Spec Fiction Oxford

Speculative Fiction
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature

Speculative Fiction
Marek Oziewicz
Subject: Children’s Literature, Film, TV, and Media Online Publication Date: Mar 2017
DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.78
Summary and Keywords
The term “speculative fiction” has three historically located meanings: a subgenre of
science fiction that deals with human rather than technological problems, a genre distinct
from and opposite to science fiction in its exclusive focus on possible futures, and a super
category for all genres that deliberately depart from imitating “consensus reality” of
everyday experience. In this latter sense, speculative fiction includes fantasy, science
fiction, and horror, but also their derivatives, hybrids, and cognate genres like the gothic,
dystopia, weird fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction, ghost stories, superhero tales, alternate
history, steampunk, slipstream, magic realism, fractured fairy tales, and more. Rather
than seeking a rigorous definition, a better approach is to theorize “speculative fiction” as
a term whose semantic register has continued to expand. While “speculative fiction” was
initially proposed as a name of a subgenre of science fiction, the term has recently been
used in reference to a meta-generic fuzzy set supercategory—one defined not by clear
boundaries but by resemblance to prototypical examples—and a field of cultural
production. Like other cultural fields, speculative fiction is a domain of activity that exists
not merely through texts but through their production and reception in multiple contexts.
The field of speculative fiction groups together extremely diverse forms of non-mimetic
fiction operating across different media for the purpose of reflecting on their cultural
role, especially as opposed to the work performed by mimetic, or realist narratives.
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Speculative Fiction
The fuzzy set field understanding of speculative fiction arose in response to the need for a
blanket term for a broad range of narrative forms that subvert the post-Enlightenment
mindset: one that had long excluded from “Literature” stories that departed from
consensus reality or embraced a different version of reality than the empirical-materialist
one. Situated against the claims of this paradigm, speculative fiction emerges as a tool to
dismantle the traditional Western cultural bias in favor of literature imitating reality, and
as a quest for the recovery of the sense of awe and wonder. Some of the forces that
contributed to the rise of speculative fiction include accelerating genre hybridization that
balkanized the field previously mapped with a few large generic categories; the
expansion of the global literary landscape brought about by mainstream culture’s
increasing acceptance of non-mimetic genres; the proliferation of indigenous, minority,
and postcolonial narrative forms that subvert dominant Western notions of the real; and
the need for new conceptual categories to accommodate diverse and hybridic types of
storytelling that oppose a stifling vision of reality imposed by exploitative global
capitalism. An inherently plural category, speculative fiction is a mode of thought-
experimenting that includes narratives addressed to young people and adults and
operates in a variety of formats. The term accommodates the non-mimetic genres of
Western but also non-Western and indigenous literatures—especially stories narrated
from the minority or alternative perspective. In all these ways, speculative fiction
represents a global reaction of human creative imagination struggling to envision a
possible future at the time of a major transition from local to global humanity.
Keywords: fantasy, science fiction, horror, genre criticism, the fantastic, indigenous literature, globalization,
taxonomy, speculation
When it comes to speculative fiction, there are more questions than answers. While
somewhat frustrating, this is also advantageous, for the ongoing discussion about the
what and why of speculative fiction has generated more insights than any single
definition ever could. Thus, rather than looking for a conclusive statement, one may gain
more from a diachronic overview of “speculative fiction” as a term whose semantic
register continues to expand since it was coined as a name for a genre in the 1940s. By
the late 1990s, “speculative fiction” acquired a number of historically located meanings.
These are now being superseded by an emerging consensus, in which the term refers to a
fuzzy set field of cultural production. First applied to genre studies by Brian Attebery, a
fuzzy set is a category defined not by clear boundaries but by resemblance to prototypical
examples and degrees of membership: from being exactly like to being somewhat or
marginally like. Likewise, speculative fiction in its most recent understanding is a fuzzy
set super category that houses all non-mimetic genres—genres that in one way or another
depart from imitating consensus reality—from fantasy, science fiction, and horror to their
derivatives, hybrids, and cognate genres, including the gothic, dystopia, zombie, vampire
and post-apocalyptic fiction, ghost stories, weird fiction, superhero tales, alternate
history, steampunk, slipstream, magic realism, retold or fractured fairy tales, and many
more. A collection of genres and culturally situated practices, speculative fiction is
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effectively what Pierre Bourdieu has called a cultural field: a domain of activity defined
by its own field-specific rules of functioning, agents, and institutions.
