Aaron Helton

All of this was a long-winded introduction to something I’ve been thinking about in specific terms for a while. I have been unable to find a name for it, so I will have to coin one and hope it makes sense: speculative nonfiction (alternatively, fictional nonfiction; alternatively to that, history jamming). I think of it as the world of nonfictional items that exist within fictional spaces, things that were created to support a fictional narrative. These items can be as fundamental as world-building elements or as obscure as references to nonexistent books. Often they can be objects, people, and places as well. For people who write fiction, most of these are throw-away elements, things that are used once or a limited number of times and discarded. Even narrative works can fall under this guise. Fictional biographies, for instance.

The idea opens up a great deal of possibility, and I think there are plenty of people like myself who would love to explore it. Presently practitioners of anything similar are pigeon-holed in genre-type alternate history (at best) or (at worst) fanfic, their works forming gray-market derivatives from their canonical sources. Given a broad enough timeline view (scale is key here), it is entirely possible that these derivative works and alternate histories could be functionally indistinguishable from the canonical sources or factual histories. And it is conceivable that future reconciliation efforts might reduce these variants and non-canonical narratives into a new canonical form, much like the collection of works we call The Bible. ...