fiction is where we expand the limits of the possible

[storyrainthejournal]

I really love this essay, Why We Need Impossible Worlds from John Stevens (erudite ogre), over on SF Signal. The essay is a response to recent discussions of SF as an exhausted genre. My own SF stories do try for a sense of possibility while you're in the story, but at this point the projected far future universe with many inhabited planets, space stations, and vessels that travel the impossible distances of deep space between them, is pretty much fantasy, a very particular kind of retro-futurism. But I don't care--the possibility and speculation about humanity and the universe and living in it that can be explored in such stories is every bit as valid, to me, as that in stories based near future on hard science. It's freeing, it's fun, it's worthwhile, it's essential, and this essay explains why pretty cogently. An excerpt:

By creating worlds and people and situations that can never occur, we dive into a context that dislocates us, if slightly or temporarily, from our environment and allows our minds to be elsewhere, to take even a short trip and return to that real world a little (or sometimes greatly) changed.

That displacement and return from an impossible world is something that invigorates our minds. When we encounter the unfamiliar, the cryptic, or the preposterous, we take in and process them a little differently than something conventional, obvious, or “common-sense.”

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In other news, I went on a mini writing retreat this past weekend, which was productive and pretty much awesome. I have pictures and some thoughts to post, probably tonight. I know you're waiting breathlessly.