The distinction between mimetic and non-mimetic art forms—however ambiguous these
terms may be—is critical for understanding speculative fiction, both as a genre cluster
and as a field. In its broadest sense, mimesis signifies the desire to imitate reality with
such verisimilitude that the audience can share the artist’s experience. This has been the
aspiration of much Western art since Plato and Aristotle, whose pronouncements
considered literature valuable when it seeks direct correspondence to life. Of course, as
Erich Auerbach demonstrated in Mimesis (1946), literary renditions of reality have always
been subject to stylization and conventions. Nevertheless, it was the mimetic standard
that became the Western norm. Reinforced by the now-untenable assumption that reality
is objective and unambiguous, it deflected attention away from the non-mimetic—
deliberate departures from imitating consensus reality that have persisted in Western art
since its beginnings. Only in the 20th century did critical thought expose the realist
fallacy: the fact that all literature constructs models of reality rather than transcriptions
of actuality. The mimetic and the non-mimetic have thus been redefined as twin responses
to reality. Speculative fiction draws its creative sap from the non-mimetic impulse.
The rise of speculative fiction is a historically situated process. While there are rich
traditions of non-Western speculative fiction, the current use of the term emerged within
the Western literary-critical discourse, albeit from a convergence of oppositional strands
including feminist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial thought. The understanding of
speculative fiction as a label for a large cultural field began to take shape at the time of
the first multicultural turn of the 1970s and in resistance to the specifically Western,
post-Enlightenment, androcentric, and colonialist mindset that had long excluded from
“Literature” stories that failed to imitate reality or embraced a different version of the
real. Indeed, no other cultural formation had put such a premium on the distinction
between the real and the unreal, or had so reductively defined the real as the post-
Enlightenment West. This distorted perception generated a counter-reaction, one facet of
which was the meteoric rise of non-mimetic genres, starting with the gothic, horror,
fantasy, and science fiction in the 19th century, followed by a rapid diversification and
hybridization of these and other non-mimetic forms throughout the 20th century. In
hindsight, the trajectories and permutations of these genres may be traced as individual
strands in the same larger process that combined to create the field of speculative fiction.
In one sense, then, speculative fiction is a tool to dismantle the traditional Western
cultural bias in favor of literature imitating reality. In another, it is a quest for the
recovery of the sense of wonder across its semantic spectrum, from the celebration of
human creative power and absolute freedom—which according to Fredric Jameson’s
Archaeologies of the Future (2005) is the function of fantasy—through dramatizing our
inability to imagine the future and thus contemplating our own absolute limits, which
Jameson sees as the function of science fiction; and on to the “inextinguishable feeling of
mixed wonder and oppression” in the face of “the vast and provocative abyss of the
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[horrifyingly inhuman] unknown,” which according to H. P. Lovecraft is the crux of horror

and the weird tale.1
Theorized as a field of cultural production rather than a genre, speculative fiction is not
limited to any specific literary techniques. Nor can its development be traced through a
linear chronology. The current understanding of speculative fiction reflects a quantum
jump that connected several established and emerging traditions. Some of the forces that
contributed to this cultural shift include accelerating genre hybridization that balkanized
the field previously mapped with a few large generic categories; the expansion of the
global literary landscape brought about by mainstream culture’s increasing acceptance of
fantasy, science fiction, and horror; the proliferation of indigenous, minority, and
postcolonial narrative forms that subvert dominant Western notions of reality or employ
non-mimetic elements in different configurations than traditional Western genres; and
finally the need for new conceptual categories to accommodate diverse and hybrid types
of modern storytelling that oppose a stifling vision of reality—with its correlates of
“truth,” “facts,” “power,” and others—imposed by exploitative global capitalism. An
inherently plural category, speculative fiction is a mode of thought-experimenting that
embraces an open-ended vision of the real.
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History of Use and Main Approaches

There are at least three ways to define “speculative fiction.” The original, long-contested,
and not wholly abandoned formulation takes it to be a subset of science fiction. This
approach can be traced to Robert A. Heinlein, who coined the term “speculative fiction”
in 1941, popularized it through his 1947 essay “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction,”
and advocated for it in his guest-of-honor speech at the 1951 World Science Fiction
Convention. Speculative fiction, Heinlein proposed, captures the highest aspiration of
science fiction and includes its top quality works. Defined as narratives concerned not so
much with science or technology as with human actions in response to a new situation
created by science or technology, speculative fiction highlights a human rather than
technological problem. This focus sets it sharply apart from the popular and formulaic
science fiction. At the receiving end of Heinlein’s critique was the type of science fiction,
or scientifiction, popularized by the first American pulp science fiction magazine, Hugo
Gernsback’s Amazing Stories (since 1926). Since Gernsback’s interest lay in amazing
gadgets, the wonder of progress, and the marvels delivered by future technology—usually
at the expense of scientific feasibility and human development—Heinlein sought to
change the discourse around science fiction through advocating for a new term and then
claiming for it the status of “Literature.”
