Speculative Literature can get Very Speculative

For this week, I read the first few short stories from Cosmicomics, “The Distance of the Moon” and “At Daybreak.” Coming from a background of math and science, during my first reading of these stories I found it hard to reconcile their content with what I knew to be scientifically possible. This pretty much ruined my reading experience. I had to reread the stories and focus more on the creative/artistic aspect than the scientific aspect in order to appreciate them. Unfortunately, a lot of the creative aspect comes from the scientific aspect, so there’s only so much separation I could really do. These stories just didn’t click for me.

            It’s definitely hard to put either of these short stories into one specific genre. They don’t have any kind of moral either, really. They’re just short stories, meant to relate a certain event, and not any more than that. This especially makes it difficult to shoehorn these stories into any kind of genre. Genre writing uses the genre itself to make a statement; adhering strictly to genre codes can be a statement, just as deviating from genre codes can also be a statement. An absence of genre altogether can also be a kind of commentary, although this commentary runs the risk of being vague if there are no well-known genre codes for audiences to go off of. This seems to be the case with Cosmicomics, because I had no idea what these stories were trying to do besides entertain. Besides having no genre codes, “At Daybreak” went one step further and started removing “human codes.” The characters experience struggles such as… never having anything to “play” with (or really any concept of “playing”), and falling down for the first time. These are things that we as humans take for granted; how can we conceive not only a reality where these things don’t happen, but a reality where even the concept of these things doesn’t exist? There is nothing at all to relate to in this story. That at least, I appreciate, because I have never been so frustrated by a story before. It takes a very creative author to conceive an alternate reality that we as humans find hard to comprehend. If anything, it speaks to its nature as a true “alien” reality.