A Moment with Leah Rhyne

What's your favourite thing about speculative fiction and why?

I tell my child all the time that I’m terrible at picking favorite anythings. Seriously, I can’t even pick a favorite color – it changes daily. When I’m feeling bright and happy, I love yellow. If I’m a little down, perhaps brown, or grey. On neutral days I go for blues or greens.

I can’t pick a favorite thing about speculative fiction because I love it all, because in speculative fiction, anything can happen. Anything.

Want to go back in time? See the world as it was a thousand years ago? Then go ahead – build a time machine. If you’re writing speculative fiction, you can. You can even choose to ignore the complexities of paradoxes, of changing the past and thus the future, because in your own world, anything goes.

Want to create a new race of alien creatures that inhabit planets in a distant galaxy? Go for it! The weirder the better! Make them look like insects. Make them look like jiggling puddles of Jello. You can even make them look like giant, fuzzy bunnies if you want. It’s your world.

One of my favorite science fiction books of the moment is John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, in which humans get genetically engineered to have green skin and super-strength. He turned people into superhero soldiers, and with them he tried to rule the universe. And why not? It was his universe.

Want to bring to light all the terrifying skeletons that inhabit your deepest, darkest dream closets? Do it. Scare us. In speculative fiction, there’s room for all the monsters.

Picture Stephen King, creating a monster that takes the form of a clown with razor-sharp teeth and claws like knives. Picture him scaring a little girl so much with the resulting novel, she had no choice but to grow up and become a writer herself, to give shapes to her own inner demons.

Now try to imagine a world without speculative fiction. A world that never included the stories of Jules Verne or H.G. Wells or Edgar Allen Poe or H.P. Lovecraft. Imagine a world without outlets for our fears, our dreams.

It’s a drab place, don’t you think? A place where people might never have considered space travel achievable, that might never have made it to the moon, let alone Mars. A place without a ticking telltale heart or a time machine.

Picture a place without Aliens, without Back to the Future and Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings. I wouldn’t want to live in that world.

My favorite thing about speculative fiction is all of it. Really. I mean that.

Because the sky is not the limit, in speculative fiction. Only our imaginations are.

Leah Rhyne is a Jersey girl who's lived in the south so long she's lost her accent...but never her attitude. Her first novel, Undead America Book 1: Zombie Days, Campfire Nights, released in October, 2012. When not writing she can be found playing with her daughter and husband, running, or drinking good red wine.

Learn more about Leah Rhyne on her website. Stay connected on Twitter.

Leah's book Undead America Book 1: Zombie Days, Campfire Nights, is available HERE.