The problem with Heinlein’s definition of speculative fiction was its proscriptive
component, subjective and exclusivist at the same time. While successful, for some, in
establishing parameters for quality science fiction, it created a counter-reaction against
limiting science fiction to the kind of stories Heinlein appreciated. One of its most
articulate critics, Samuel R. Delany, expressed delight in the “other” science fiction being
named the enemy. In The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (1977), Delany argued that Heinlein’s criteria
helped younger authors move away from Heinlein’s didactic methods and abandon the
quasi-mystical search for the ultimate meaning of human life that informs not just
Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) but other science fiction classics, such as
Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human (1953) or Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End
(1953). Heinlein’s use of speculative fiction was also restrictive, if not elitist: it excluded
not just pulp science fiction and what later came to be known as hard science fiction, but
also fantasy, horror, and other non-mimetic genres. In fact, it was effectively an attempt
to replace the term “science fiction” on the taxonomical map. It failed to do so. This was,
in part, because the quality markers Heinlein attributed to speculative fiction can
arguably be found in much science fiction and other non-mimetic genres that fell outside
of Heinlein’s purview. A more direct reason was that the understanding of what it means
for science fiction, or literature in general, to be socially engaged had changed by the
1960s: from Heinlein’s projections of idealistic, morally unambiguous models of human
behavior toward social criticism and contestation of the oppressive status quo. Although
Heinlein’s definition fell into disuse by the late 1960s, the term itself was adopted by
various protest traditions within the science fiction field. As championed by Judith Merril,
for example, it helped create feminist speculative fiction of the 1970s and has remained a
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lasting influence on a number of female writers, including Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris

Lessing, and Margaret Atwood. Also, Heinlein’s core notion—that “speculative fiction” is
a synonym for “science fiction”—has largely gone unchallenged until quite recently. Most
publishers, at least, still use it in this sense.
The second approach has been to theorize speculative fiction as a category not
synonymous with but opposite to science fiction. Deriving in part from the tumultuous
diversification of science fiction that began with the New Wave movements of the 1960s,
and in part from the increasing cross-breeding of fantasy, science fiction, and horror that
was well under way by the late 1970s, this position articulated concern over blurring the
genre’s boundaries. The key proponent of this approach has been Margaret Atwood, who
—expanding Merril’s earlier formulations—began using “speculative fiction” in the late
1980s as a term that best describes her dystopian novels starting from The Handmaid’s
Tale (1986), through Oryx and Crake (2003), and The Year of the Flood (2009). The
distinction Atwood adopts hinges on probability, although not necessarily constructed in
scientific terms. Science fiction, she claims, includes stories about events that cannot
possibly happen, such as the Martian invasion and similar scenarios in the tradition of H.
G. Wells. Speculative fiction, instead, refers to narratives about things that can potentially
take place, even though they have not yet happened at the time of the writing. As
examples, Atwood evokes the tradition stretching from Verne to that part of her oeuvre
that explores the not-yet- improbable futures of our planet.
The argument for speculative fiction as an ideologically different enterprise than science
fiction has not been particularly convincing. James E. Gunn and Matthew Candelaria’s
excellent collection Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction (2005) does
not even engage this proposition. The only study that takes it seriously, Paul L. Thomas’s
Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction (2013), merely reiterates Atwood’s position,
assuming rather than demonstrating the validity of her distinction. The definition of
“speculative fiction” to denote narratives that seek to map out a possible future has also
been applied to late 19th- and early 20th-century utopias, most of which were concerned
with social and political—rather than technological—speculation. It is not clear, though,
how “speculative fiction,” when used so, is a better term than “utopia.” After all, the
works it designates are subject to retrospective transformation into science fiction if their
at-one-point possible futures do not become reality. This would be the case for classics
from Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1887) and Una L. Silberrad’s The Affairs of
John Bolsover (1911) to other novels in the large body of utopian works that emerged in
the 1870s and by 1912 had produced over three hundred titles. A glance at what is
perhaps the best overview of this robust tradition—the three-volume Political Future
Fictions: Speculative and Counter-Factual Politics in Edwardian Britain (2013), edited by
Kate Macdonald—confirms that the label “speculative fiction” fails to offer any significant
critical edge. While Macdonald’s collection examines only six novels and does
occasionally refer to them as (Edwardian) speculative fiction, she and her co-editors
prefer the volume’s title term “political future fictions” for this entire body of works.
