I would have to say it was something that came to me over time, like the tide coming in slowly so that you do not realize it’s arrival until your shit is all wet.

By speculative fiction I mean fiction with settings or themes which differ from what is found in our own world and is presented with the intentional purpose of considering the results of the differences. This can include, but is not limited to, science fiction, horror, fantasy, and the type of hero fiction most commonly associated with comic books

It is in these stories authors often remove or change that which is most inherent to our familiar society. In science fiction, the setting is often space, or another planet. In fantasy, religion and the gods behind it frequently compose the central change. In horror, we might deal with a broken civilization due to the consequences of a braaaiin eating zombie outbreak.

While its true that the real reason I started writing a fantasy novel is because I was a fifteen year old nerd, that has changed a little over time. I began to see that the fantasy setting was really the best medium to explore some philosophical, religious, and historical ideas that interested me. I saw I could isolate these things in a vacuum that either highlighted or tore down their most fundamental aspects so as to explore the theoretical repercussions on people and community.

For example: I wondered how interesting it could it be to explore an information Singularity as an inverse of the creation story told by the 10 emanations of the Sephirot? I liked the idea so much it became a central plot line in the book. The main character, Kabladan, is working to bring a sort of information Singularity to his world, while some of his opponents adhere to the idea that some knowledge is sinful. (Heard that old yarn that says original sin came when we ate from the Tree of Knowledge?)

Believe me, I didn’t plan it that way–I’m not that smart. But while writing I began to see the place for such thoughts which lent heavily to plot and character development. Also I began to explore other works that did similar things, trying to see how these authors had mastered the symbiosis between story-telling and theoretical considerations.

In Harry Turtledove’s Darkness series he recreates a world that is much like our own and tells a story that is similar to the general plots of WWI and WWII. He replaces technology with magic and follows the view points of many characters from various classes of society. Interesting to me is the way that Turtledove uses magic as a field of study. It is more along the lines of a science, which works well when his mage characters begin to delve into the magic which is nuclear technology in our world.

Another story I just recently picked up, Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, turned out to be much more than juvenile fiction. His first book explores a world where the Protestant Reformation never took place and the series has deep ties to John Milton’s Paradise Lost, arguably one of the greatest pieces of literature written in the English language.

Not only is it entertaining for us to change the things most static in our lives out and see how they would play out, it’s also a way to contemplate on our current situation and think about things abstractly. Speculative fiction is the original life simulation experiment–before Will Wright. In some cases, as we travel forward through time, that which was science fiction becomes reality and the value of having previously explored these topics becomes invaluable. How important will Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics be in the future?

The types of human beings that are most comfortable exploring new ideas and not clinging to stability are often the most interesting and trail blazing types of people. Exploring theoretical  worlds where the things that are the most concrete in our lives are changed, promotes the type of malleable thinking that needs to accompany important decisions.

Because, don’t we hope that the folks who build the Predator drones remember the Skynet I’m thinking of.