I have only very recently met Gillian Polack, when I attended the 68th World Science Fiction Convention in Melbourne, Asutralia and we shared a panel—together with Karen Healey and fellow FSF Guest Series author, Mary Victoria—on the topic of “Writing Strange Lands: Other Cultures in YA Speculative Fiction.” A very successful panel and a topic on which Gillian was clearly in her element—as is FSF, which is why I am delighted to welcome her here today, posting on: “Why Fantasy-SciFi Rocks My World.”

F-SF Guest Author Post: Gillian Polack

I’m hopelessly in love with those tales that fall under the wide umbrella that is speculative fiction.  Science fiction, fantasy, horror and those gloriously interstitial stories that slip somewhere between these genres: I love speculative fiction.

I love it that a thousand different writers can share its shelter and play with its tropes and share their dreams with readers.  For me, it’s all about sharing dreams.  It’s also about the act of dreaming.  I dream my stories; I dream from the stories of others.  Dreams make my private world glow.

If I had to describe those dreams, however, it wouldn’t be through stories, it would be through questions.  SF/F rocks my world, you see, because it’s a vehicle for my questions as well as for my dreams.  Dreams and questions walk hand in hand in my universe:  they’re each others’ closest allies.

“What if?” is the question I see used over and over again to define the genre.  I’m told that speculative fiction stories are tales that start with the question “What if?”  That a speculative fiction story is that because the writer says “What if a hero were born?” “What if the world were made of jelly?”  What if gravity were real?”  We use our stories to explore questions and their consequences.

“Why not?” is the question that gives us permission to write and to explore.  It helps us overcome our inhibitions and our limitations.  “Why not” allows me to write the unexpected and put my fears and hopes on paper and into print.

“Who are we?” is what it’s all about. Every permission and every daring assumption has this as its goal.  Whether the story is about dancing robots or a reverie of clouds, whether it’s speculating on string theory or on private agonies, “Who are we?” is the question that writers have to answer to bring it home to readers.  The answers are not always serious, but they’re always about us, somehow.  This is the question that anchors our dreams.

Speculative fiction is amazing because, in answering “What if” and “Why not?” and “Who are we?” it shows us our dreams, it helps our dreams grow – it makes our universe more real to us and shows us other place and other times and makes them equally real.

It does in so many ways.  Today I’m thinking of these ways of sizes of things. It does this through every size of thing.  Little things – seeing rain, balancing a pebble deep in my hand, understanding how pain plays strange symphonies with the senses.  Big things – dreaming of death and despair and the stories that will lead me way from them, seeing kingdoms and empires in my mind’s eye and explaining them to readers using the little things.  How a good writer plays with the little and the big is the real magic.

Fantasy and science fiction and horror rock my world because they’re stories that speculate about human beings and about the responses of human beings to the universe.  They’re about growing and understanding and laughing and weeping and singing silly songs to oneself in the dead of night.  Speculative fiction is about deepening realities and about twisting realities and about everything a writer can imagine.

Questions provoke the imagination. Little and big things are the alphabet of story.  Together, they create the dreams that make me happy.

About Gillian Polack

My second novel (Life through Cellophane, Eneit Press, 2009 was shortlisted for a Ditmar Award, and I and my courageous team of banqueteers were awarded a Ditmar for the 2009 Conflux banquet, set in Lake Charles, Louisiana in 1883. My life goes in circles, because my first novel (Illuminations, Trivium Publishing) was published in Lake Charles.  My most recent book is an anthology where speculative fiction writers look at the cultural baggage we all carry (Baggage, Eneit Press, 2010) that was launched this September.  While I’m working on the next Conflux banquet, my main focus right now is an SF novel, part of studies towards a doctorate at the University of Western Australia. You can find out more about Gillian Polack, here.

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To see—and read—the other authors who have posted so far in the Guest Series, click here.