Regardless of the genre you write in, we can all claim to be authors of speculative fiction of some kind or another. Every story speculates about something. Our imagination is built from even the simplest what if question. What if this happened, what would happen next? What if this confronted our heroine, would she succeed? What if this transpired, how could our hero escape? Whether you write mysteries, thrillers, romance or mainstream literary, the journeys of your characters are driven by what if questions.
The granddaddy of speculation is the what if question that deals with the future. ‘What would it be like if’… has been at the core of science fiction stories since Mary Shelley’s classic Frankenstein and H.G. Wells’ War of The Worlds. Nothing stirs the imagination of a speculative fiction author more than to project their what if thoughts into the future and ponder how the clouds of the cosmos would coalesce around them.
Speculative authors are inextricably bound by two fundamental biases of perception. The first is our knowledge of the past and the second is our perception of the present, our current reality. Our past has molded our values. We explore this in our characters’ behaviors and develop plots based on the principles of human interaction we’ve observed. The reality of our present acts as an electric prod to step us forward from this day into the next. This is the reality of the society we live in, our environment and communities, the politics and economics of our daily lives; a reality that molds our viewpoints, influences our current mood, motivates us to make changes in our lives and gives us either a feeling of optimism or pessimism about the future. With these two natural human biases, we see the future through the lens of what we knew to have been true yesterday and what we believe is true today. But is this the only lens available to an author?
In its simplest form, science fiction extrapolates our biased past and present into the future through the medium of change. In hard science fiction, a what if technological change such as artificial intelligence or cloning plops in the middle of the speculative pond like a weighty stone, creating a ripple effect. In space operas like Star Trek and Star Wars, authors extrapolate impressive changes in today’s science to create new worlds of wonder beyond known technology. In dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, we view changes as destructive forces accompanied by a deterioration in societal norms. Some of the most powerful classic speculative stories combine what if technologies with what if changes in society. Examples are George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
But is there another unique lens to look through? Yes. But it requires a radical change in perception. What if you adopted the viewpoint of someone from the past? What if you could unlearn what you know happened to their future? How would you see the future differently if you could erase the history of science and technology you know and replace it with the imagination of someone’s yesteryear?
That lens is Retrofuturism. It is the basis of the new genres of steampunk and dieselpunk. And this is your invitation to learn more about them and about Cyberpunk in the FWA’s next webinar, New Horizons in Science Fiction… Looking Back and Moving Forward presented by yours truly, Charles A Cornell and my fellow speculative fiction author, MJ Carlson.
The webinar takes place on May 14th, at 11:00 am Eastern. Register today!
About the author:
CHARLES A CORNELL is a member of the Florida Writers Association and has won Royal Palm Literary Awards in the Thriller and Science Fiction categories. His dieselpunk series, DragonFly combines science fiction and fantasy with alternative history in a World War Two re-imagined like never before. His over-active imagination creates retrofuturistic war machines and bio-mechanical monsters in his writer’s den in Detroit, Michigan where he lives with his wife, son and a very perplexed cat.
