Perhaps this is a settled question now, but when I was in graduate school “speculative fiction” was one of those terms people used for the vibes of it. In my conception and in that time, it was concerned with the near-real. Perhaps a single, fantastical element represented an intrusion or disruption of the real. Such disruptions can say something about the fragility of experience, or about our relations with others and society.
The Column
Sarah Wilson
spoilers
The Column identifies its characters in terms of their roles within a larger group. In a constrained writing situation, this strategy can do a lot of work for an author. We have our own ideas about the sorts of people who do these things, and I imagine that few readers will approach them as blank slates. They are rather types–The Column is ultimately a story concerned with social and vocational connectedness–that we might sort intuitively. The two speculative elements–a cave and the titular column–create the disruptive and deadly narrative fulcrum, but it is the social reality that will either save or doom the protagonist. Whom should the player trust? As the game repeatedly insists, we don’t know these people. We know what we see, tactically, during this trial, and we know their roles.
This makes for a great setup as a speculative work, because, despite the fantastical element, the central problem is assessing strangers with a limited data set: something that we humans do all the time. I was briefly worried that this would all lead into some sort of logic puzzle where the captain lies 2/3 of the time but the cook is honest 4/5 of the time and so forth and what not, but no such thing happened. Thank goodness!
I see that other reviewers wanted fewer characters, or else more realized ones. I would like to emphatically push back against that idea. While perhaps a little more information would be interesting, ultimately The Column is compelling to me because it is a story about being surrounded by and dependent upon strangers. Realizing the characters would turn the story into something else: an Agatha Christie mystery, perhaps.
The use of roles to define characters reminded me of Stephen Crane’s The Open Boat, of all things, a story of less fantastic yet no less desperate survival.
I was very impressed by what seems like careful planning and time management. There’s a lot of well-written, carefully paced prose here to admire.