Every day, I dread picking up my phone in the morning and looking at my newsfeed. Doomscrolling, they call it. We don’t want to do it, and yet somehow, we feel compelled. Most of the time those headlines seem like something from some other reality, all strung together by pet videos and people doing ridiculously stupid things on Buzzfeed, like baking their plastic cutting boards.

It’s all so strange and surreal — and in a world that feels increasingly fictional, the surreal takes on weight. Enough weight that it starts to resonate. Hyperbole is now the new normal.

We might think that’s new, but it’s not. If you look through history, unimaginable things — both positive and negative — erupt before our eyes all the time. And we’re stunned. We should be stunned. Life is a stunning thing. Whether it’s a news report announcing a groundbreaking treatment that could end Alzheimer’s…or watching the horror of our own Capitol being overrun. Between taking our kids to school and debating whether Zumba or Ozempic is going to solve all our problems, we spend our time wandering the rooms of our own personal unreal estate, ­grappling with a wide world of WTF.

And yet people will talk about ­fiction — particularly speculative ­fiction — as being “not real.” I’ve always taken umbrage at that. I don’t write untrue stories. At the core of everything I attempt — every surreal essay on the human condition in novel form — I’m trying to get at something very real, very true. Of course, the particulars might be filtered through odd lenses—but what is a lens if not a way to find clearer focus?

I’m often told that my stories can feel prophetic, which is a little scary. I mean, when I wrote Unwind as a response to how our society fails to deal effectively with issues of reproductive rights, it was a cautionary tale. It wasn’t supposed to be an instruction manual. Or Dry, which I wrote with my son Jarrod. It didn’t so much predict the California drought and cyclic resurgence of devastating fires — that was already happening by the time it was published in 2018. But it did accurately depict a surge of the darker side of human nature in a major crisis — including raids on Costco. (Toilet paper! Who would have thought that the world would have lost it over toilet paper?) And then there’s AI — and how the AI we’re seeing sounds more and more like the Thunderhead in its interactions with us.

The only reason speculative fiction can sound prophetic is because the lens of the surreal can be so much clearer than a window. It can magnify specifics and help us to see what’s hiding within a grander vista.

At a bookstore event a few years ago, when the subject of predictive speculative fiction came up, one audience member shouted out, “Can’t you predict something happy for once?”

And so I took them up on the challenge. I decided to write a book about a pandemic of joy. A virus that, once you recovered, would leave you in a state of utter contentment and fulfillment for the rest of your life. And the funny thing was, the more I considered it, the less far-fetched it seemed. I mean, think about it. What makes a successful virus? We think of COVID-19 as a successful virus because of how it overtook the world — but it wasn’t successful at all, because it forced us to go to war with it and defeat it. No — a truly successful virus would be one that we actually wanted to spread. And who wouldn’t want to spread joy? Well…actually, there’d be a lot of people. Politicians, who could no longer prey on people’s fear and anger, because no one was fearful or angry anymore. Or businesses whose success depends on convincing people they need all the junk they’re selling in order to be happy. Come to think of it, there’d be a vested interest around the world in coming up with a vaccine against happiness.

Tiburón by contemporary artist Jonas Raider, inspired by All Better Now. Illustration: Jonas Raider.

With All Better Now, I’m exploring human nature again, because that seems to be an obsession with me. This time it’s about the potential upheaval when human nature changes for the better.

Is it factual? No, it’s made up.

Is it true? Damn right it is!

Because when you make stuff up for a living, you start to feel a responsibility to ensure that the stuff you invent is additive to the world. In that way, writers aren’t all that different from scientists. Albeit, mad scientists. But I, for one, don’t mind flooring the pedal in Doc Brown’s Delorian, or throwing the switch in Dr. Frankenstein’s lab. Because mad scientists change the world. Just look at Nikola Tesla, who gave us AC current, and radio. (Tesla, not Marconi — credit where credit is due.) Those things were science fiction until speculation became reality.

Which proves that there’s a whole lot of stuff worth making up!

From the May/June 2025 special issue of The Horn Book Magazine: Perception and Reality. Find more in the "Reality Reimagined" series here.

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