Guest Blog Post - Introducing the Visionary Fiction Ring. Posted by Saleena Karim

Visionary Fiction is the main genre, or category, of my novels. I wrote an article for Writer's Journal a few years ago, as well as a blog post describing this genre a few months ago. Visionary fiction is an ancient storytelling art but a relatively new genre for the publishing industry. Recently, I've had a wonderful time connecting with two other visionary fiction authors, Saleena Karim and Shannan Sinclair on our Goodreads visionary fiction group. Our discussions have sparked our passion for the genre, and we've created a project for ourselves: we will post all three of our perspectives on the relevance of visionary fiction in today's world on each of our blogs later this month. More projects together will follow. Our goal - increase reader awareness of this fascinating genre!

Saleen Karim, the author of Systems A Novel, posted on her blog on March 12, and it is a wonderful introduction to our project. Enjoy her post, below.

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Recently I wrote a post about the difficulty I was having with defining the genre of Systems. Though I found the elusive ‘metaphysics’ category at Amazon (and no, I haven’t got round to re-classifying Systems there yet), I still felt that it would be good if the novel could be classified in a way that didn’t make it sound like it belonged to a tiny or specialist niche (or conversely placed it in too broad a category such as sci-fi).

Since then I’ve met Jodine Turner and Shannan Sinclair at a Goodreads group dedicated to visionary fiction. We’ve all agreed that since our type of fiction needs a brand awareness campaign, we’re going to make an attempt to do just that ourselves. And so, we’ve started a web-ring for visionary fiction (see the new menu on the right-hand side of this page containing links to Jodine and Shannon’s sites) and we’re brainstorming some other ideas at the moment. I’ve also created a new category at this blog especially for Visionary fiction.

So, what is visionary fiction? In one way it could be described as similar to inspirational fiction; it’s often inspired by a search for a higher truth, but it isn’t always about or aimed at readers of a particular faith. It can be metaphysical, or esoteric, or spiritual in tone. It often involves the paranormal. Of course this means that visionary fiction is most likely to also fall under fantasy, as does Jodine’s Carry on the Flame series. But this is not always the case. Systems (as sci-fi) is a case in point. So is Shannan’s Dream Walker, which she describes as ‘Quantum fiction’ because it explores quantum and string theories.

But what all visionary fiction has in common is that it it takes its inspiration from that fascinating creature called humanity and explores its limitless potential. A pioneer of the term ‘visionary’, Michael Gurian, describes it as “fiction in which the expansion of the human mind drives the plot“.
Interested in knowing more? Watch this space for updates. Soon Jodine and Shannan will be dropping in to give us their insights on visionary fiction and its relevance in today’s world.

If you have written a novel and think it might fit into what I’ve described here, say hello here or at Goodreads. We’re looking for more authors to join this ring.