Visionary fiction

Visionary fiction, classified by the Book Industry Study Group under the BISAC subject heading FIC039000 FICTION / Visionary & Metaphysical, emerged as a distinct genre around the year 2000. Visionary Fiction is a literary form that illustrates the process of growth in human consciousness. While it contains an all-inclusive spiritual component and often makes use of paranormal modes of perception, it employs story elements like plot, character, and setting to immerse the reader in a drama of evolving awareness—rather than an exposition of specific teachings or practices.

While the visionary mode of writing with its specific content appears throughout the literature of numerous cultures in many ages, the term "Visionary Fiction" has only recently come into vogue. Contemporary authors have formed organizations like the Visionary Fiction Alliance to clearly define what the genre is and what works belong to this category, advocate the use of this term for all fiction of the determined type, and promote authorship and readership of this form of fiction.

While the basic definition of Visionary Fiction—the literary form that illustrates and demonstrates the process of growth in human consciousness—is now generally accepted, it remains an evolving genre with some controversy over what literature it includes. Following are some of the most frequently cited definitions, sometimes at variance with each other, which illustrate the range, historically and ideologically, of the term’s usage.

As a literary term, the word visionary is defined thus: "Visionary writing has the qualities of prophecy—perhaps it is apocalyptic in imagery, or it may be predictive in its insights, or it may contain a core of moral truth. Many of the Romantic poets (especially Blake) have been labeled visionary. Note that in its literary sense, visionary writing need not be religious in nature, though it frequently is."

In his 1929 lecture, "Psychology and Literature," (also a chapter in Modern Man in Search of a Soul), psychologist Carl Jung divides all works of art into two distinct forms, psychological and visionary. "The psychological work of art always takes its materials from the vast real of conscious human experience—from the vivid foreground of life, we might say." What is currently classified as mainstream or realism. "The latter [visionary] reverses all the conditions of the former [psychological]. The experience that furnishes the material for artistic expression is no longer familiar. It is a strange something that derives its existence from the hinterlands of man’s mind—that suggests the abyss of time separating us from pre-human ages, or evokes a superhuman world of contrasting light and darkness." Jung’s model would classify all serious imaginative literature, including the classics like Homer, Virgil, and Beowulf, as Visionary Fiction.

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