One Guy’s Safari Through Speculative Fiction

A novel is like a pinball game. Once the shiny new character leaps into motion, it encounters the bumpers and flippers of the plot and bounces wildly off, tracing out the unique path of tension and surprise we call a story. Done right, a novel is a thrill dispenser connected to your neural architecture. For the author, it’s an even bigger gamble.

I cut my teeth reading literary novels by women authors… Louise Erdrich, Barbara Kingsolver, Jane Smiley and Ann Patchett. The adventure novels I write these days are a cross between speculative fiction and women’s fiction. Why? Because the writer must always heap tons of trouble on their characters to build the ending’s payoff, and in our society, women as a group endure a lot just by living, let alone being cast as fictional characters.

Craig Boyack’s March 8 guest post about speculative…