You consider yourself an educated reader. You've read your Joyce (well, up through "Ulysses" -- leave "Finnegan's Wake" to the brilliant and the mad), your Nabokov, your Proust. You've wrestled with "The Waste Land," you know "For Whom the Bell Tolls." Your tastes run to the current masters as well as the classical. You are, for want of a better word, well-read.

Or perhaps you are a more focused reader: a lover of Southern Fiction (whatever that means these days), or the Family Drama, or, like so many of us, fiercely loyal to a stable of mismatched authors that seem, to you, to represent all that is truly fine about the written word.

No matter; unless you count yourself an admirer of fantasy, science fiction or horror, chances are you've glanced over at the "genre" section of your favorite bookstore and asked yourself, "My oh my -- what's going on over there?"

And I'm here to tell you: Everything is going on over there.

Let's make certain we are on the same page.

In the past 50 years, one form of fiction -- mimetic fiction -- has tried to pass itself off as the only serious way to write a novel. I use the term "mimetic fiction" -- fiction that creates the illusion of reality -- because it is a more accurate term than "mainstream fiction" or "literary fiction." It is important to recognize that mimetic fiction is itself a genre, because if we only value this particular type of writing, what happens to Melville's white whale, or Kafka's cockroach, or Garcia Marquez's village of Macondo?

I have nothing against mimesis, properly done. Some of my favorite fiction is pure mimesis (see Joyce's "Dubliners"). But we must acknowledge that writing in the mimetic style is a choice ... one of form. It isn't the artistic furniture that's important, it's what you do with it that counts.

What are we left with, when mimesis has left the building? The fiction of the unreal. The most common types you probably know, if only from film. Science fiction focuses on speculation about possible, or impossible, futures. Fantasy plays with basic notions of reality. Horror concentrates on the evocation of dread, much like comedy focuses on the opposite. There are other types as well: alternate history, magical realism, slipstream.

For simplicity's sake, let's gather all of the nonmimetic genres into one ungainly theoretical sack. Let's call it "speculative fiction," for it does often speculate. It's not a comfortable arrangement. There are bound to be messy disagreements, arguments, even an ideological scuffle or two. But this grouping does serve a purpose, if only to remind us that strange and exciting things are being written, outside of what we might normally think of as serious literature.

OK, OK -- so we have a name for all of that stuff now. Again, you may ask: What exactly is going on there?

And again I answer: Everything.

Describe a subgenre of mimetic fiction, and there are speculative authors doing similar work. Do you prefer fiction that is heavily character-centered? Fiction that explores the human condition, that asks the big questions? Fiction that displays a sense of history, that draws connections between important things? How about fiction that explores what it means to be an American in the 21st century? Speculative authors are writing about all of these things. They, like Pablo Picasso, have every single one of the tools that a "naturalist" (read: mimeticist) has to work with; but they, like Picasso, also have the freedom to abandon the appearance of reality when it suits their vision.

There are other virtues of speculative fiction that are particular to the genre. Truly fine science fiction can teach us about the world we live in, and the worlds we might live in, while satisfying the reader in the traditional ways. Great fabulism can have us reeling from the scope and power of the human imagination. Horror can shine a light on our collective nightmares.

But speculative fiction is, in the end, fiction. It struggles with the same issues, has many of the same goals, grants many of the same rewards. It can be funny, exhilarating, poignant, beautiful. The best of speculative fiction is, like the best of fiction, exactly why you read.

Responding to critics who often used the worst of science fiction to condemn the genre as a whole, author Theodore Sturgeon coined what was thereafter known as Sturgeon's Law: "Yes, ninety-percent of science fiction is crud. But, then again, ninety-percent of anything is crud."

There is a lot of bad speculative fiction out there. "Genre writing" can be facile, plot-driven, technologically fetishistic, reactionary, and, worst of all, stale and unimaginative. It can go wrong in all the ways other types of writing can go wrong, and it can go wrong in ways that are particular to speculative fiction.

It is my hope that this column, in the coming weeks, will be a guidepost of sorts, allowing readers to separate the chaff from the wheat more easily. I only ask that you approach speculative fiction with an open mind. There are wonders within, if you've the patience and the courage to look.