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Speculation
I recently visited a place that keeps a bookshelf set aside for bookcrossing. I first heard about Bookcrossing.com from another blogger, and have had a good time “setting books free” after registering them at the site. I’ve had an equally good time “catching” books released by other bookcrossers. On my recent “hunting trip,” I came across a find that could not have been any better, as far as I am concerned -- John Costello’s Science Fiction Films. I have been having a great time reading through the little volume at a very leisurely pace over the past couple of weeks.
I am quite a fan of science fiction, but am a much bigger fan of the more general category of writing that I’d term “speculative fiction,” encompassing not only science fiction, but fantasy, imaginative tales about possible parallel worlds or possible futures for our world. It’s an area of fiction that can really captivate me, whether talking about 1001 Arabian Nights, Star Wars, The Matrix, or Diana Wynne Jones’s Chrestomanci. I pretty much love it all.
Not all writers (or readers) of speculative fiction will agree with Tolkien’s views on it all (Lewis, perhaps, serving as a case in point). It is, however, interesting to give thought to the reflections of someone who obviously knows the field well, both as a reader/critic and as a writer. For me, whatever else one may think of Tolkien’s view of world-creation, I think he does offer some good insights on the interaction between the concerns for language and imagination in speculative fiction.
©2007 Shelly Bryant
Citations from Tolkien’s essay are taken from The Tolkien Reader
Tolkien, J. R. R. The Tolkien Reader. New York: Ballantine
Books, 1966.
The thoughts on the decay of the Tolkien-Lewis friendship can be found in many different sources; the best I’ve come across is Humphrey Carpenter’s The Inklings
Carpenter, Humphrey. The Inklings. London: HarperCollins
Publishers, 1978.
Friday, 05 October 2007
I’ve been thinking about why I love the genre so much, and I think I have come up with something that explains it. Speculative fiction, to me, is situated right in the center of one of literature’s two major concerns, the imagination. I would say, as a very sweeping statement, that the other major concern of literature is language, and there is also a major emphasis on language and words in much of the best speculative fiction. The past decade’s big speculative fiction craze, the Harry Potter series, serves as a perfect example of the concern for language and word play that is often so important in the genre. Names in the series (like in The Matrix) are used in a playful manner throughout the series -- names not only of people but of places and things (Diagon Alley, the Pensieve, and the Mirror of Erised being just a few of my favorites).
Reflecting on this brought to mind one of the giants in the speculative fiction field, J. R. R. Tolkien. His essay “On Fairy-stories” ( an essay in Tree and Leaf) is a wonderful window into the mind of the writer. He expounds on his notion of writing about Faërie (which I will summarize in an all-too-simplistic manner as being that which is concerned with the fantastic), a notion firmly rooted in both his profession as a linguist and his faith as a Catholic.
Tolkien’s Middle Earth might just be the best-known world of speculative fiction. His elaborate histories give a richness to the world of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings story that knows no rival. Interestingly, though, this world was created because of Tolkien’s interest in language. Early in life, he had already begun creating language systems, his favorite being the one that was related to Icelandic. Over time, he realized that the languages could grow no further without a history and culture, and so he began to speculate, asking himself, “What kind of people would speak this sort of language?” From his Icelandic-based language system, we have the Elvish language of Middle Earth. Each people group in Middle Earth grew up in order to facilitate the growth of its language system.
A twin concern in Tolkien’s thought about world-building is his emphasis on the writer’s role as “subcreator.” His idea was that the writer of speculative fiction is involved in making a new world, and therefore should display the same sort of care that his Catholic faith told him the Creator of our world took in creating it. This was a view he held very strongly, and as a result, he was meticulous about the details of Middle Earth, making sure to tie up all the loose ends, which resulted in a tightly constructed, well-thought-out secondary world. It is reported in many places that his insistence on this part of world creation might have been part of what eventually led to the fall-out between Tolkien and his long-time friend, C. S. Lewis. Tolkien had been a big fan of Lewis’s Ransom stories (“the space trilogy”), but when the Narnia books were first read to their writers’ circle (the Inklings), Tolkien was appalled at what, to him, seemed a slipshod, thrown-together piece of pastiche. His lack of enthusiasm, and later his more serious disdain (as the books were published and became very popular), eventually played a part in creating a rift between these two men, each of whom authored works that claim a place amongst the classics of speculative fiction. (There were probably other factors that contributed to the rift, but many who were close to the men see this as at least one major point of tension between them, particularly on Tolkien’s side.)
For Tolkien, Fairy-stories are a separate field from travel tales (including travel into space), from talking-animal stories, any tale that turns out to be a dream, and many other similar stories that would easily fit the label “speculative fiction” in a broader context (p. 40-43). As he describes it all, it is a about “the origin of language and of the mind” (p. 44), and about creating in the same way we’ve been created. It should be, he says, presented as if it were true (p. 42), as a history. Myth, after all, is essentially “of the same stuff” as history, for Tolkien (p. 55).
