By JB Andre •

Not all speculative fiction is equally speculative. While much engages with the unreal (vampires, superpowers, ghosts), or the possibly real (future technologies, alternative timelines), a very small sliver of speculative fiction will try to capture something impossible or paradoxical. This last category—one I’ve come to call the speculative impossible—was completely hidden to me until reading Henry Hoke’s Open Throat, a novel told from the point of view of a mountain lion in the Hollywood Hills. One line in particular jumped out at me, after the mountain lion scares a hiker and sees themselves in the glass on the hiker’s phone:

I lean close and see something in the black screen
maybe a tongue and teeth
my reflection
but I don’t have that word yet

This line created my understanding of the speculative impossible. It summoned the contradiction that the narrator has to balance throughout the whole story. How can you write a word you don’t have? Open Throat is trying faithfully to depict the consciousness of something that is recognizably inhuman, yet is written for a human audience. The world of Open Throat is essentially our world, and the only speculative element is this impossible contradiction.

In this essay, I’m most interested in how authors use ambiguity in language to sell readers on an impossible premise. As a speculative writer, I’ve been in many workshops where the feedback I receive is mostly focused on the logical implications of my premise. So many readers will latch on to an intellectual question about the story, and be completely unable to connect with the emotional core of the story because of this. I’ll be looking at Henry Hoke’s Open Throat, Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, a novel on an island where items disappear both physically and from memory, and Charles Yu’s “The Man Who Became Himself,” a story in which a man discovers an awareness that he is at once himself and not himself.

We’ve already established the paradox Hoke is navigating: we are in a consciousness that uses language it does not have, one that is both mountain lion and human. How does Hoke thread this needle? The following is a passage where the mountain lion reflects on how much the hikers on the trail talk about New York.

they talk about new york a lot in ellay // in new york you don’t need a car // cars are loud metals that carry people to the park and that they leave in lines and clusters near the paths and that they can’t stop talking about needing but not in new york // is new york where I have to go […] I want to go to a place where I won’t be hated // where there are therapists running around everywhere like deer and I can just find one and catch it and pin it down // store it somewhere safe and visit it once a week

The first thing to note is the vocabulary and the grammatical structure. Los Angeles (LA) is referred to as “ellay” by the mountain lion, and cars are not machines but “loud metals.” Throughout the passage, there is a lack of capitalization for proper nouns and sentences are not separated by periods but by line breaks, as if in a poem. All of these choices imply to the reader that we are dealing with a different kind of intelligence—one that perhaps thinks more poetically than logically, one that has a limited understanding of language. These serve to create a kind of irony, wherein the reader actually knows much more than the mountain lion. We know that “ellay” is actually “LA,” and we are intimately familiar with cars, what they are, what they do, how they work. 

What Hoke does so successfully in this passage though is to make ambiguous exactly what degree of irony is being employed. The narrator clearly knows that “ellay” and “new york” are both places, that cars are made of metal and carry people around, so there is a degree of understanding, but it’s unclear where that understanding ends. Does the mountain lion think of “ellay” or “new york” as cities?

The section describing therapists as deer is especially effective in creating this ambiguity, as the therapists are “running around like deer,” can be caught and pinned down, stored, and visited once a week. This merging of animal behavior (hunting for deer) and human behavior (visiting once a week) creates a striking image, one which can be read multiple ways depending on the level of understanding we presume the mountain lion to have. In one reading, the mountain lion understands human language fully, and wants to see a shrink. In another reading, the mountain lion uses “visit once a week” as a euphemism for eating the body of a therapist over a long period of time. Then, there’s a middle ground reading, where the mountain lion understands visiting the therapist to be a vaguely positive thing, and associates it with another positive thing (catching deer), to imagine what a utopic New York might be.

The power in this section lies in the ambiguity of the irony, which allows the narrator to inhabit an ambiguous state of consciousness, one in which it can use words it “does not have.”

Fiction has the ability to create impossible realities, to entertain paradoxes. Just because it can, however, doesn’t mean it always does so successfully. Impossible premises are particularly vulnerable to losing readers who are unable to suspend their disbelief along the way. Hoke is able to accommodate his readers with an ironic ambiguity that allows for different, simultaneous readings. 

Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police similarly leverages ambiguity to navigate its central paradox. The Memory Police takes place on an island where things “disappear,” a process in which items suddenly seem to lose meaning, are ritually burned or destroyed, and fade quickly from memory. People who harbor lost items or retain memories of them are themselves disappeared by the Memory Police, and the story is told in the first person by a woman who is not immune to the island’s mysterious memory blight. Throughout the story, the woman recounts many times items have disappeared, such as birds, roses, and ferries. Somehow, the narrator is able to describe things she has forgotten, which itself is a contradiction.

So how does Ogawa navigate the paradox in her premise? First, the narrator does not shy away from concerns the reader might have. The narrator is constantly asking questions, concerned about the implications of what it means for something to disappear. “[W]hat will happen if words disappear?” she asks, which is later echoed with “[W]hat if human beings themselves disappear?” and “[W]hat if everything on the island disappears?” These questions manage to raise concerns that the reader has, while sidestepping the core question of what exactly it means for anything to disappear. 

When the narrator does home in on the experience of what disappearance is like, Ogawa slides into the ambiguity of analogy and emotion. Throughout the novel, the experience of what it means for something to disappear is not treated like a logical problem (one which might be answered by questions like: what exactly do you remember, could you still use the object for the same function), but instead is treated like an emotional problem (one which is addressed with questions of what it feels like for something to disappear). 

The novel is dotted with embedded stories that attempt to convey how the characters feel about losing memories. The narrator is a novelist herself, writing a novel about a typist who loses her voice, then loses her ability to type, finally losing herself entirely. Another character recounts silver polishers who worked in silence until they were completely unable to speak. 

When addressing the experience of memory loss head-on, the characters will even then speak in metaphor. Two metaphors in particular appear multiple times: memory as a body of water, and memory as the heart. Often, memory as water is used in the context of describing the lack of reaction to something which has been forgotten, such as when the narrator sees something that has disappeared but says “The swamp of my memory was shallow and still.” Memory as the heart is often used to describe the cumulative effect of having forgotten so many things, such as when a man who cannot forget says to the narrator “Your heart is doing everything it can to preserve its existence. No matter how many memories these men take away, they’ll never reduce it to nothing […] There, behind your heartbeat, have you stored up all my lost memories?” 

These two metaphors even intertwine, such as when the characters discuss a music box that only one of them can remember. 

The box exists without any doubt and it’s right in front of us […] The only thing that’s different is the hearts of those who once heard it […] It’s not the box’s fault that it disappeared. But what can we do? It’s disturbing to see things that have disappeared, like tossing something hard and thorny into a peaceful pond. It sets up ripples, stirs up a whirlpool below, throws up mud from the bottom. 

This metaphor is not interested in asking logistical questions about what it means to forget something, but instead focuses on the emotional experience of memory and forgetfulness. Forgotten memories are described as “disturbing,” and “hard and thorny,” reinforcing the idea that to remember is painful, where the default mode of forgetfulness is pleasant like a “peaceful pond.” Ogawa’s continued use of these metaphors allows the narrator to address the process of memory loss with a great deal of ambiguity. 

The ambiguity comes in a few forms: questions, allegory/embedded stories, and metaphor. Explicit questions about the future (“But what can we do?”) direct the reader’s questions from logical, logistical questions to more open-ended questions that reflect the characters’ anxiety. Allegory invites the reader to consider the emotional parallels between stories that have different premises (and therefore different logistical questions: “how exactly did the typist lose her voice” vs. “how exactly did the narrator lose her memories”). Metaphor further shapes the language of the novel away from the language of logic (memory, brain, thought) to the language of emotion (memory, heart, emotion). All together, these sources of ambiguity redirect readerly attention from the logical implications of the premise to the emotional implications of the premise.

