Introduction

The Circle, Columbus Day, The Tommyknockers are all very different stories, but can be shelved in the same section, speculative fiction. Speculative fiction may sound like one genre, but really it’s an umbrella term that pulls many subgenres under one roof. It takes dystopian, space opera, and horror novels and wraps them into one genre bundle while promising different structures. While speculative fiction can also include other subgenres, we’ll focus on the three I mentioned.

Most craft advice treats plot structure as universal, but the fingerprint of each subgenre shapes the tensions in wildly different ways. Dystopian focuses on tension through systemic pressures. Space Operas use scale and escalating scope to ramp up the story and character conflicts. Horror works through the slow burn build of impending doom, but not knowing what shape that threat will take until it’s too late. A writer who works across subgenres needs to understand the different structural instincts for each in order to build the stories that will leave their mark.

Dystopian Fiction: Tension Through Systemic Pressure

Dystopian fiction’s fingerprint gains it’s uniqueness from the fact that the villain isn’t really about a single villain. The antagonist in these stories stem from the system, which means the tension comes from the interaction between the protagonist’s slow realization of how much the system hinders rather than helps them. The stakes are then escalated as the system works to correct the protagonist’s deviations. Even in the most overt systems, both the protagonist and antagonist actions begin small and use an incremental escalation to pull the reader in at every turn.

The “wake-up” beat is a signature move for this genre as the protagonist first sees the system clearly and realizes the personal stakes of staying within the system.This can be a major or minor reveal, but it’s entire purpose is to get the protagonist thinking. Usually up to this point it shows the “normal world” of the dystopia. This can be the protagonist going from the day-to-day activities that make the society tick, or a survival stretch in the post-apocolyptic dystopias.

You can see this clearly in The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins where we get a view into Katniss’ morning of hunting and how she helps her family survive. You can also see this in The Book Cnesor’s Library by Bothayna Al-Essa, where the protagonist starts his new job as a Book Censor.

After you’ve woken up your protagonist, then it’s time for the incremental escalation. There’s something amazing how once you understand that something can be different you interact with the concept in new ways afterward. The mundane day-to-day becomes proofs to the lie your character has been living. Then comes the boundary testing phase, where the protagonist sees how far they can push it until the system reacts. Usually this begins with minor infractions and goes from there. Eventually your character will have to escalate to a point where they rebel against the system, find a way out of it, or rejoin it more effectively brainwashed than before. The entire time your protagonist is facing the loss of finances, family, or friends that were always there to support them.

Note that if you keep this escalation purely systemic/abstract, you’ll likely lose your readers as you beat them over the head with the “system is bad” theme. Move your protagonist and their connection characters to the forefront of the story to engage your readers.

Space Opera: Tension Through Scale and Escalating Scope

Space Opera thrives on expansion. The story’s scope widens at every step: it often begins with an individual protagonist, then a crew, then a single ship, then a star system, then a war, and eventually the fate of the galaxy. The tension comes from the gap between the character’s personal goals and the ever-increasing stakes they’re dragged into. Once a story grows this large, it becomes important to understand what’s going on outside of the protagonist’s perspective.

Many space operas use multiple-thread plotting. You can look back at the Parallel Plotlines post for more on this concept. Multi-thread plotting in space operas means the reader is either going to get a perspective from the opposing force, or will somehow interact with the opposing forces actions. This is important to remember because the actions of the protagonist will impact what their enemy does, and vice versa. The parallel plotlines allow for you to show characters across the universe and how they impact their part of the scope and others.

This turns distance/travel time into a pacing tool. Instead of a short drive to the next location on earth, your characters are often dealing with lightyears of travel, even if they find shortcuts. You can see this used as a pacing tool in The Expeditionary Force series. Throughout the books Joe Bishop and Skippy may have a masterplan, but it will take a lot of traveling to set it up, so it slows down the pacing long enough for you to enter a parallel plot threat of an alien race, Skippy’s perspective, or another element of the Expeditionary Force to get another side of the story. It also allows for key character development moments and world-building without becoming info-dumps.

The calibration challenge becomes something similar to over-leveling in a LitRPG. In Space Operas the scope can escalate so much that personal stakes get lost. This risks losing the reader’s concenr for the individual character once the fate of the galaxy stakes take over. You chose this protagonist for a reason, and even though they may just be an individual, they also are a key element of the story. When you feel that calibration drifting to the scope side of the story start forcing yourself to answer the so what in relation to your protagonist.

Horror: Tension Through Dread and the Slow Reveal (2–4 paragraphs)

The tension from the Tommyknockers by Stephen King doesn’t come from the oppression of small town politics, or the massive scope of defending a galaxy, but from the unknown pieces of the puzzle that readers try to grasp at to understand the threat.

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”

― H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature

This quote gets to the heart of how horror works, by playing on what the reader suspects but the story hasn’t revealed yet, making horror’s plot engine closer to a held breath than an escalating clock. The held breath in The Tommyknockers is a static and suffocating tension that keeps its characters in their small town. It uses elements like the slow reveal, normalcy as contract, and inversion of the “fair-play” concept from mystery. Let’s dive into each of these a little more.

• The Slow Reveal:
  • The slow reveal focuses on giving the reader just enough information to intrigue, but not so much to reveal all the facts. For each story, what is slow revealed will depend on the premise and the execution. Some stories will reveal what horror is at play from the beginning, but will hold back why the threat is doing it until the end. Others won’t reveal what the true threat is until the end. Either way, something is held back, often by providing only the perspective of the characters who don’t know what’s going on. An important note on this is that if you hold off on critical information too long you’ll lose your readers.
• Normalcy as Contrast:
  • One of the classic tropes and marks of a horror story is the normalcy contrast. Usually the story begins by establishing what normal looks like. A group of people getting ready for a vacation, moving to a new house, or going on their first date with someone. These all build on something that most can relate to and are seen as normal in our world. It also sets the baseline safety level that the readers can expect to experience. On the contrast side, ensure you’re adding elements that make the reader think something isn’t right here. It can be something small like a last minute change in plans, or pure atmospheric work as they arrive at their destination.
• Fair-play Inversion:
  • Horror inverts the fair-play principle by replacing the promise of logical order and puzzles with chaos and irrational dread. While the puzzle will be present it won’t always make sense in our world, though it follows all the rules of the threats world. This inversion takes a reader’s normal expectations of a situation and pulls on their greatest fears to deliver a gripping story. It also turns clues into terror as the characters gain more understanding with the reader on what is truly threatening them.

Horror becomes all about balance. If you are too slow or too fast on your reveals, then it collapses respectively. Without the normalcy as contrast you lose that depth to understand who the characters were before they entered the horror part of the storyline. And the fair-play inversion only works to the extent that you can align the atrocities experienced with the theme and character development/destruction arc of the story.

Conclusion

Speculative fiction casts a wide umbrella as far as the subgenres go, and each one requires different considerations. Dystopian fiction focuses on systemic pressure and personal stakes escalating together to form stories that make us question the systems we live in. Space operas start small and build in scope and scale until we’re exploring the galaxy trying to fend off the next major disaster. Horror digs into our fears and plays with the unknown through dread and controlled withholding.

I invite you to identify which of these three engines your current WIP is actually running, even if you think it’s a different subgenre. After that, consider if borrowing a tool from one of the other branches of speculative fiction can help your story.

Speculative fiction’s range may seem intimidating, but it isn’t a lack of focus. It’s an opportunity for you to build fluency across multiple genres to write better versions of whatever branch you fall under.

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