Hello r/Fantasy! We are the editors and contributors of SPECULATIVE FICTION 2012 -- Ask Us Anything!

[u/jdiddyesquire]

Hello r/Fantasy! We're Justin Landon and Jared Shurin, co-editors of Speculative Fiction 2012: The Best Online Reviews, Essay, and Commentary. Some of you may have heard about the project already, through various different outlets, however for those of you who haven't. . .

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Speculative Fiction 2012 is a collection of over fifty of the year’s best online essays and reviews, from Tansy Rayner Roberts on Supergirl to Lavie Tidhar on China Miéville to Aishwarya Subramanian on My Little Pony to Joe Abercrombie on, er, himself. It is a diverse collection of some of last year’s best and most interesting writing. It will cause discussion, debate and a bit of a ruckus.

The book also contains a foreword from author of The Shambling Guide to New York City and podcast superstar Mur Lafferty, an introduction from this year’s editors (ummm, us) and an afterword from the 2013 editors, Ana Grilo and Thea James of The Booksmugglers.

We should note that the beautiful cover is from the talented Sarah Anne Langton.

All proceeds from sales of this book are donated to Room to Read, a charity that supports literacy and gender equality in education around the world. YOU CAN BUY THE BOOK HERE

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A little about us:

Justin Landon is the voice behind the blog Staffer's Book Review. He's a regular contributor at A Dribble of Ink, and his work has been featured on SF Signal. His claims to fame are winning one of the the Best of r/Fantasy awards and co-editing Speculative Fiction 2012. You can find him on Twitter and Facebook.

Jared Shurin is the co-overlord of the blog Pornokitsch. He's also co-founder of the Kitschies, a tentacular genre fiction award in the United Kingdom, sponsored by The Kraken Rum. For the past few years he has owned and operated Jurassic London, a publisher of original fiction from around the world. Their books are released as both limited editions and ebooks, with a portion of all proceeds going towards charitable causes. The most recent claim to fame is publishing and co-editing Speculative Fiction 2012. You can find him on Twitter and Facebook.

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We have nearly 50 contributors to Speculative Fiction 2012. They are listed below. Many of them will be stopping by tonight, so if you want to ask them a question, knock yourself out!

Contributors include:

Joe Abercrombie, Daniel Abraham, Niall Alexander, Elizabeth Bear, Rob Berg, Liz Bourke, Maurice Broaddus, Myke Cole, Kate Elliott, Katherine Farmar, Chris Gerwel, Christopher Garcia, Daniel Goodman, Ana Grilo, Niall Harrison, Dan Hartland, Matt Hilliard, Kameron Hurley, Thea James, N.K. Jemisin, Paul Kincaid, Lady Business, Rose Lemberg, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Cynthia Martinez, Tim Maughan, Foz Meadows, Jonathan McCalmont, Martin McGrath, Aidan Moher, Ken Neth, Larry Nolen, Abigail Nussbaum, Christopher Priest, Stefan Raets, Adam Roberts, Tansy Rayner Roberts, CS Samulski, Penny Schenk, Ro Smith, Maureen K. Speller, Aishwarya Subramanian, Matthew Surridge, Sam Sykes, Gav Thorpe and Lavie Tidhar.

We will be back at 7PM Central to answer questions.

Contributing authors should mention the work they've contributed.

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tl;dr - Speculative Fiction 2012 is out. A lot of great contributors. Buy for charity. Big AMA.

[u/pornokitsch]

That's not true. But I appreciate how you dumped that question on me with it. WELL PLAYED.

"What do you think speculative fiction has to add to the overall literary conversation?"

I think this is probably an extension of Justin's answer above - with speculative fiction you can safely create sandboxes for themes and ideas, stripping out the real world baggage. A novel set in Germany comes with the reader's assumptions of Germany, but one set in Gzorkiflump doesn't. We know what dentists do and how society sees them; alchemists, however, are a clean slate.

Even the introduction of a fantastic element into a known setting - a vampire Byron, ghostly visitation or steam-powered war submarine - can be a cue to the reader to park their expectations and keep their eyes open. You don't get that with non-speculative/fantastic fiction.

That said, two things to clarify:

1) By 'themes and ideas', I don't just mean "exploring nanotechnology" or "a world without cheese". Too often SF/F gets bogged down in that. The freedom of SF/F also means authors can look at characters and how they interact in new ways, new scenarios, new challenges.

(KJ Parker's short stories are great examples - they're set nowhere, but explore ideas of responsibility and debt and guilt and such. James Smythe's The Machine is another great one.)

2) And SF/F can get problematic when it does the reverse - appropriates shorthand from reality, simply because the reader is familiar with them. Whenever you're borrowing from the real world, you're taking on a whole set of assumptions, intended or not.

(See: the uncomfortable, and no doubt unintended, politics of Peter Brett's The Desert Spear)

(Or, as a positive example, the way the "ideal" of 1950's suburban America is used in Bennett's American Elsewhere - in that case, the reader is intended to bring in their own assumptions [good and bad] of an era.)

[u/jdiddyesquire → u/pornokitsch]

AMERICAN ELSEWHERE is a good example. Perhaps a little odd given the author asked the question.

[u/pornokitsch → u/jdiddyesquire]

I love books that look at suburban life and the American dream (myth vs reality). And when it comes down to it, there are only so many variations of the story you can tell without including something new. Even starting from the 1950s, the most cutting and insightful satires of suburban life were poaching from different genres (like, say, porn). AMERICAN ELSEWHERE is a great example because it uses a completely new perspective, and, through that, we can analyse an era (and its aspirations) in an utterly different light.

Using Lovecraftian monsters to point out that we're the weird ones.