Believe it or not, the question I most often get from spec fic writers is, “What exactly is spec fic?” Someone sends me a manuscript, I accept it, and then a few weeks later they write me and say, in a cyber-whisper, “By the way, I was just wondering…” or “You know, a friend at work asked me the other day …” or “I’m really embarrassed to even ask this question …”
Don’t be embarrassed. Most of us grew up thinking in terms of two related genres—science-fiction and fantasy. I say related, but maybe what I mean is “inexplicably in the same section of the bookstore.” Fantasy and sci-fi tended to get lumped together, even though they were very different. Orson Scott Card once wrote that science fiction has rivets and fantasy has trees. That’s a fun over-simplification, and there’s some truth to it. Really though, most people who read traditional sci-fi fans steer clear of traditional fantasy, and vice versa. The thing that bound the two genres together—at least in the minds of booksellers—was that both were fantastical.
The question in recent years has become, what do you do with books about fantastical subjects that don’t qualify as either sci-fi or as fantasy? For example, there was a disastrous attempt several decades ago to market George Orwell’s 1984 as science fiction. It might have some science fiction elements, but it’s definitely not the sort of thing most traditional sci-fi fans recognize as sci-fi. It is dystopian fiction, similar to Orwell’s other masterpiece Animal Farm, and Robert Hugh Benson’s Lord of the World.
And what about the works of Charles Williams? Difficult to classify. Tarot cards that come to life; Platonic forms that roam the earth; Hell as a plane of existence that co-exists alongside our own. Sometimes you find Williams in the fantasy section, but that’s too easy. His books are not genre fiction; they are meaty and philosophical and full of deep theological themes.
So, what do we do with all these other books that don’t fit traditional definitions of fantasy (wizards, elves, and dragons) or science fiction (robots, machines, and space ships)? The solution has been an umbrella term: speculative fiction, or spec fic for short. Spec fic encompasses fantasy and sci-fi, but it also includes horror, dystopian and utopian fiction, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic, alternate histories, supernatural tales, even superhero fiction … basically, anything that speculates on the apparently improbable or seemingly impossible.
The term “spec fic” isn’t an attempt to rename the old fantasy/sci-fi section. It is, rather, a way to gather all the loose clusters of related genres under one convenient term. And you’ll find all of the above-named genres published at Musa under the Urania imprint (with the exception of horror, which is handled by Thalia, our paranormal line).
So don’t be embarrassed if you don’t know what spec fic is. Writers still tend to think of themselves as working in a particular genre, and those genres still hold. It’s simply a more expansive, more inclusive term.
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