Patricia Forde: Return to Speculative Fiction

I have always loved speculative fiction. I cut my teeth on Margaret Atwood’s fantastic books and swiftly moved on to writers like Philip Pullman and his amazing Northern Lights series.  

There are many definitions of speculative fiction as a genre, but I see it as all fiction that is not based in the real world. That includes science fiction, fantasy and tales of magic realism.  

In these types of books, writers speculate about other worlds. In my first novel, The Wordsmith, I was looking at a post-apocalyptic world. This was a future version of Earth, showing Ark – a world that was much kinder to the environment, producing energy in natural ways and leaving a very mild footprint on the planet.  

But Ark had its own problems. It was a harsh place for the human spirit. Music was banned, art was banned, and the language of Ark was List – a list of five hundred words. The people in power used the list to suppress free speech and to exercise total control over its people. 

Writing post-apocalyptic fiction is very similar in my head to writing historical fiction. In historical fiction you are writing about a world that was, building on some facts and imagining the rest, and with the other you are writing about a time that might happen in the future. Both demand a certain amount of inventiveness!  

When I was writing The Wordsmith duology, I took some advice from an article I read by Margaret Atwood. Amongst other things, she said that her speculative novels borrowed a lot from history. So, I turned to Irish history and was reminded of the time when the Irish language was being suppressed by the British.  

During Penal times tally sticks were introduced to suppress language.  A stick was hung around a child’s neck, and each time the child spoke Irish at school, a notch was put on the stick and the child received a slap for each notch at the end of the day.  

I took that idea and applied it to the citizens of Ark. Punishment using forbidden words involved the sinner being thrown into the woods to be eaten by wolves!  

In the second book of that duology Mother Tongue, I used the ancient Irish hedge schools as a model for the rebels in Ark to teach language. Some readers might have noticed that the rebels borrowed quite a bit from Michael Collins in their political structure – using small independent cells so that no one group held all the information! 

In my new novel The Girl Who Fell To Earth I returned to the realm of what-if and looked at what might happen if someone from a far more advanced Planet came to Earth.  

Terros is a planet run by scientists, where the environment is protected, and people live forever. Aria, the protagonist, has been brought up to despise humans who are well on the way to destroying their own planet.  When she is sent to Earth on a mission to destroy human life, she finds that, for all their faults, humans have some excellent qualities, and she sets about saving them and herself. 

In this book as in The Wordsmith I want children to get a glimpse of other possibilities, other ways of living, and other ways of co-existing with fellow creatures on their planet. I don’t believe in Utopias and these worlds that I create are far from perfect, but I think all of us, and maybe young people in particular, should be encouraged through literature to explore possibilities, and see that other models of living are possible.  

Some of those models are there to sound a warning; others to encourage a better way of living. 

For me, I don’t think I’ll ever stop wondering what-if and hopefully those musings will inspire me to write more speculative books!

Her picture book To the Island was co-published by Little Island and Galway 2020 European City of Culture. She is the seventh Laureate na nÓg, Ireland’s Children’s Literature Laureate. 

The Girl Who Fell to Earth is out now and published by Little Island.

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