Imagination vs Speculation
Fiction has two modes: the imaginative and the speculative. The mode that has to do with pure, unbridled invention and the mode that tries to think logically about rules and consequences. So the imaginative parts of Lord of the Rings have to do with the whole-cloth contrivance of things that don’t exist: ents, hobbits, dwarves. The speculative parts have to do with how, given the rules of Tolkien’s universe, his characters might behave. What would it take for a homebody hobbit to leave home? This principle goes for stories that lack ‘fantastic’ elements as well. The imaginative part of Huckleberry Finn is Huck and Jim and their life circumstances. The speculative part is what it might take for Huck and Jim to bond and run away. Imagination is Jim finding a dead body. Speculation is Jim preventing Huck from seeing it.
(That good speculation requires a good imagination is a given. But it is still different, for my purposes, from the act of creating something from nothing.)
In order for speculation to be concerned with what might happen though, it has to be concerned with what is. Every act of speculation speaks as much about what rules a writer thinks govern a fictional world as it does about how those rules might manifest. And if a writer is trying to speculate about how reality could go, as many writers are, then they are proposing hypotheses about the way reality is. In a third season storyline of The Wire, for example, the show imagines that Baltimore establishes a zone for the legal use and exchange of drugs. It then speculates how the government, police, and citizens would react—revealing general principles about what motivates these people and why.
But fiction is weird. Fiction usually isn’t concerned with either a fictional reality or a real reality—but both, simultaneously. So in a satirical movie like Election, the story is at once attempting to distill a supposedly real phenomenon (what happens when unscrupulous people butt up against cowards and innocents) and be consistent within a necessarily heightened movie reality. Which means that fiction, in order to feel ‘correct,’ has to scan according to both realities. If you don’t think that automatons of ambition exist, or you don’t think that they succeed in the end, or you think using Tracy Flick to depict that kind of person puts unrepresentative blame on the heads of teenage girls—the speculation doesn’t track for you. On the other hand, based on what the movie establishes about Tracy Flick, we would also consider it ‘illogical’ or bad speculation if she suddenly behaved selflessly.
Interestingly, the more metaphorical or satirical a work is—in other words, the more it is attempting to have meaning—the more, I would argue, it becomes concerned with ‘real’ reality. The more, that is, its implications about reality affect whether or not it works. If I’m watching Transformers, it doesn’t actually matter that much whether it makes sense that a giant alien robot would pal around with a teenage kid. Because Transformers isn’t trying to claim much about reality.* But if I’m watching a production of Rhinoceros, it sure as hell matters whether I think fascistic impulses exist, or whether they colonize people in the absurd, virulent way Rhinoceros depicts. It matters less whether Rhinoceros establishes complicated rules for its fictional world. Though it should be (and is) self-consistent.
*(Insofar as Transformers is trying to distill a reality, one might claim it is trying to distill what a certain attitude or fantasy looks like. So it is consistent with the reality of the terms of that fantasy—cars, heroism, hot girls— rather than whether or not that fantasy is especially likely to happen. “If I were trying to make the perfect heterosexual boy fantasy movie, what would I include? In other words, what is the perfect heterosexual boy fantasy movie? What defines a heterosexual boy?” In a thoughtless execution of the het boy fantasy genre—XXX? Crank? I don’t know—this kind of consistency would matter even less.)
What am I getting at? I want to set aside the definition of ‘speculative fiction’ that acts as a euphemism for science fiction. And I want to examine what makes good or bad speculative fiction, and what counts as ‘speculative fiction’ in the first place. Right now, the terms ‘science fiction’ and ‘speculative fiction’ are a confusing conflation of three different genres:
1. Fantasy with tech or futuristic trappings. Star Wars, Transformers.
2. Speculation about the consequences of a scenario that doesn’t exist (a technological innovation, a social innovation, a crazy circumstance). Looper, A Handmaid’s Tale, Asimov, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Contact.
3. A technology or a fantastic setting as a metaphor for a real world phenomenon. The Forever War, Metamorphosis, Frankenstein, Xenogenesis.
There are good and bad executions of all of these genres. And of course they tend to overlap. But in order to talk about whether a given work is failing or succeeding, we have to talk about which realities the works are trying to make claims about (or take as a given), and therefore whether or not the claims are accurate or convincingly depicted.
