I hope there’s an International Lego Day too, but here in the U.S., it’s time to celebrate one of the best, most creative toys ever invented, the Lego brick.

The toy was invented by a company in Denmark in 1949 and has been going strong ever since.

So why talk about it in this blog dedicated to speculative fiction? I think of “speculative fiction” in the broad sense, not the narrow sense. Can a toy be a “speculative fiction”? Absolutely. (And by the way, what fiction is not speculative?) Fiction is the concept that asks “What if?” Play in that sense is a type of fiction, just as much as fictions built out of words. Films are fiction. You might argue that a scientific hypothesis is a fiction (in the best sense of the phrase “what if,” not in the sense in which the word is often misunderstood, “a falsehood”), or a legal supposition. (Example: For legal and inheritance purposes, if you and your spouse die in the same accident, your will might stipulate that one of you dies before the other. In this “what if,” it won’t actually matter which goes first, if the deaths are almost simultaneous. The will might stipulate that in such a circumstance, one of you goes first, the second of you inherits from the first, and the second one’s heirs then inherit from that person.)

So let me say it outright. A toy is a type of fiction. Playing with a toy raises all sorts of “what ifs.” “What if I, a five-year-old, am actually a superhero, or a fire chief, or. . .?” And the Lego brick is one of the most brilliant, versatile fictions of all.

You can buy all sorts of Lego kits, for all ages, and follow the instructions to build magnificent structures. And you can also disassemble one of those, or not assemble one at all, and just go at the bricks, letting your imagination be your guide. My grandson Will has built some stunning things out of Legos–space ships, animals, most recently a picture of the Milky Way galaxy. But he has also built these:

One is a modification of a kit, and one he just free-formed. Both of them prominently featured in a scenario he was imagining of some kind of cataclysmic war in space. That’s “speculative fiction”–the toy constructed from the Lego bricks as well as the scenario he imagined.

So happy National Lego Day to us in the U.S. And wherever you are, whenever it is, happy International Lego Day. The Lego brick is a great, enduring toy, and it’s a fantastic fiction.