Why Speculative Fiction? Ten finalists speak

The inaugural Te Pae Tawhiti Awards, presented at the awards evening on the 22nd August as part of Hamilton Book Month, celebrated the depth and breadth of speculative fiction in Aotearoa. It's a growing section of many bookstores, with legions of fans and so many subgenres you'd be hard-pressed to name them all. What draws authors to write speculative fiction?

We asked ten of the Te Pae Tawhiti finalists to give us their thoughts, and here they are.

Middle Grade

Eye of the Dragon by Susan Brocker 

I am thrilled that my book for middle-grade readers, Eye of the Dragon, is a finalist in the Te Pae Tawhiti Speculative Fiction Awards. While I never set out to write a speculative book, the story took on a life of its own inspired from a song from my childhood, Puff the Magic Dragon. To me as a child it was a song of longing and loss, but also of hope and a belief in magic. The young character, Thomas, in my story discovers that through caring for an injured dragon and believing in himself, he can overcome the bullies in his life. He is helped in the journey by his friend Huhana, who tells him about the taniwha, and how Māori have always believed in magic. 

Welcome to Miracle by Shara Curlett

I believe all types of books are important, however I choose to write speculative fiction because I love to push the boundaries of what’s possible, and I love to extend my imagination to the impossible. Fantasy is pure imagination and creativity at work, taking the ordinary and twisting it into something extraordinary. As authors, particularly those of us who write for children, we have the privilege of dreaming up new worlds, new creatures, new characters, and placing them in perilous situations within the safe confines of a book. In doing so, we show our readers that when it comes to imagination, anything is possible. And now, more than ever, we need to keep writing the best speculative fiction we can, to continue to fuel kids’ imaginations and creativity. Because this is where the best ideas are sparked.

YA

Truth Needs No Colour by Heather McQuillan

For my audience of teenagers, life is already speculative: bodies are changing, the rules of the world keep shifting, and adults insist things are 'normal' when nothing feels normal at all. Spec fic externalises that and can also act as a wake-up call to act before it's too late. As a writer, I love it when you find that crack of light in an imperfect world and set a character on the journey to change it all, or burn it all down! Providing a dystopia with hope is perhaps my small rebellion.

Wyld Witch Weather by Janna Ruth

I see speculative fiction as a giant sandbox where I get to explore ideas around society and what it means to be human, while at the same time having fun with it by adding magic, monsters, and high stakes. Wyld Lands Academy, for example, is a magic academy trilogy full of teenage angst, witches, and elemental magic, but it’s also a story about fascism and the power of propaganda. Speculative fiction has the power to make you think by creating engaging ‘what if’-scenarios that either mirror our world (but with magic!) or create an alternative, imagining what the world could be like, while still being entertaining and fun. 

Author image credit for Alex Lodge: Ben Woollen

Adult novel

Lifelikeness by Alex Lodge 

Honestly, it is mostly inspired by being a giant fan of two writers: Ursula LeGuin and Margaret Atwood. The Year of the Flood by Atwood and The Word for World is Forest by LeGuin are two speculative fiction works that have had a big impact on me as both a writer and a person. The thing I love about the genre is that as a reader we can begin from a blank slate: nothing is taken for granted. I feel like it's a narrative space where, as storytellers, we can deconstruct social structures like capitalism and industrialism and actually offer alternatives, or at least encourage readers to think about society in a different way. To me, writing in this genre feels like getting to be a small part of a giant and hopeful conversation about the future of the world. 

Dancing in the Purple Rain by Judy L Mohr 

Speculative fiction has always been a part of my life, starting with the books my parents read to me as a child, through my teen years, and even now. My parents were massive Trekkies, but they also loved their Dune novels, their horror films, and the fantasy creatures. Family discussions centred around the latest technology (and where it can take us), looping in theology and mythology. And there was always an element of looking at how fantasy and science fiction can help us understand the current world.

Speculative fiction is so much in my blood that the one time I tried to write a pure contemporary thriller, my brain threw in cloning technologies. At that point, I realised that I was always meant to write speculative fiction. Even my dreams (the ones I remember) have speculative elements to them. It’s who I am, so why try to fight it?

Short Story finalists

Wild@Heart by Michael Botur

Because the questions rattling around in our heads all day long - inspired by the sun, the weather, Homo sapiens or science news - need to have their answers teased out through drama. Written drama. My genre is horror, specifically. In horror we live vicariously through people experiencing the scariest 'What if?' events that come from our everyday neuroses. 

Also - life or death stakes, in horror, are very gripping for the reader. 

The Hound of Annwn by Rem Wigmore

I’ve always loved it. I was raised on a steady diet of fantasy and sci-fi, so when I first started writing, back in my tweens, it was a natural choice.

There are so many possibilities in speculative fiction. Your scope is limitless – you can write in any world and time you choose. You can also narrow that scope to highly specific subgenres as well, if you choose, or mix and match genres to get science fantasy and speculative mystery, Weird Westerns, fantasy romance. It’s a genre umbrella of infinite potential. There are such marvels here, the strange made familiar, the familiar made strange.

Although I dabble in a mix of genres, I always return to speculative fiction in the end. It’s what comes naturally. Why does a river choose to run to the sea?'

Novella finalists

The Emotion Dealer by Jack Ramiel Cottrell 

Often, I end up writing speculative fiction because the world is strange and ridiculous. Literary fiction is expected to make sense. Given that real life hardly ever makes sense, I feel like speculative fiction is more realistic. And it gives me the freedom to do what I want with my writing - once I've decided that in the world of my story you can get cybernetic limbs on buy-now-pay-later, it hardly matters that the story itself is structured in fake HTML. 

When I'm writing something serious, like my novella The Emotion Dealer, I find that speculative fiction offers just as many ways to get into the things that the story is really about as any other genre, in ways that feel more true than any of them. And it's a better disguise for true things too - no one asks if it really happened that way, even when it did.

Spellcasting On by Andi Buchanan

I don't only write speculative fiction, but it's what I keep coming back to. It wasn't a conscious choice to begin writing it; it was what I knew and loved, and how I learned to tell stories. I grew up reading fantasy by writers like E. Nesbit and Alan Garner and then I started reading science fiction by writers like Louise Lawrence and John Wyndham, and every book offered me something new, something I hadn't imagined before. Speculative elements are fun to create, but imagining other worlds and other ways of being offers new ways to explore communities, our relationships with each other, and how we live in this world. And who doesn't love a sea monster or a demonic rabbit?