The Difference Between Words and Worlds is a Letter

Metaphor and the Literal in Speculative Fiction
by Richard Baldwin

I started as a poet and - though I had always wanted to be a fantasy writer - for the life of me I couldn't find a way to write even a half-decent short story. I tried everything I could think of. I would free write for hours to try to get a story out. I would brainstorm like crazy. I would outline meticulously. Nothing worked.

The problem was two-fold: Everything I wrote wanted to be shorter and more dense than any stories I'd ever read (I'd never heard of flash fiction), and all the weight of whatever I'd write ended up being wrapped up in the metaphors.

Today much of what I write is still shorter, denser, and more wrapped in metaphor than a fair few authors, but when I set words to page now I can get a story out of them these days.

What changed? Eventually I decided that if I couldn't write short stories I could at least write longer poems. The longer the poems ran, the less they relied on one single image or metaphor to coalesce their meaning - they'd rely on two metaphors instead, say, or maybe three, and eventually they ran long enough that they didn't rely on metaphor and related language to keep up momentum, they instead relied on their plot.

I never stopped loving metaphor, though. Plot gets the story from its beginning to its end, but without some resonance a story is just literally a means to an end without any real meaning.

Now, I understand some speculative fiction audiences aren't big fans of metaphor. Metaphor is a complex subject in speculative fiction because our form of fiction is often written to be taken literally, and when audiences read it they expect the words to mean (until demonstrated otherwise) exactly what they say.

There's not a lot of space for figurative language when you must speak literally, so a lot of the oldest science fiction eschewed metaphor entirely. Since the New Wave it's been much easier to tell a story with figurative elements, but still the first thing we writers generally have to do is find a way to convey literally the context of the story, only after which it becomes clear to an sf/f audience what is metaphor and what is a literal explanation of some new phenomena the characters (and, through them, the audience members) are only just discovering.

Is there a way to go further, though? To use metaphor in a way that takes advantage of the nature of speculative fiction itself, to write in metaphors endowed with meanings that could never show up in any other form of fiction.

I believe so, yes. The trick is to find a way to convince audiences to read a statement two ways at once.

A literary or mainstream fiction audience reads metaphors as figurative: The trees move as if dancing when the author says, "the trees dance". A speculative audience, on the other hand, reads metaphors as literal unless demonstrated otherwise and in advance: The trees are literally dancing unless it's obvious from provided context that the trees couldn't do that.

On rare occasions, once the audience is set up for it, however, it is possible to use a metaphor that is both figurative *and* literal. In just the right story, the trees might literally dance while they also appear figuratively to be dancing (with all the resonance that the idea of dancing within the given context might suggest).

This is a difficult maneuver to manage, and it can distance the audience from the story; metaphor requires a form of associative thought that naturally disjoints one from the moment of the tale into a comparison to something, usually something outside the action. But, if it's perfectly handled, the apt literal image that also serves as a metaphor can resonate in ways that few moments in stories otherwise might ever manage. Moments like that, I would argue, are about as close as fiction can ever get to being poetry.

A more common form of metaphor in speculative fiction, however, involves subtext. An example: "The door dilated." While this isn't metaphorical in the sense that it gives us a figurative understanding of something that leads to a deeper understanding, it nonetheless contains its own resonating levels - just more literal ones than are available in other forms of fiction. We know the society that makes a dilating door must be one in which a door can dilate, and also one that has or had some use for a door to dilate. This suggests space age technology and a need to keep doors sealed, which suggests the story is in space (though of course we'd need a bit more context to be absolutely sure about any of this). As readers we can learn a great deal about a culture from a well chosen moment that carries within its subtext cultural implications that the statement pertains to. What is such a resonant statement, besides a metaphor?

Though I no longer focus on poetry, I don't just like metaphor, I don't just love it, but instead I feel it is absolutely crucial to good fiction. I don't feel this way, however, merely because finding depth and resonance in language is one of the great pleasures of fiction. No - metaphor matters to me by the very fact that we can discern great depth from simple words. Metaphors in all of their forms demonstrate, more fully than in any other literary technique that I've ever seen, the wonder inherent in the human ability to communicate with each other - to communicate at all. Is there anything more incredible than the ability for us to connect and share feelings through systems of shaped marks and noises?

One of the great things about speculative fiction is that it has so many different options for conveying metaphor that just aren't possible in any other medium. Nowhere else can we see, demonstrated over and over again, such a concentrated display of how us humans can convey not only our feelings and emotions but entire worlds of experience to each other. That's bigger than poetry, there aren't words for how big that is.

Fortunately, it seems, the spaces between and behind the words can handle that job just fine on their own.

Richard Baldwin writes from a raw strange shore along the archipelago of fantasy, but he currently resides in Toronto. A graduate of Odyssey and Taos Toolbox, more of Richard’s fiction can be found in AE and the Cucurbital 2 anthology from Paper Golem Press. He is also a professional audiobook narrator - view his demos HERE.