Speculative fiction

Some stories make you wonder if they're fantasy or if they are science fiction, and this is one of them.

Of course, Heinlein would just call it speculative fiction and not worry about it.

A former soldier has just been discharged from a war in Southeast Asia.

The country is not mentioned, but this is 1963, and Vietnam was just bubbling up in the people's consciousness.

Yeah.

I mean, I think so much of the project of literary speculative fiction, which is kind of the world that this book takes place in or that I'm trying to have it take place in, I think so much of what those stories can do well is they can kind of literalize the abstract or literalize kind of the feeling that is in the air culturally or societally into like a generally kind of pulpy premise.

And one thing that I kind of became more conscious of while writing was that what I was responding to was a whole like shit ton of problems with like no easy answers and easy solutions.

Right.

My guest today is Yoav Avni, one of Israel's most inventive novelists.

He's a two-time winner of the Geffen Award for Speculative Fiction, which is basically Israel's version of the Hugo, and his novel Three Things for a Desert Island was a national bestseller.

If you love Kurt Vonnegut or Douglas Adams, his writing will feel like home.

It's funny and a little magical with a lot of heart underneath.

particular, one of which is.

Herzl Amar.

And I was wondering, with the idea being that the state of Israel, instead of having been in Israel, but took another direction, what do you think, and also on the theme of speculative fiction, what do you think Herzl would say if he were to be dropped in Tel Aviv or in modern Israel in the Middle East?

At this point of time?

If cli-fi and romanticism are unfamiliar literary genres to you, you are not alone.

I'm Lisa Morgan, and today on The Weekly Reader, our book critic Marian Winnick schools me, and you, about the seemingly endless possibilities of speculative fiction.

Hi, Marian.

Hi, Lisa.

Speculative fiction is the term now used to pull a wide range of genres into the embrace of the mainstream.

Sci-fi, cli-fi, fantasy, romanticism, horror, dystopian political novels and more.

One of the pioneers of this trend is Emily St. John Mandel.

Although the other guests believe Melanie is a robot, she's actually a human who spent seven seasons on a body modification reality show called Celebrity Plastics, where she may accidentally have been given eternal life.

So actually, I think the thought of doing something that couldn't be more different was quite appealing.

And I thought the speculative fiction element might be constraining or difficult.

But actually, I find it surprisingly liberating and much less complicated than I thought it was going to be.

And it contributed to the story and the themes in ways that I wasn't really expecting.

So it ended up being really fun to write.

I really enjoyed it.

definitely and do you think you'll return to more speculative fiction sorry I should have kept that answer for the question for the end but

I would definitely try it again because just because it was so much fun and it's so interesting today and I've never done anything like that before

We'll be previewing our very own submission to the Future Vision XPRIZE, which is a hopeful film competition, and we're really excited to share that with you all.

Okay, so Pietro, we were talking a little bit about this before the show, but I was really kind of excited about some of the ways that I was finding real research, real documentation about the relationship between speculative fiction and real technological developments.

And I wanted to sort of see what your thoughts were on that.

Yeah, absolutely.

These models don't just regurgitate stories.

They learn the underlying patterns of how we frame problems and solutions.

If 90% of our speculative fiction teaches that advanced technology leads to collapse, surveillance, or extinction, Then the model internalizes that as the default trajectory.

It becomes the most statistically probable answer when someone asks, what happens next? Now, this matters enormously because we're entering a phase where AI is helping us prototype futures, whether that's through scenario planning, policy modeling, or even just shaping public imagination.

I happen to be the only person here, so it's probably the best place to do it for now.

Obviously, this isn't speculative fiction related, although I am planning to go to at least one show around, you know, fantasy tropes, particularly tabletop role-playing games.

I saw two or three shows of that ilk, so I am planning to go to that.

But the really important thing is that I got to meet Jesse Rye in person.

We got to hug it out.

We got to watch some good comedy.

And yeah, also tangentially related to speculative fiction is the death of Tim Curry.

This guy looms large in all of our lives, but for me, probably most is his portrayal of Pennywise.

Both my bachelor's and master's are in literature.

Primary focus on speculative fiction.

So spooky shit.

Science fiction shit.

Like, yeah.

Nathan, what are you doing your dissertation on?

Well, my dissertation actually, and I do believe it's something that we talked about the other day, but it is largely on how I feel that speculative fiction is deserves the same level of academic attention as like regular traditional literary fiction because of, well, who it is that writes speculative fiction in the first place.

I mean, in terms of representation, I mean, it's mostly folks that look like y'all, not folks that look like me.