Stories Taking On Flesh
How do we evaluate Christian Speculative Fiction?
I think this is a key question to answer if one is to correctly evaluate the state of Christian Speculative Fiction in general. There are two main areas to evaluate the general state.
Conjunction of Mercury and Venus, align above the Moon, at the Paranal Observatory.
1. The popularity of the Christian Speculative Fiction market.
I think this is what most people tend to think of when this subject is broached. Is the market expanding or shrinking? Are publishers accepting more or less such titles? Are bookstores carrying more of it or less? Is indie-publishing succeeding in publishing and selling Christian Speculative Fiction titles?
I would propose that by itself, this is an inadequate gauge of how the genre is doing. More to the point, it is a symptom, not the cause. Symptoms are good at getting an idea if there is a problem or not, but not how to fix it. Too often, we see the symptom of bookstores carrying little Christian Speculative Fiction, and we hash over how to deal with the symptom.
It’s much like a doctor saying, “Oh, your persistent headaches aren’t a big deal. Take pain reliever and move on.” When all the time the person may be about to have a stroke or an aneurysm. Dealing with symptoms rarely addresses the cause of the symptoms. But that is how we tend to approach fixing any perceived problems in Christian Speculative Fiction.
Likewise, trying to figure out how to get bookstores to carry more CSF titles or publishers to publish more of the genre through artificial means is about as effective as trying to heal cancer with a band-aid.
The solution is to address the core issues in order to change the symptoms. What are those?
2. The quality of Christian Speculative Fiction as a whole.
This is not to suggest that there is little quality in CSF. Rather, that the overall quality may not be where it should be in order to expand the market.
I know, I know. There are other factors involved. Good quality books languish in obscurity all the time, while fluff sells. Some will hang the whole thing on marketing, which is why they point to the publishers and bookstores. But that doesn’t change the truth.
Without a focus on quality in Christian Speculative Fiction, there can be no long-term expansion of the market.
Propping up mediocre stories with marketing will only take a book so far. It is artificial, and only works well when there is product people want to buy. Marketing’s job is to let the right people know you have a good product. If they get it and discover it is not good, you will kill return sales and continued expansion.
Which brings us back to the question at the top. How do we evaluate that quality?
I suggest the standard answer to that, while important, is insufficient: a focus on good story-telling, the knowledge of the craft in plotting, characters, scenery, word-smithing, grammar, spelling, hooks, transitions, points of view, etc.
Because while CFS has been known to be deficient in those departments at times, such that even today many stay away from reading or admitting they write Christian Speculative Fiction, that doesn’t quite cover the full concept of quality we should expect. After all, if we are including “Christian” as part of the genre title, what does that mean and how do we judge it? The previous paragraph applies to all novels and genres. Where does the Christian element come into the quality?
Of course, that can open up another whole can of worms that’s been discussed here and other places. People start evaluating doctrines, use of magic, cussing, sex, cussing, sex, bonnets, cussing, magic, sex . . . you get the picture. That rarely tells us much about the quality of the Christian content, or how well it is presented. So I offer the following guideline on how to evaluate real Christian Speculative Fiction.
Evaluate how well a story incarnates Christian themes and elements into an engaging story.
We just celebrated Christmas. The primary point of that celebration was the incarnation of Christ into the world. To incarnate something is to “embody it in flesh.” The immaterial becomes real to our senses and mind. Once incarnated in a baby, Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, could be held, kissed, hugged, and rocked to sleep. He became part of our story, our reality.
Writing a story containing Christian themes and elements is admittedly not easy to do. Too often it can end up appearing unnatural to the setting, the characters, or forced into the plot. Sometimes it can appear the plot is serving the message instead of the plot embodying the message. When done right, a message, Christian theme or element, flows with, in, and from the real world of the story. It becomes incarnate within the story itself rather than appearing to drive the story or stand apart from the story to draw attention to itself.
