Speculative Sci-fi poetry. Individually, I know these words. We can even put speculative sci-fi together and I'm still within the realm of understanding. when we put 'sci-fi' and 'poetry' together however, I get a bit confused. 🫤 I came across a writing contest (closed now, sorry!) that was asking for spec sci-fi poems. Intrigued, I immediately googled 'speculative sci-fi poetry what' and got these five examples. I was taken aback to find that Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" was listed! "Goblin Market" is one of my favorite poems, but I always sort of half-mindedly classified it as a 'story poem,' which must have been doing the piece a grave injustice.
Another piece I quite liked was "The Quiet World" by Jeffrey McDaniel. This felt much more sci-fi than Rossetti's poem for me and I was drawn into this idea of combining sci-fi and politics. This could have a lot to do with the fact that I was browsing internet forums reading about all the BS going down in Florida's education system at the moment.
In an effort to brainstorm some ideas that mix sci-fi and political elements, I came up with: -Teachers replaced with robots
-Women replaced with robots
-Gene selection
-People falling in love with AI chatbots
I was really leaning into robots. I know space exploration and other advanced tech are all on the sci-fi table, but it seems more and more today that the world doesn't want people, they want robots who will do what they say.
So for the writing contest, I wrote a poem about robots. No idea if it was good, or if it'll win, but I'm pretty excited to try writing within a new genre.
I definitely plan on writing more speculative sci-fi poetry in the future. It's pretty fun! Highly recommend.
After all of that, I went ahead and tried to Google some female speculative sci-fi poets, but didn't really come across any? I found Octavia Butler, Ursula K.Le Guin, and a few others, but they write more full on novels and short stories rather than poetry. There's a market!
(There is never a poetry market.)
But even if there isn't a market, it can still be an enjoyable experience, so why not keep trying out the genre?
It can be a bit scary to know where to start when stepping outside of your writing comfort zone, but my advice is to start by looking up more information on the thing you want to write. There's nothing wrong with being inspired by or learning from others to better your own work.
Anyway, see ya next time! ✌️
My links:
To check out what I'm writing on WebNovel:
Where Nightmares Roam: https://www.webnovel.com/book/where-nightmares-roam_24450607206805105
To support the author (me!):
My Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mea_andrews
To see a list of my publications:
Here: https://sites.google.com/view/meas-publications/home
No photos this time around! Been boring!