Why Speculative Fiction?
People often ask how a school bus driver who paints watercolors ends up devouring speculative fiction. The answer is simple: speculative fiction is the genre of "what if?" - and after thirty years of driving routes through Macomb County, I've learned that "what if" is the most important question you can ask.
Every time I pull out of the garage, I'm running a simulation: what if that car runs the stop sign? What if the student at the next stop isn't there? What if the weather turns? Speculative fiction just extends that questioning to bigger scales - what if society restructured? What if technology changed what it means to be human? What if the world we know is just one of many possibilities?
Authors Who've Shaped My Thinking
Ursula K. Le Guin
The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness taught me that societal structures we take for granted are choices, not inevitabilities. Her anthropological approach to world-building resonates with someone who observes hundreds of family dynamics through a bus window every day.
Octavia Butler
Parable of the Sower and Kindred showed me how speculative fiction can examine power, survival, and community. Her focus on practical adaptation - characters who prepare, learn, and endure - mirrors the mindset that keeps my students safe.
Ted Chiang
Stories of Your Life and Others and Exhalation demonstrate how rigorous speculative concepts can illuminate deeply human questions. His precision appeals to the route-planner in me.
N.K. Jemisin
The Broken Earth trilogy's exploration of systemic oppression, geological catastrophe, and chosen family speaks to anyone who's seen how communities form under pressure.
Connections: Fiction, Driving, and Art
World-Building = Route Planning
Both require understanding systems, anticipating consequences, and building contingencies. A well-built fictional world, like a well-planned route, holds together under stress.
Character Study = Student Observation
Thirty years of watching children grow, interact, and navigate their social worlds has made me appreciate fiction that treats character development with the same attention to nuance and growth.
Abstract Concepts = Watercolor Expression
Speculative fiction deals in concepts that can't be photographed - just as abstract watercolor expresses what can't be literally depicted. Both are languages for the ineffable.
Long-Form Thinking = Sourdough Patience
Epic speculative series reward the same patient, long-term thinking that maintains a sourdough starter for years. You trust the process.
Recent Reading Notes
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel (2022)
A time-travel narrative that's really about pandemics, simulation theory, and the persistence of human connection across centuries. The structure - moving between time periods like bus stops on a route - was masterful.
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (2021)
Problem-solving as narrative engine. The protagonist's methodical approach to survival - hypothesis, test, iterate - is exactly how I approach a new route or a painting that isn't working.
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson (2020)
Climate fiction that treats institutional change as seriously as technological innovation. As someone who works within a public system, I appreciated the bureaucratic realism alongside the speculative elements.
What I'm Looking For Next
I'm particularly drawn to:
- Climate fiction that centers working-class communities and practical adaptation
- Novels exploring aging, care work, and intergenerational knowledge transfer
- Speculative fiction set in the Midwest/Great Lakes region (underrepresented!)
- Stories about institutional memory and organizational change
If you have recommendations that fit these themes, I'd love to hear them. The best book suggestions I've gotten have come from fellow drivers, artists, and bakers - people who understand that stories are how we make sense of our worlds.