Men In Gorilla Suits

In the year 2000, flying cars will take us to work and robots will babysit our children and walk our dogs. We will vacation on the moon and Mars; all our needs will be taken care of. Our only fear is an attack from Galagaxian-7...or maybe a portal opening from a fantasy realm and dragons loose in the streets. Lines blur between Macondo, City of Mirrors and our world; somewhere in northern Wisconsin, an English bulldog controls the forces of gravity. Speculative fiction is often viewed as the genre of pulps, but so many classics we're used to are speculative works -- even though we do not see them as such. This week, we devote an episode to speculative fiction... * * * We begin by defining what speculative fiction is to us, and then talk about the first speculative work we fell in love with. After that, it's on to why people love speculative fiction so much...while others hate it. Find out if we have ever written speculative fiction...and if we think there's room for speculating in literary novels (or if here