Something is struggling to be born in this damaged and inspiring world, and I believe science fiction and its speculative cousins are helping us figure out what it is. It’s pushing the imaginations of fiction writers to bend and twist familiar forms to try to capture the forces that are hurling us into a barely conceivable future.
This blog is my small way of exploring the half-perceived forces that keep evading our definitions, genres and explanations. They are like five- or six-dimensional objects and beings pushing into our four dimensional world. We see the parts that fit what we can understand but wait for full comprehension in spaces we struggle to imagine.
As a latecomer to science fiction, I’m a student of the many great writers and knowledgeable critics whose careers have been devoted to the field. The only honest way I could imagine presenting my responses was to record them in a blog, a form I got used to while writing for years about mental health.
In a way, exploring science fiction extends the themes of that blog: struggling at the boundaries of mind and consciousness, living with liminal states of reality, probing the impact of a violent world on inner life, testing the limits of scientific explanations and remedies. Science fiction opens imaginative pathways to possible futures and expanding ideas of what the mind can become.
This blog offers a few experiments in short fiction amid attempts at making sense of the fictional worlds so many fine writers have been imagining. Hopefully, this effort can be a small contribution to pushing awareness of science fiction far beyond the pigeon holes of genre to the attention of all concerned about what human life can be.
If you’re interested in something completely different, especially the way the mind twists reality without any help from fiction, you can check out my mental health blog, Storied Mind.
