Review of Eugen Bacon's book: Writing Speculative Fiction

Faerie Review

'Writing Speculative Fiction - creative and critical approaches'

Author: Eugen Bacon

Publisher: Red Globe Press (Macmillan International)
Reviewer: Louisa John-Krol, Winter 2019 Australia

Enchanting, talented, brilliant,
multi-award-winning
African-Australian author
Eugen Bacon

Eugen Bacon’s book offers a paradox that is extraordinarily liberating. On the one hand it provides carefully researched, nuanced distinctions between fantasy, science fiction, horror and paranormal genres and their sub-genres to include fairy tales, dark fantasy, myths and legends, and magical realism, for example. On the other it embraces speculative fiction as an umbrella for bending traditional genre fiction, crossing into hybrids, or cross-genre forms rich with playful text that is also literary.   

The book builds a sturdy ship by which the reader may navigate the chaos of postmodern rapids, whirlpools, riptides, squalls and centuries of tempests preceding them. At the same time, conversely, she dares us to be playful, joyful, questing and explorative about categories, throwing them into the air like jester’s props. Take risks! Mix them up, try new patterns, spin new forms! Rather than cowering before thrones of tycoons and market forces, we stand for artistic freedom. As a genre-crosser from way back, musically and in other respects, I relate to this spirit of play. 

As if gleefully foreshadowing this paradox, Bacon wrote by hand on a front page for me personally: ‘Prepare to be astonished!’ Only after reading her book, did it occur to me how witty that was. Astonishment, by its nature, defies preparation. If we know we are about to be astonished, can we be any more prepared for it? Only if we guess the source from which astonishment might spring! If we were reading a formulaic Mills and Boon romance, perhaps we’d stand a chance at preparation? When we read great literature in any genre (or mixed genres) - a greatness expressed through such attributes as vibrant vocabulary and metaphor, as Bacon evinces - possibilities of astonishment increase exponentially, to such an extent that they may well be infinite. How do we prepare for infinity?

Her citations of Atwood’s dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale are timely with regard to America’s current Republican Party, e.g. what is happening in states like Alabama in backward legislation around women’s rights to terminate pregnancy. Under new draconian laws, a doctor who administers an abortion can incur more jail time than the rapist who impregnated that womb in the first place. Clearly it was a prescient book, written long before the Trump regime. Watching the TV series on DVD interspersed with Trump’s speeches, congressional hearings and news reports in real time, is like witnessing a rolling crystal ball of misogyny, crashing through the window of reality.

Memorable advice from Bacon includes:

• Choose prompts that resonate with you. If you hit a wall, it might not be writer’s block; it could simply be that you’re tackling the wrong topic.

• Finding, or developing, your writerly voice matters.

• Consider archetypes.

• Characteristics: be experimental, take risks, imagine the unthinkable! Try mixing or swapping the qualities of sentient beings with those of inanimate objects and find out where the idea takes you. Bacon ’s book itself is a splendid demonstration of this advice in practice. The book itself seems to gain a life of its own, working upon the soul as a sort of shamanic shapeshifter. 

Bacon’s metaphor (on page 145 and earlier, in variants) of pouring new wine into old skins, turns up elsewhere in her conversations or presentations in relation to fairy tales, and resonates with me. Postmodernism is about a recasting of stories anew, remodelling, adaptation or reinventing the old, like the 2012 film Snow White and the Huntsman, based on the original Brothers Grimm fairy-tale. 

I also relate to this book passionately as a spinner of magic-realism, fables, fairy-tales and fantasy across many modes, from music to literature. The conventional contemporary distinction between emerging and established writer may oversimplify and misrepresent artistic experience. Some people churn out popular books, songs, paintings or other creations methodically, attaining commercial success or critical acclaim with little or no inspiration, such that the Muse might be absent from their endeavours. 

Others limp along for years, or bounce from one failure to the next, never quite hitting the mark. Some skilfully balance wit, flair, scholarship and authenticity, as if born for their century. Others are at odds with their era, suffering under its zeitgeist, painfully at war with the spirit of their age, even attempting to destroy their work or themselves, which some might say, amounts to the same thing. Some people start young and run out of puff. Others start late and bloom forever. One kind of success need not cancel another. It’s possible to have it all, or none, or some, at one time or another. 

If you are wondering whether this book is for you, based on an estimation of yourself as ‘emerging’ or ‘established’, you might be doing yourself a disservice. This book requires no such distinction. It is, purely and profoundly, for lovers of literature. 

Approaching life - and thus writing - with a child’s wonder, is another attitude that Bacon embraces.

Eugen Bacon, author

On page 62 she touches lovingly upon Labyrinths, a book I too enjoyed by Jorge Luis Borges. Bacon remarks upon the format of stories within stories and the interplay of juxtaposition. There’s another haunting tale by Borges, about a ‘being sensitive to the many shades of the human soul’, who lies dormant on the first step of the Tower of Victory until, at someone’s approach, its inner life begins to glow, approaching consciousness as it follows the visitor up the staircase, and gleaming ever more brilliantly, reaching its ultimate form only at the uppermost step, when the climber ‘has attained Nirvana and whose acts cast no shadows.’ Over centuries, it has reached the terrace only once. (p.15-16, ‘A Bao A Qu’, The Book of Imaginary Beings, Penguin Books.) For me, Bacon’s sensitivity to literature and life - and her quest to embrace them both with wonderment - encapsulates the A Bao A Qu's mysterious ascent.

Following her final quotation of an inspiring author (on page 166), Eugen extends encouragement to her own readers: ‘Perhaps you too can know this genus of magic’.

Find out more about Eugen Bacon’s enchanting writing from her website at eugenbacon.com, or follow her on Twitter @EugenBacon