Spark in the Umbra

This post is part of NZ Speculative Fiction Blogging Week which runs from Sept 14-20, which you can read more about here.

The week is a project of SpecFicNZ, a group of passionate and wildly creative individuals I’ve had the pleasure of working alongside as we build an organisation for the support and promotion of Speculative Fiction writers in our little corner of the world.

Personally, I’ve always loved Speculative Fiction, well before I even knew of the concept. On the surface, Speculative Fiction is an umbrella term which spans across the genres of Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror which just happen to be my 3 favourite genres.

To my mind, what the 3 genres have in common and what I love so much is that they are all stories of encounters with The Other, something that transcends the everyday, whether it’s Other worlds, Other species, Other times, or the Other hidden within us.

For me, Speculative Fiction is all about Tales of the Other.

There’s a concept in evolutionary biology called Hybrid Vigour (or Heterosis) which describes the phenomenon where a cross-breed is often a superior individual with the best qualities of both parents and novel adaptive features as well. It’s how new species are made and how Yggdrasil, the Tree of Life branches out and creates new forms to explore our planet and the Universe.

So one of the really cool things about SpecFic is that it breaks through the somewhat blurry and artificial distinctions between the 3 genres (which are partly a marketing convenience) and includes and encourages novel fusions and hybrids of those genres which includes some of my personal favourites like Steampunk and Science Noir. I think Star Wars is a Science Fantasy fusion which explains it’s wide appeal. Hybrid vigour indeed!

The link I’m making here between biology and story-telling is not an idle one.

Stories are examples of Memes, an informational parallel to genes – a way of looking at the spread and development of ideas through the eyes of evolutionary theory. In the last 150,000 years, what it means to be human has changed radically.

We discovered language.

With language has came civilisation, culture, mythology, religion, science – a veritable Tree of Narrative branching and filling our heads and our hearts. With language, ideas and experiences could now spread from mind to mind, outliving their originator and achieving a kind of immortality as different elaborations and combinations are created.

Now, this all brings me now to the New Zealand dimension.

For our size, we have an incredible diversity with multiple climates, multiple ecological niches, exotic flora and fauna which all stem from our geographic and genetic isolation.

For a lot of people outside NZ, it’s already kind of an otherworldly place. Part of what I think made NZ so right for the Lord of the Rings is that Middle Earth is like the Earth we know, but also different and mythical and the NZ landscape offered that variety and sense of the familiar yet also magical.

New Zealand also builds on our biological and ecological diversity as we’re also a memetic melting pot with multiple cultures, multiple languages, and multiple world views all rubbing shoulders. Our isolation has encouraged a kind of primal pioneering creativity, a willingness to try new things in new ways and find ways to make them work.

So I can think of no better place to be writing and supporting Speculative Fiction.

For we are truly the Land of The Other.

And we have Tales to tell.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 at 10:35 pm and is filed under Evolution, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.