Either set in the future or located in an alternate reality of timeless present, these diverse
narratives are protracted engagements in political speculation. The majority do not
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employ science fictional devices, which sets them apart, albeit not absolutely, from
science fiction. Nevertheless, in their blend of didacticism, warning, and entertainment,
future fictions are best described as utopias rather than speculative fictions. According to
Macdonald, they are “utopian by definition of their concern with social change, and the
imaginative means by which change is effected.”2 This goes some way to explain why
Richard Bleiler’s introduction to Volume I, despite its title “On the Naming of Nineteenth-
Century Speculative Fiction,” does not evoke the term “speculative fiction” even once.
The key weakness of Atwood’s restrictive strategy, then, appears to be the anchoring of
the definition of “speculative fiction” in the story’s predictive value. By making possible
futures the centerpiece of her approach, Atwood repeats—unknowingly perhaps—the
same claims that were made about science fiction in the 1960s, when authors such as
Isaac Asimov proclaimed that the American space program was a vindication of the
stories published earlier in Astounding Tales. However, the predictive value of science
fiction, or any other non-mimetic genre for that matter, has never been clearly
demonstrated. Rather, the general consensus has been that the appeal of these genres
lies elsewhere, most of all in their evocation of wonder: supernatural, technological, bone
chilling—as in horror—or other. Nor is Atwood’s assumption that science fiction must
inevitably treat impossible things a tenable one. It certainly flies in the face of most
definitions of science fiction, based as they are on Darko Suvin’s “necessary and
sufficient condition” of the narrative dominance of a novum that must be scientifically
possible.3 Finally, Atwood’s distinction between stories about events that could and could
not really happen reiterates the most widely applied criterion for demarcating science
fiction from fantasy rather than a criterion for distinguishing genres within science
fiction. For all this arbitrariness, Atwood’s proposal does call attention to the important
future-oriented potential of speculative fiction, which quality is central to most
discussions today.
The third, more inclusive, less prescriptive, and increasingly widespread understanding
of speculative fiction has been to adapt the term for the entire extremely diverse field of
non-mimetic narrative fiction. Seen from this angle, speculative fiction does not denote a
genre as it does for Heinlein, Merril, and Atwood. Nor is it confined to literature. It
operates across the spectrum of narrative media, from print, to drama, radio, film,
television, computer games, and their many hybrids. Within literature, it thrives in many
formats—the novel, short story, picturebook, comic book, graphic novel, and poetry—and
offers a blanket term for the supergenres of fantasy, science fiction, and other non-
mimetic genres that may or may not be derivatives of these two, but either elude
relational classification or have been established as distinct genre traditions. These
include, but are not limited to, utopia, dystopia, eutopia, horror, the gothic, steampunk,
slipstream, alternative history, cyberpunk, time slip, magic(al) realism, supernatural
romance, weird fiction, the New Weird, (post)apocalyptic fiction, myth, legend,
traditional, retold, and fractured fairy tale, folktale, ghost fiction, New Wave fabulation,
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and other interstitial genres as long as they are informed by the non-mimetic impulse—
that is, by the broadly conceived departure from verisimilitude to consensus reality.
This understanding of speculative fiction has been increasingly topical since the 2000s,
albeit mostly among readers, authors, and scholars who are either younger or speak from
the minority perspective. It has not yet won much support among seasoned researchers.
