A Cosmonaut’s Prospectus
by Joshua Fagan
Writing about literary trends and tendencies from the narrow viewpoint afforded by the present has never been easy. In “How It Strikes a Contemporary,” Robert Browning creates as an allegory of the poet-figure an enigmatic observer, attempting to understand the beguiling networks of secrets and circumstances unfolding themselves in the enigmatic corners he observes. That the man feels unreal, more akin to an eerie, vague description of a spirit than a person of flesh and blood, is essential to the ideas Browning considers with this poem. An entirely comprehensive perspective of contemporary life strikes us as strangely inhuman. Virginia Woolf’s more famous “How It Strikes a Contemporary” explicitly discusses the difficulty of comprehending one’s own artistic era. Study the Romantic or Elizabethan eras, and there are lists of canonical poets and ideologies to comprehend and interpret. Without the aid of history, Woolf argues, considering a literary moment becomes a matter of slogging through an unsettled haze.
Despite these warnings, becoming detached from the present and living only in the past is no answer, especially as the editor of a speculative-fiction magazine. Fiction is at a particularly precarious and exciting moment, and to neglect the opportunity to document that moment would be wasteful. When I started Orion’s Belt in 2021, it was as a protest against the separation of literary fiction and speculative fiction, against the lack of flash fiction that combined the experimental daring of the best speculative fiction with the attention to craft and style of the best literary fiction. I would never claim Orion’s Belt was the only magazine to contemplate this intersection, even if it was one of the few that made its stance so explicit. Nor would I be so arrogant as to claim Orion’s Belt has fundamentally changed the fictional landscape. Still, I believe this magazine is representative of a distinct literary moment that deserves more attention. This moment is an attempt to make sense out of a chaotic era where words saturate us, and yet fiction and poetry seem fundamentally less important than they were in previous eras.
The most convenient, concise way to frame the current crisis in fiction is that realist fiction is no longer relevant to map the world as it exists. Reality has become unreal, breaking down and becoming fragmented. The best way to capture this unreality, then, is through speculative fiction. References to the crisis caused by climate change and other pressing modern-day issues add depth and immediacy to this narrative. Ask a speculative writer why they choose to write speculative fiction, and you will likely a receive a response somewhat like this. A brilliant former professor of mine at Columbia, Hilary Leichter, said in an interview that she chose to set her modern surrealist masterpiece Temporary in a speculative register because “I don’t feel like I’m in a realist world.”
This narrative is not wrong, and it’s an effective counter against inanities about speculative fiction not being as relevant or important as realist fiction. The problem is that the narrative is incomplete. In the middle of the nineteenth century, ambitious writers like Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert, determined to deflate the lingering corpse of Romanticism by capturing social life as it was actually lived, created what exists in the popular consciousness as the “realist novel.” Since their triumph, every new school or movement of writers has positioned themselves as innovators against a sclerotic and outdated realist establishment.
Virginia Woolf, in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” parries the attacks of steadfast realists of her era by asserting that the writing of these authors portrays reality by focusing ardently on external, empirically observable characteristics. This is wrongheaded, she claims, asserting that these dogmatic realists “were never interested in character itself; or in the book itself,” but rather in “something outside.” They think of characters as an extension of material and social circumstances, not full, enigmatically vibrant people with stormy and unpredictable inner lives.
Just as Woolf and her fellow modernists attacked Edwardian realism, so did the postmodernists attack postwar realism, and so do the intelligent, vibrantly creative speculative fiction authors of today attack the elliptical, enervated form of writing that passes for realism in our century. Does this make the modern assault on realism redundant? Not necessarily. What is at stake today is not only the conception of what literature should be, but the relevance of literature itself.
I have no desire to declare that there are no great books being written, or that the art being made today is merely a pale shadow of the daring works made in decades and centuries past. Doing so would be regressive and a little silly. As Lincoln Michel has discussed in “The Future of the Future of Books,” consumers are not going to stop buying and reading books. The publishing industry is not in danger of collapsing. Yet success and even quality are not the same as relevancy. Bruce Springsteen’s last few albums have been relatively commercially successful, and they’ve received rapturous critical acclaim. Calling them relevant would nonetheless be an exaggeration to the point of mischaracterization. Literature is not going to disappear, but there is a chance that it could become the equivalent of classical music or opera: a fascinating subject continuing to produce daring works, but no longer a subject relevant to the zeitgeist. Poetry has faced this fate for years; no one writes poetry to become rich. Story-writing could face the same fate, displaced by film, TV, and videogames.
The current moment in literature arrives at a time of great uncertainty for realism as a fictional mode, but also for literature as a method of storytelling. Perhaps this era will pass. As Browning and Woolf demonstrate, accurately reading one’s contemporary literary moment is nearly impossible. There is a chance that a fleet of canonical, widely beloved writers will emerge in the next five years. Perhaps we’ll be awash in another golden age, filled with writers who will make as firm an impact on this century as Woolf and T.S. Eliot made on the last century. Still, from my contemporary position, that seems unlikely.
Yet we needn’t despair. There is still a place for great English-language literature, even if it’s a less prominent place than in past ages. In a world where conventional speculative fiction with enormous budgets has taken over film and TV, literary magazines like Strange Horizons, Uncanny, or even Orion’s Belt exist to showcase an alternative. Haunting, intimate stories and poems we’ve published, like “A Generation of Darkness” or “architect of night-bridges,” are not attacks on the supremacy of Star Wars or Game of Thrones. They are simply demonstrations that even though literature may no longer be the preeminent medium for world-historical, era-defining fiction, there are still avenues where it remains unmatched.
Works like these two incisive, ethereal pieces depend on the specific words and sentences chosen, where written language functions as a kind of incantation summoning that which can’t be accessed in quite the same way by any other format. As we end our second year here at Orion’s Belt, I’m proud to say that we’ve published works like these, and we will ardently, lovingly continue to do so.
Joshua Fagan is a writer and critic currently residing in New York City. His creative work has previously been published in venues including Daily Science Fiction, The Fantastic Other, and Star*Line. He is the author of the Amazon bestseller The Philosophy of Avatar, an extended study of Avatar: The Last Airbender in the context of the Western philosophical tradition. As an academic, his work focuses on the intersection of literature, myth, and technology in the aftermath of Darwin, and his critical work has been published in The Robert Frost Review. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the literary speculative-fiction publication Orion’s Belt. His YouTube channel has received over 1.6 million views.