Why speculative fiction?
(taken from SLW’s Big Book Club speech, 2003) (see here for an LJ entry on this topic) Well, some writers deal with their personal problems by fictionalizing them, externalizing them. I’d contest that this is exactly what speculative fiction writers do, only with the world around them as well, not just the worlds within. How better to solve the planet’s ills than by swapping all the names and changing things for the better? It’s an attractive fantasy, and sometimes an informative one. As a species, we have thrived by planning ahead, by anticipating problems and solving them before or as they occur. This is what separates us from the apes. Speculative fiction seems to me to be the only genre that allows us to truly explore what might have been or what might yet come. Many of the events waiting for us–longevity, environmental collapse, cloning, water wars, artificial intelligence, global disease and more–have been explored by science fiction already, so the territory is not entirely un
