INTRODUCTION
Start Here, End Everywhere:
A Multiverse of Adventure and Possibilities
I love realistic fiction, whether contemporary or history-based. I am a maven of mimesis, a voyeur of verisimilitude. To borrow and warp the title of one of Robert Crumb’s famous characters, you could call me “Mr. Naturalism.” Give me Thomas Wolfe the Elder, William Faulkner or Charles Dickens, and I will become happily lost in their deft and vivid representations of consensus reality.
But this affection for the quasi-journalistic-moderated-by-authorial-sensibilities depiction of the world around us did not always reside in my heart. It was only when I got to college and my reading habits broadened that I learned to love realism.
Before then, from the time I began to read, I loved only science fiction, fantasy, horror, the weird, the surreal, the absurd—in short, all those genres and many others which are subsumed in the word “fantastika,” imported into our conversation by famed critic John Clute in order to serve as an umbrella for all that is not realism. In my callow youth, I denigrated realism, and thought that only “imaginative literature,” “speculative literature,” fantastika was worth my time.
The famous editor John W. Campbell was fond of categorizing literature into two camps along these same lines. He said that realism’s remit was only what was known to exist, the ding-an-sich if you will, and only those bits which came directly under our limited human attention. Our civilization, our various societies and customs and historical eras. Meanwhile, science fiction and its sister genres encompassed everything else: all the counterfactual, impossible, heretofore-unknown, magical, as-yet-unrealized scenarios stretching from before the Big Bang to beyond the Heat Death of the Universe. One was bounded, one infinite. If you accepted his division of topics, then how could any rational, open-minded person limit themselves to realism alone, as so many inexplicably do?
In many ways, I still believe in the accuracy and validity of this division promulgated by Campbell, which is why my deepest fondness remains for fantastika, and why I practice mainly in that realm. There’s just so much territory to explore, beyond the fields we know. But at the same time, I don’t bother to put realism and fantastika into a scale anymore and try to weigh their contrasting virtues so that I can proclaim one is lesser and one is greater. I take each on its own terms. To use Stephen J. Gould’s label for the remits of religion vs. science, I regard them as “non-overlapping magisteria,” each with their own appeal.
So in this volume you will find naturalistic passages aplenty—but all in service to wild-eyed, non-realistic conceptions: a Venn diagram of all my loves.