The New Age of Literature: The Speculative age

 The world needs a new kind of literature. But to be more precise, the world is arriving at a new kind of literature. This form of literature is different from the Theocratic age, the Aristocratic age, the Democratic age and the Chaotic age of literature as described by the eminent literary critic, Harold Bloom in his book, The Western Cannon. I call this new age of literature the Speculative age.

The speculative age comprises of three important elements which I will further elaborate in this post. These three important elements are; The replication of technological advancement, the trend towards social engineering and the domination of the visual image.

By replication of technological advancement, I imply that most works of literature (especially pop cultural literature) tend towards depiction of an advanced technological world. These works of art either represent our world with facets of advanced technology, or build from scratch new fantastic and out of the world stories. The fantasy and the science fiction are the major genres of pop cultural works of art in the 21^st century. They tower over other modern and postmodern works in either its hopeful or grim perspective about the world under the technological advancement.

The 21^st century work of art cannot merely be a representation of life as it is. Why? Because our life is no longer just a simple life. It is imbedded with technological devices and their abilities to change our life styles. We are already stepping into a transhumanist world where technology yokes with biology to improve our living standards as well as our conceptions about living. Most of the time, the pop cultural works of literature today are an extension as well as an exaggeration of technological lives of ours’.

A good example of this would be the blockbuster movies of superheroes that is a recent trend in the cinematic medium. These superhero movies rely extensively on science fictional tropes such as weapons of mass destruction, aliens and genetically augmented beings in order to build the necessary fantastic and glamorous quality of these movies. These tropes help their creators to build modern epics (not modernist) similar to the epics of the theocratic and aristocratic ages as Harold Bloom has segmented the Western Literature.

This trend is also visible in other mediums such as computer games and cartoons. I was one day watching a recent Indian cartoon dubbed to Sinhala named Chandi whose titular character is a village boy dressed in a dhoti and naked above his waist. This child was a village hero who fought various forms of machines and outer world forces in his screen time. I was truly surprised at this trend of speculation and recognized the need to focus on scientific and fantastic elements in my own stories: it was reminder to me that this speculative tradition has taken hold as a long stayer for at least the near future.

Just like cartoons, the video game is another medium of art that cannot be removed from the speculative tradition of the 21^st century.  The video game is steeped in fantasy and science fictional trends more than any other form of art most possibly due to the scientific interests of their creators; the video game programmers.

Other than the scientific world we live in, another aspect that influences the speculative genre to come into the fore is that speculative fiction allows the artists to empower progressive social change or social engineering via their fantastic story environments. The fantasy and the science fictional worlds are a fertile ground to seed as well as sow the progressive social ideals. While a realistic work of art cannot pitch women in a world war II setting, fighting against the Axis powers (although there were women who did), a movie or a video game can present female characters as formidable equals of male characters in their speculative worlds. Some good examples for this are the Black Widow from the Marvel Cinematic Universe or Wonder Woman from The DC Extended universe. Both are fantastic science-fantasy universes.

The new speculative fiction also allows more space to engage progressively with race politics. The opportunity provided for multiple less represented ethnicities such as African-Americans, Mongoloids and South Asians in fantastic and science fictional movies and videogames is increasing day by day. This trend is made possible by the outer worldly cinematics and themes with which these works of art engage.

Speculative fiction is not only favorable to progressive feminist and race politics, but it also encompasses a larger community of people into their political or thematic dialogue by removing the engagement with themes such as religion and nationalism. The multinational and non-religious speculative fiction can influence more people than works of art that are either pro-religious or racially dominant (by Caucasian characters).

Third and lastly my attention goes to the medium of art itself: the visual image. In our 21^st Century, the visual medium is taking over the world of literature. It is not a prediction but a common sight that visual mediums such as Cinema, Video games as well as Comic-books are replacing other forms of literature such as the novels and the stage drama. This is not to say that the novel and the stage will die away. Surely, they will not die away. But in the present as well as in the foreseeable future, the more visually dazzling mediums will loom over the non-visual novel and the limited space of the stage. My opinion is that if these mediums have to be relevant again for large masses of people, they themselves should start tackling the same speculative ideas that are the de rigueur of 21^st century cinema and the videogame. As mentioned early, this is again not a debunking of slice of life or more grounded storytelling. These genres cannot die away. But the medium has to focus more on the speculative side over grounded story telling if they won’t to have a direct impact on society.

If any artist is reading this blog post, then I suggest that you immediately start taking notes from the movies of science-fantasy you watch as well as the otherworldly video games you play. This is the future.