You’ve landed on my first blog post, where I want to share some of my all time favorite works of speculative fiction. I’ll have more to say about each of these texts in future posts, and I will add more lists of excellent suggested reading, but I want to start with some of the things that I wish everyone could read.

SOME OF THE BEST THINGS YOU COULD EVER READ:

• Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower
• Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness
• Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

I can’t quite say that these are my three favorite books; I have far too much book love for just three favorites. Yet, each of these books is an example of how a brilliantly told story about possibilities you have probably never fully considered can make you think and feel in ways you never have before.

Why these works of speculative fiction?

I’ve written several essays about the theoretical and ethical work books like this can do. The main point is that they can expand the parameters of your thinking and give you new insights into your everyday world.

Parable of the Sower (1993)

Butler’s novel asks you to enter the life and mind of a teenager, Olamina, whose deteriorating community refuses to accept the reality she sees as obvious: god is change. She is also an empath who feels all of the pain as well as the pleasure she sees others experiencing. Olamina creates her own set of beliefs in order to address the ecological, economic, and social collapses happening all around her, as well as the intensity of her experiences as an empath. The world of this novel is devastating and deadly, but punctuated with moments of love and hope. The sequel, Parable of the Talents, is absolutely worth reading.

The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

Written when women in the U.S. required a husband’s permission to open a bank account, Le Guin’s novel asks you to imagine an entirely different way of thinking about gender. The world in this novel, called Gethen, is populated by people very much like us humans. However, the people on Gethen have no set sex or gender. Their sexuality is tied to specific times when they can become biologically male or female, but the vast majority of the time they lack defined sex or gender. This novel is part of Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle of science fiction, and I love all of it. You couldn’t go wrong following this up with The Dispossessed, my other favorite from the series.

The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)

Whether you love or hate or have never watched the television series, you should still read this book. Atwood brings you into The Republic of Gilead with Offred, and asks you what you would do to survive there. Offred finds a way to tell her own tale, and in the telling we find possibility, hope, and power. Reading the book is a different experience from watching the show, especially because the novel ends with “Historical Notes” that color everything that comes before. The 2019 sequel, The Testaments, is also wonderful, but I’ll have to come back to that one.

Critique & Creation in Speculative Fiction

Let’s end this discussion of some of the best works of speculative fiction with the melding of critique and creation. Good literature, like any good art, engages with the world in ways that reveal truths. I am partial to literature that critically engages with the truths of how power works in our world. Even when we can easily identify inequalities and problems, it is often difficult to wrap our minds around the complexities of the power relations related to those inequalities and problems. Fiction can help, and brilliant speculative fiction like the works listed here do just that. But even more than illuminating power, these works create possible alternatives. They are not manuals with directions to create utopia, but they are glimpses into other ways of being, thinking, and doing, that can help us address those inqualities and problems we see every day.