For some it feels too baggy, covering a range of texts that slip beyond fantasy and science
fiction. One criticism has been that speculative fiction explodes genre boundaries of
science fiction and fantasy in ways that are not productive—for example, by including
counterfactual narratives with past and present settings, elements of which have often
been taken to disqualify the text as science fiction, or by embracing texts without magic
or the supernatural, which traditionally would place them outside the perimeters of
fantasy. Other critics have observed that speculative fiction may refer to texts that are
speculative socially, politically, or philosophically, but not scientifically. Or it may not
employ any fantastic devices. Indeed, the ambiguous meaning of the term “speculation,”
which in its broadest understanding may apply to all literature and, when narrowed, is
not necessarily the same as the related key term “extrapolation,” has been the subject of
much debate. Yet, to discuss speculation as a type of narrative protocol—as has been
expertly done by Brooks Landon in “Extrapolation and Speculation” (2014)—is not the
same as exploring it as a supergenre. In that latter sense speculative fiction has not yet
been defined in a rigorous way. This lack of taxonomic clarity, pointed out in The
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2011), accounts for why speculative fiction has been
seen as too nebulous a tool for literary analyses based on close reading, which usually
involve a consideration of generic boundaries, say, between post-apocalyptic dystopia and
ghost fantasy or supernatural romance. It may also explain why the term “speculative
fiction” can only rarely be encountered in articles published in genre-centered journals
such as Science Fiction Studies, Foundation, Extrapolation, Mythlore, Journal of the
Fantastic in the Arts, Studies in the Fantastic, and others. Likewise, no entries on
speculative fiction can be found in most genre-focused encyclopedias and companions.
Besides, at best a reference in passing, the term is missing from John Clute and John
Grant’s The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997); Jerrold E. Hoggle’s The Cambridge
Companion to Gothic Fiction (2002); Gunn and Candelaria’s Speculations on Speculation:
Theories of Science Fiction (2005); Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts, and
Sherryl Vint’s The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (2009); Gregory Claeys’s The
Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature (2010); Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint’s The
Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction (2011); and numerous others, including The
Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction (2014), which features Landon’s chapter on
speculation.
An opposite view—expressed by one of the young voices, the editor of Foundation,

Graham Sleight—projects “speculative fiction” as an indispensable term for contemporary
works within the fantastic field, most of which blend genres to such a degree that they
can no longer be adequately described with old tools and categorizations. A glance at the
“Special Section” of the fiftieth-anniversary volume of Extrapolation (2009), in which
twenty scholars were asked to contribute short pieces on the current state of scholarship
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and criticism in the field of speculative fiction, reveals that the debate about the
usefulness of the term “speculative fiction” is generational and attitudinal. As Brian
Attebery suggests in his opening contribution, it reflects an increasing gap between
scholars extremely competent in fiction and criticism up to about the 1990s, and scholars
more familiar with recent output but not necessarily aware of these works’ antecedents.4
The latter group, Attebery notes, tends to examine literature armed with a wider range of
theoretical approaches and critical terms. Speculative fiction, it seems, is one of these
new labels, complete with its own unique set of questions, assumptions, and foci.
To make sense of this most recent conceptualization of speculative fiction, it may be

helpful to situate its arrival through the application of Raymond Williams’s concepts of
dominant and emergent cultures framed within Pierre Bourdieu’s comments about the
dynamics of social and cultural fields. According to Williams, any historical period is
defined by its dominant patterns and informed by a specific “structure of feeling”—a
notion Williams applied, in his essay “Science Fiction” (1988), to distinguish what he saw
as three main types of modern science fiction: purtopia, doomsday, and space
anthropology.5 This structure of feeling is generationally specific and stems from a
particular “community of experience,”6 one instance of which would be the community of
academic scholars with its ways of articulating difference and meaning. The dominant
culture, however, is always challenged by the emergent culture, with its own structure of
feeling based on a different set of lived experiences. As the Extrapolation example
suggests, the dominant fantasy and science fiction culture, institutionalized in today’s
academia, has shown no need for or interest in the term speculative fiction. The emerging
culture, by contrast, has wholeheartedly owned the label of speculative fiction as a way to
conceptualize its experience of new types of non-mimetic writing and to position them in
a contiguous relation to older, ideologically loaded forms. Comprising younger readers,
authors, scholars, grassroots initiatives, online resources, fanzines, and more, this
emergent culture draws from a different structure of feeling. For this group, “speculative
fiction” has become an accepted term to refer to the entire field in ways that challenge
the dominant consensus about fault lines among various non-mimetic genres, canonical
and upstart alike. While distinctions are the lifeblood of literary criticism, the appeal of
the term “speculative fiction” lies in its inclusiveness and open-ended porousness.
