Most of you know me here on My Book Therapy as the Social Media Mentor. That’s not changing, but I’m adding some new things to my resume. One that I’m super excited about is scifi author.

That’s right. I just signed a contract with Prism Book Group for my Christian science fiction manuscript, ALONE.

With that, Susie decided that I could represent this genre at My Book Therapy. So once a month I’ll be posting on Social Media, and once a month, I’ll be sharing a post about spec fiction!

I was talking with a non-publishing friend a while back, and she asked me what kind of book I was writing.  I told her about my science fiction series and my Steampunk series. Then I said, “Actually the short answer is I write spec.”

At her blank look, I corrected myself. “Speculative fiction.”

If anything, her look got more confused, and I realized she had no idea what I was talking about when I said speculative. So I took the opportunity to explain the term to her.

Speculative, or spec for short, is the umbrella genre where you find all kinds of weird fiction—from science fiction, fantasy, horror, Steampunk, etc. If you go into a mainstream bookstore it’s all the books you find in the science fiction/fantasy section.

And this lead me to an interesting distinction about this term. It’s one you almost exclusively used in the Christian fiction world.

That’s not all that surprising if dig a little and consider the history of Christian fiction. When Christian fiction  began to emerge, there was a deep prejudice against science fiction. Many thought that there could never be such a thing as Christian science fiction.

Odd if you think about it, considering the works of C.S. Lewis, and some of the late nineteenth century writers. Although, strictly speaking his works were fantasy, not science fiction (the difference between fantasy and Science Fiction will be coming).

But back to speculative. These are books where the main components are supernatural. There are always some overlap books, especially now that indie publishing has blown open the doors. It’s possible to have a strong romance or suspense thread in a spec book.

Many of the large Christian publishing houses have spec lines. But one of the leaders of speculative fiction in the Christian world is Enclave Publishing (formally Marcher Lord Press). They ONLY publish spec fiction.

I believe Speculative is a genre that’s here to stay in the Christian publishing world. What do you think?