A ghost story in 19th century, a noir in roughly the present day, and a future SF timeline. Specimen Days is split into three sections, three time periods, and three genres. Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham is another early (2005) speculative epic that should probably goes right after Cloud Atlas as a foundational text. Cloud Atlas and To Paradise are good examples here. Often this is connected to the variety of historical time periods, of which at least one will be a science fiction future. Secondly, the speculative epic tends to be “genre-bending” in that it covers a range of genre modes. Some epic fantasy or space opera novels have a big cast of characters and many settings, but they typically are confined to a relatively small time period in an individual book (baring a prequel chapter or epilogue perhaps). Cloud Atlas is 528 pages, Cloud Cuckoo Land is 640, and To Paradise is a whooping 720.Įdited to add: It seems worth noting that epicness is of course a feature of many styles of fiction, especially of SFF where you have subgenres like “epic fantasy” and “space opera.” What’s perhaps different here is the epicness is tied to a big canvas of settings, characters, and especially time. The “epicness” doesn’t necessarily mean the book is long-Nagamatsu’s book feels quite epic to me at under 300 pages-but unsurprisingly most of these books are on the longer side. Sometimes the speculative epic is broken up into separate parts with separate settings, but sometimes it might follow one setting through a long stretch of time. Or like a vast imaginative canvas, as I said in the review. What traits run through the novels I named to which we could certainly add others ( The Actual Star, The Overstory, and The Old Drift have been suggested)? What are the traits of the speculative epic?įirst, the speculative epic is “epic” in that it tends to cover a vast swath of time, multiple settings, and often a large number of characters. Am I nuts? It does seem that there are many novels coming out in the next couple of years that are sprawling, multi-POV, multi-setting operatic fantasias.”Ĭhristian Lorentzen amusingly summed up the genre as one of main styles of literary fiction today:Ī short newspaper review doesn’t give you too much space to spell out thoughts, so I thought I’d try to talk about this a bit more here. Brandon Taylor noted in his newsletter last year that “it seemed like everyone went away during the pandemic and now they’re all back writing Cloud Atlas. I’m hardly the first person to notice this trend of course. Or perhaps it’s because the issues we now face feel so overwhelming that only a vast, imaginative canvas can begin to tackle them. Why does this form speak to today? Maybe it’s a natural reaction to the last decade’s autofiction trend, with its straight realism and narrow subjectivity. John Mandel’s forthcoming “Sea of Tranquility.” The ur-text might be David Mitchell’s “ Cloud Atlas ” with its nesting narratives stretching from the 19th century to a dystopian future. Some recent or upcoming examples include Matt Bell’s “ Appleseed ,” Hanya Yanagihara’s “To Paradise,” Anthony Doerr’s “ Cloud Cuckoo Land ” and Emily St. “How High We Go in the Dark” is a welcome addition to a growing trend of what we might call the “speculative epic”: genre-bending novels that use a wide aperture to tackle large issues like climate change while jumping between characters, timelines and even narrative modes. I’ve always been a bit envious of critics who got to do this so I figured why not.
#Sea of solitude twitter full#
It’s timely and well worth your time, and you can read my full review in the link.Įmbedded in the review I tried my hand at defining a growing trend in literature and slapping a name on it.
It’s a beautiful and mournful book about grief and loss in the wake of a global pandemic. Yesterday, I had the pleasure of reviewing How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu for the New York Times.
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