Can speculative fiction teach us anything in a world this crazy?

There’s an old saw from Mark Twain about how truth is stranger than fiction, and I think it’s fair to say we’ve lived through a very strange reality this past year. With all the chaos and change, we’re led to a foundational question: what’s the purpose of speculative fiction and its adjacent genres of science fiction and fantasy when so much of our world seems to already embody the fantastical worlds these works depict? So I got our occasional fictional columnist Eliot Peper and the author of Veil, the three part Analog Series and other speculative fiction novels on the Gmail for an epistolary conversation on digesting 2020, the meaning of speculative fiction, and the future of art. This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed. Danny Crichton: I’m curious about the future of speculative fiction. We just went through a devastating year with the pandemic and a number of major climate disorders – the types of events that are among the fodder for this genre. How do you keep speculating when reality always seems to catch up with the amygdala of our imaginations? Eliot Peper: Current events are a painful reminder that unlike fict… Click below to read the full story from TechCrunch
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