‘Speculative fiction’ is a term thrown around reasonably often, but unpacked very little. If you Google the term, you can find an exhaustive (and dense) definition here.
Amid the veritable sea of words, there’s a comment about speculative fiction being a ‘thought exercise’, which I quite like as a starting point for an explanation. The clue of course to what exactly comprises the genre is in the name – it is inherently intertwined with the author’s speculation rather than pure imagination.
Cambridge defines ‘speculate’ as “to guess possible answers to a question when you do not have enough information to be certain”. As such, the term infers an educated guess upon pre-existing information.
In 2003, Margaret Atwood of The Handmaid’s Tale fame created quite the stir by claiming that she most definitely did not want to be categorised as a science fiction author. Atwood elaborated by defining science fiction as being “talking squids in outer space” whereas she felt her work was inherently grounded in a world which “could really happen”. While the term speculative fiction existed long before Atwood’s comment (it was first coined in the 1940s), the declaration nevertheless is attributed as having give the term a new prominence and weight. With the above in mind, we can nicely define speculative fiction as the constructing of a narrative situated in a setting that the author perceives as what the world we know becomes, be it five, ten, twenty, or two hundred years in the future.
A Boy and his Dog at the End of the World by C A Fletcher, which I reviewed for TND and have been raving about to everybody who will listen, would definitely fall within the speculative fiction category. In the interview I subsequently conducted with him, he spoke about how he developed the setting by “thinking about what would remain three or four generations later and then taking Griz, the protagonist of the book, through the ruins of our world and seeing it with new, wondering eyes.”
Moreover, series such as The Expanse (another great series which you should either watch or read; preferably both) straddle the line of science and speculative fiction. The exact workings of the Epstein Drive, which facilitates the travel of humanity across large swathes of space, is left intentionally vague. I came across a hilarious comment from Corey in response to a question of how it works, which was simply “it just does”, but after a solid thirty minutes of searching concluded I needed to get back to what this article is actually supposed to be about. However, the manner in which they build the rest of the world is textbook spec fic. In their Reddit AMA, they described how they came to create the intricate setting of their books: “I just sort of accumulate facts about the solar system, and then think, “what would future people use this moon/asteroid/planet for?” Take notes, and eventually you have a lot of notes and a future society that sort of makes sense.”
What’s particularly interesting about this is the continuation of Atwood’s comments. In 2009, Ursula Le Guin criticised Atwood’s statement by saying, “she doesn’t want the literary bigots to shove her into the literary ghetto.”
Curiously, speculative fiction is a subgenre nestled within the broad definition of science fiction, yet the distinction Atwood sought to confer upon it really sought to separate them. Certainly, it has more literary connotations, but to say as much infers there’s limited finesse in terms of execution across all other science fiction subgenres. It’s almost impossible to comprehensively answer why exactly speculative fiction might be viewed as more literary than garden variety sci fi (maybe ‘speculative’ sounds particularly high brow?). Perhaps because there’s a certain diligence in the intellectual legwork that needs to be done for a piece of speculative fiction to be produced as the chain of credibility really needs to be thought through in order to ensure a reader can genuinely buy into the premise that this is an evolution of our world, authors are deemed to be of more literary merit. There is very little explanation out there as to how exactly speculative fiction is somehow more literary, so it’s difficult to arrive at a clear conclusion, or even hypothesis, on this question.
So at the end of the day, speculative fiction is currently categorised as a subgenre of science fiction in which the author quite literally speculates about how the world we currently inhabit will morph in the future. It often has a particular focus on one element which has changed it (Paolo Baccigalupi’s The Windup Girl is a good example of this; he envisages how climate change will affect global society and what challenges this will bring). It is therefore different from more general science fiction which does not make as much of an effort to tether the world of the story to the world we know.
But to complicate things further, the initial definition I sought buried amid a veritable landslide of highly academic text made an interesting point about the troubles that we have with conferring such a definition onto speculative fiction as a genre: if it is purely about what might come to pass, how do we categorise dystopian books? The Hunger Games is clearly meant to be set in a far-distant version of America that has emerged from a series of ecological disasters and a war. Do these two genres overlap, are they separate, or is dystopia something inherently tied to the speculation of how our world could go horribly wrong? To be honest, that’s a really tricky one to answer. Genre doesn’t actually conform to rigid lines; the beauty of fiction and genre is that a story can creep across lines that should theoretically define and constrain one particular genre from another. I recently wrote about this difficulty in defining genre with particular relation to Young Adult literature for TND; Let’s not delve further into how a young adult speculative fiction dystopia challenges questions of definition…
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