Speculative fiction has a long history of using various techniques to sell impossible premises, and in the writing process authors have to define just how precisely they will explain the internal logic of their premise. This is often thought of in the context of “hard” or “soft” magic systems, and here we see perhaps what could be an example of the softest magic system of all. Hoke and Ogawa both use ambiguity to tell logistically impossible stories—stories that would likely suffer if they tried at all to justify their internal logic. Instead, these authors opt for an ambiguity of irony in Hoke’s case, and the ambiguity of emotion in Ogawa’s, to tell stories that are less interested in exploring the logical implications of their premises than the humanistic ones.

So far, we’ve seen Hoke and Ogawa navigate the speculative impossible by shifting readerly attention away from questions that probe the logistical implications of their internally paradoxical premises. Charles Yu’s “The Man Who Became Himself” goes about the speculative impossible in a different way: instead of trying to shift readerly attention, Yu tries to address the premise head on, and generates ambiguity in his answers. In this story, the protagonist, David Howe, seems to one day realize that he is himself, and he is David Howe. While the title of the story seems to suggest the narrator and character becoming one, the story is in fact about the deep sense of dissociation David Howe feels. The premise is explained as follows:

It had really started a month earlier. Or not. // Whatever it was, if it was an it, had started a month earlier // […] It had happened or not happened. Either way, something or nothing. // […] There was, for instance, the habit David had developed of referring to himself, daily and with increasing frequency, in the third person.

In this passage, Yu accomplishes a number of things. First, he manages to address the central premise without actually providing answers to logistical questions. Rather, the answers are vague and non-committal. Strings of statements like “it had happened or not happened,” and “it had started a month earlier. Or not,” force the reader to hold multiple conflicting realities in their mind, all the while driving towards increasing specificity—the fact that something happened a month ago, something that involves David, and led to him referring to himself in the third person. It allows for the possibility that yes, David might be crazy, maybe nothing happened, but more likely, whatever happened is in some way impossible to communicate. The sense of dissociation is implied by David’s use of the third person—a kind of distance he feels from himself.

Over the course of the story, the narrator continually tries to explain what is happening, but each attempt reveals the internal paradox of the story. David is both himself and not himself, and it’s not that he cannot understand this; the issue is that it makes no sense for David to not be himself. This produces a moment where David tells his wife, “I don’t understand how this happened,” and when she does not understand what he means, he “point[s] at David, at himself, at his self. ‘This,’ he says.” Here, the premise is not further explained by David’s answer of “this,” but in how Yu separates out who David points to. By breaking apart David, himself, and “his self,” Yu reveals how David feels as though he is dissociating into separate identities, as though he is separate from himself.  

The ambiguity in “The Man Who Became Himself” is generated by the internal contradictions used to explain the premise (Something did or did not happen). Even the title itself is a kind of contradiction of its premise—the title implies that David’s fractured identity somehow comes together into one whole identity, but the story is clearly about a dissociation so strong that the best David can do by the end is to be “David and […] not David, [his wife’s] husband but […] also a stranger.” In the end, David’s dissociation is certainly not resolved. But, by presenting David’s dissociation as “becoming himself,” Yu defamiliarizes the concept of defamiliarization itself. Instead of using ambiguity to obscure a paradoxical premise, Yu highlights the ambiguity and paradox of dissociation to convey precisely how unsettling it is. In framing a somewhat common experience in the speculative impossible, Yu has managed to convey the paradoxical nature of human psychology.

Hoke, Ogawa, and Yu all write the impossible, and do it well. By reading their works, I’ve come to develop a framework for understanding the speculative impossible. The genre concerns itself with premises that are internally paradoxical. The stories are not simply showing phenomena that do not exist, but are depictions of things which logically could not exist. What Hoke, Ogawa, and Yu do so masterfully is to not avoid these questions, but to leverage ambiguity when the questions arise. By doing this, writers of the speculative impossible can tap into a mode of writing that is more focused on communicating an internal, emotional reality than creating a textual, logistical one. 

 

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JB ANDRE holds a bachelor’s in neuroscience, a teaching degree, and an MFA in fiction from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. He works as an academic specialist at the University of Chicago. His work is forthcoming or published in New Ohio Review, Propagule, The Account, Uncharted, and anthologized in the Red Mare Collection 2025. 

 

Featured image by Robert Thiemann, courtesy of Unsplash.