This Is Us
We’re All Speculative Fiction Writers Now
The power is in asking what if, what if, and what if again
If 2020 has had a genre, it’s been speculative fiction. We have all become future-casters. We’ve gazed at the maps, done back-of-the-envelope calculations, and read the arcs of infection charts. Suddenly, we speak math as our native tongue. To experience 2020 in real time has been like watching a bad flip-book in which each page comes from a different narrative. We’ve had an election narrative, a wildfire narrative, a pandemic narrative, an uprising narrative, a coup narrative. We’ve been winning. We’ve been losing. We’ve had no idea.
Each day peeled a layer from the previous one, revealed it as a lie, a provisional hypothesis that had to be discarded in favor of a different model, one that better fit the evidence. Now, we want desperately to be at the end— the final unmasking that reveals the ultimate answer. We want good to be rewarded, evil to be punished, and the struggle to be over.
But speculative fiction is a genre of narrative with rules, and those rules make it hard to understand where we’ve been and where we’re headed. Speculative fiction wants to organize around a central question; it wants to exclude the sticky, tricky anomalies in its threads; and it wants to move toward…
