Everybody died on the shortest day – a collection of short speculative fiction
For the mini-thesis of my Masters in Creative Writing, I wrote a collection of short stories within the genre of speculative fiction. The collection is accompanied by a brief critical reflective essay. The stories themselves are all set in Cape Town, on actual places I see every day, but with imaginative twists in the plot, narrative and characterisation since, as Margaret Atwood explained, “speculative fiction is literature that deals with possibilities in a society which have not yet been enacted but are latent”. The stories revolve around the subject of death. Each story handles the topic in different ways, some focusing on grief, the fading of that person from one’s memory, or denial and even resentment. Every story contains an element of what Freud termed “the uncanny”. The aim of this element was to alter the Cape Town that readers know and bring new insights to the familiar. Stories vary in genre from horror to science fiction and even fabulism, since speculative fiction acts as an umbrella term and utilises many sub-genres to accomplish its narratives. The characters range from a family grafted onto one body to live together, to university friends who tend to their deceased colleague like a pot plant on their windowsill. In this way, I hope to demonstrate that the varied responses to death do not keep the characters further from it, but in fact bring them closer to dealing with it. My literary influences range between horror, gothic, science fiction and surrealism. Authors such as Franz Kafka, Kobo Abe, Mariana Enriquez and Edgar Allan Poe have profoundly influenced my own writing. In part, as a tribute to these influences, I have sought to write a collection of stories inspired by my personal vision of a speculative future of death in Cape Town.
The Uncanny, Futurism, Speculative Fiction, Short Fiction, Horror
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