Combining how well authors incarnate Christianity along with the other elements of how to tell a good story is the route to evaluating how well the market as a whole is performing. Because the more titles that hit that level of quality in Christian Speculative Fiction, the better the genre as a group does, both in the market and in the reader’s hearts. Without that core in place, all the rest is meaningless.
How well do you feel the genre as a whole is incarnating Christianity into their stories?
I don’t think you can make quality the basis of a healthy market. For secular speculative fiction, there’s always been a wide variety in quality across the board. Usually a market is healthy when there’s a large number of books being published of all types. There’s Hugo-award winning work, B-tier writers, c-grade military fiction, d-grade video game tie-in novels, and quite a few things that get published only because of author name. If anything, the healthier the market, the more quality problems you have: look at YA fiction at the height of the boom for an example.
I agree writers need to step up their game, but the health of the market should be in how many writers are getting the opportunity to tell their stories. Very few do to any real audience.
Agree in the general market, and the desired outcome: people reading our stories.
Still, the way to get people reading our stories is to do them so well that people want to read them. You’ll see that with the occasional breakout author like Deker. Who, incidentally, in an interview with Jeff Gerke a few years ago shied away from calling himself a Christian Speculative writer because the term “Christian” had too much negative connotations for him when attached to novels. Rather, he sought to tell good stories and the Christian element flowed from it. Much like what I was talking about.
The more novels that are well written including in the area of effectively incarnating the faith into the story, the healthier it will be as a whole. People won’t tend to think of them as “Christian” whether they contain the gospel or not, because while there, it doesn’t stand up and wave its hands in the air for attention. It just shows faith in action, in the lives of believable characters and stories. Without that, you can’t create the demand that would drive a thriving Christian Speculative fiction market.
I’m not saying there has to be most of them of that quality, and who knows, maybe we’re already there? But we need to have enough of a percentage of such quality to draw people to the genre. If that isn’t there, other solutions are just attempts to prop up something that can’t stand on its own.
How well do you feel the genre as a whole is incarnating Christianity into their stories?
I’ve wondered about the value of the genre term “Speculative Fiction.” Has it just distanced writers from potential readers? If someone asks you what kind of fiction you write, and you state “Speculative Fiction” or “Fantasy,” which makes the instant connection? SpecFic covers Fantasy, Sci-Fi and some others, but is the extra layer needed? Especially when Fantasy and Sci-fi are so well-established?
There’s no way of knowing how much this may impact the market. However, with many Christian authors debating the value of attaching “Christian Fiction” to their works, is adding another layer helpful or hurtful?
If this all sounds basic, it is. We need to start with the basics. There’s a lot of discussion in recent posts on the state of the ChristSpecFic market. People are smart enough to figure out what SpecFic is, but the question is whether or not such a market exists. Fantasy and sci-fi exist and people love them.
Many people are working hard to make ChristSpecFic successful. Let’s make sure we’re not unnecessarily reinventing the wheel and flying right by the readers everyone is looking for.
Correct. Readers aren’t going to generally know what you mean by using the term Christian Speculative Fiction. They think in terms of fantasy, science fiction, horror, etc. Likewise, when someone wants to know what I write, I don’t use the term Speculative Fiction short of deciding it is a good teachable moment. 🙂
It is more an insiders term to refer to fiction written by a “not currently true but what if . . .” by and/or for a Christian that portrays some elements of Christian life in it. It isn’t so much a genre, but a collection of genres that fit into such a category. So when one refers to the Speculative Fiction market, it refers to the combined markets of the genres falling under that umbrella term. Not a market as a reader would perceive it, but a mega-market made up of several for insider analysis.
This is a site dedicated to promoting Christian Speculative Fiction, thus the focus. But that focus isn’t toward marketing speculative fiction as a genre to readers, but each individual genre under that umbrella. But when we want to talk about the group as a whole, it is a lot easier to say “Christian Speculative Fiction” than to list out every possible genre and sub-genre we’re referring to.