The first category mostly only needs to scan according to its fictional reality. When this kind of story makes a claim about real reality, it usually tends to be a claim about human emotion or human values (what is tragic, what is virtuous, what is cool). The questions you ask about Star Wars are things like “Is this fun?” or “Does it make sense that Luke is sad here?” The last category, in turn, mostly needs to scan according to its real reality. Something like Xenogenesis makes you ask questions like “Is this effectively evoking the conflicted, shell-shocked experience of cultural assimilation?” Frankenstein is more of a story about hubris rather than a story primarily about the actual consequences of reanimating the dead. Stories in this category can be tremendously complex on the narrative level, and care about being consistent and exciting on that level, but the speculation part tends to exist primarily in the service of a concept rather than itself.
I think of it this way: speculation in service of a concept will be closed, rather than open. The Wire’s Hamsterdam storyline is open because there was no way it really had to go, other than the way that the writers thought logically sprang from the state of Baltimore’s citizens and civic institutions. But something like District 9 is trying to convey a pre-established position about the mechanics of prejudice and othering. District 9 is more effective if its narrative logic is sound, but there was also no way District 9’s plot was going to depict any fallout from alien contact other than xenophobia. Top-down rather than bottom-up storytelling. Evidence-based versus theory-based. This isn’t inherently a good or bad thing, for the record, just a distinct difference in genre. In metaphorical stories, the logic of something is considered more or less known to the author; the problem is how to get other people to internalize the logic.
True speculative fiction (category 2) and true narrative fiction (category 1) seem to resemble each other more than they do metaphorical fiction (category 3) because they both take the bottom-up approach. What is something like a sitcom (situational comedy) other than putting characters in a scenario and asking what will happen? Beyond approach, what Friends and Star Wars and Game of Thrones and Isaac Asimov all have in common is a curious paucity of thematic content (that is: it’s difficult to say what they are “about”), but not in a bad way. Extremely hard speculation like The Wire tends to not be terribly thematic because theme requires a certain amount of artistic control that epistemically honest speculation doesn’t lend itself to. When works of hard speculation are thematic, and when they’re good, they seem to mostly lend themselves towards themes about the complexity of systems. Which makes perfect sense. Hard speculation is also different from “hard science fiction” that mostly applies its hardness to its setting and not to its narrative. Only occasionally, like in things like The Silmarillion, does a hard worldbuilding story understand that its worldbuilding is the story and put the focus there accordingly.
All this said, most works of speculation are in-between things. Things like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Brazil or Her or Children of Men or Contact or Snowpiercer. Eternal Sunshine is fairly honest speculation about how people would use a memory-altering technology, but the only reason the story proposes that technology is to explore things about romantic relationships. Most stories, in other words, choose their speculation in a thematically pointed way, even if they’re not transparently allegorical.
The thing I want to figure out is why the way that something like Eternal Sunshine speculates thematically is so much better than the way that something like Her does, despite the fact that they have similar subject matter and approach. While both pure narrative and pure metaphor and pure speculation can all, to a certain extent, get away with ignoring one or both of the above, blended works seem to ignore the other categories at their peril. The absolute worst executions I can think of are the metaphorical stories that are undermined by a refusal to speculate. Stories that have such a poor understanding of consequences or such a lack of curiosity about them that it ruins the metaphorical and literary power of the reality they are trying to convey (see: what it means for a work of art to take itself seriously). A good metaphor will not simplify reality, but will open it up, and this is impossible to do without a good understanding of what reality is (or a respect for the fact that understanding reality is overwhelmingly difficult).
Works like Her and Snowpiercer seem weak to me because their artistic reach extends their grasp, but in a lazy way rather than a forgivably ambitious way. They imagine overly wholesale fictional circumstances: all the people fall in love with their computers, all of society is trapped on this train. These are huge statements about the pervasiveness of both loneliness and the stratification of society, yet neither of them are convincing on the individual character or narrative level, and so their huge claims fall flat. Theodore mostly seems to be lonely because he’s an almost inhumanly stunted person. I found myself wishing the movie were just a simple story about an individual in the real world that falls for a catfisher. Similarly, I felt that Snowpiercer would almost be more convincing as a story set in an actually oppressively stratified country. Those “realistic” stories would be less symbolic, but far richer. Although movies like The Matrix and Children of Men also have overly ambitious speculative conceits, both put considerable effort towards the complexity and excitingness of their narratives and also make much smaller claims about reality. The Matrix is a metaphor for a more generic feeling of unreality and aimlessness, while Children of Men tries to be a thriller in a speculative circumstance, but makes few sweeping, moral claims about society that it has to prove. Poor speculation, in other words, takes its ideas as “given” and uses metaphor as a kind of autotune to conceal a lack of work.
[Credit both to Peli Grietzer for autotune as a figurative concept, and Gabe Duquette for this specific usage].