If the growing acceptance of speculative fiction is a function of the emergent structure of

feeling in the increasingly hybrid first decades of the 21st century, the very term
“speculative fiction” in its broad modern use can best be thought of as a field of cultural
production. In the model created by Pierre Bourdieu, field is a relatively autonomous
domain of activity defined by its own field-specific rules of functioning, agents, and
institutions. Like any other field, the literary field is structured externally in relation to
the somewhat abstract field of power—the space of relations of force between agents and
institutions that wield the economic or cultural capital that allows them to claim
dominance in different fields—and internally in relation to the principles of heteronomy
and autonomy. These indirectly correspond to the two poles in the field of power and may
be thought of as the opposing ends on the spectrum of subordination of art to economic
capital, as in the heteronomous principle, or rejecting it in favor of cultural capital, as in
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the autonomous principle. Despite the difference between economic and cultural capital,
however, any practices within a field, even these seemingly disinterested, are effectively
economic practices in that they aim to maximize material or symbolic profit.7
Bourdieu’s framework allows positing speculative fiction as a field that implies a different
mapping of the same territory. Before the advent of “speculative fiction” as a blanket
term, roughly through the 1990s, the fields of fantasy, science fiction, horror, the gothic,
and other non-mimetic genres had all been theorized as largely separate subfields of the
literary field. They had little economic potential but growing cultural impact: in 1984, for
example, Wolfe’s Glossary listed twenty-one definitions of “fantasy” and thirty-four
definitions of “science fiction.” Against the relentless push from mainstream institutions
in the literary field that sought to exclude these genres from “Literature,” the main effort
of agents operating in each subfield—readers, librarians, publishers, and especially
scholars—was to demonstrate that fantasy, science fiction, horror, and related genres
deserve to be studied as literature. This argument has lost much of its urgency in the 21st
century but can still be found even in recent scholarship within genre fields, one example
being Joan Gordon’s “Literary Science Fiction” chapter in The Oxford Handbook of
Science Fiction (2014). Nevertheless, it was central especially in the early period when
each genre fought for its own recognition and maximizing its own power within the field.
This was happening through establishing genre-specific journals, organizations,
conferences, presses, awards, courses, scholarship, and other initiatives. There was little
effort, however, to advocate for the collective empowerment of all non-mimetic genres
within the field of literature. True, many scholars across the board used “the fantastic”8
as a designation for this larger cluster, but their proposals were often handicapped by
claims about genre seniority and the hierarchical taxonomies they entailed.
The change came in the early 2000s, when the term “speculative fiction” was adapted as
a designator for the collective field of non-mimetic literature and art. This move redrew
the map of the literature field and reframed the power struggle within it. First, it
abandoned border wars among genres; their exclusivist definitions; and squabbles over
claims to cognitive, artistic, or other primacy that have long been the feature of genre
criticism. Second, it redefined the goal of the power struggle within the field from
seeking to win the stamp of “literariness” for any particular genre to exploring how non-
mimetic genres may be potentially more adequate than the so-called realist literature to
address contemporary global challenges and reflect the diverse perspectives, traditions,
and experiences of the multicultural world. Third, adopting speculative fiction as a
blanket term opened up the field of literature to fruitful interaction with other fields,
including drama, film, visual arts, music, computer games, even science itself. In this new
“map,” speculative fiction emerges as a large subfield of literature, with links to other
cultural fields, rather than a narrow subfield of science fiction. It is part of modern global
culture in a way that the relatively isolated and largely Anglophone genre fields were not,
at least not from the start. The field of speculative fiction resists stratification that was
part of individual genre field dynamics, especially rankings from masterpieces to failures
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and the pitting of genre fiction against literary fiction. Put otherwise, it offers a new way
of allocating value by giving primacy to the system of relations within the field rather
than to individual works themselves.
Early Formulations about the Field of

Speculative Fiction
There is little doubt that the “emergent culture” and “field” conceptualization of
speculative fiction represents a new trend. Even so, this trend is not without antecedents.
It owes much to historically located traditions of critical reflection, especially the
pioneering work of Judith Merril, Robert Scholes, Diana Waggoner, and Kathryn Hume.
The “field” view of speculative fiction can first be traced to New Wave radical feminist
authors of the 1960s and 1970s and was a spinoff of American feminism’s second wave. It
was contemporaneous to the widely discussed shift from “hard” science fiction toward
science fiction indebted to “soft” sciences of sociology, anthropology, linguistics,
economics, and political philosophy—a narrative swerve that feminist authors theorized
as indicating a rebellion against the constrains of patriarchal, androcentric structures of
meaning. Feminists were perhaps the first to point out that conventional concepts of
possibility and rationality used to define science fiction, fantasy, and other non-mimetic
genres were limited and value laden. Moving beyond the purely formalist definitions,
these authors and critics highlighted the sociopolitical contexts of these genres’ creation,
academic legitimization, and subversive cultural impact. To project speculative fiction as
a new space for articulating feminist theory and praxis was, of course, a political move. It
linked the cognitive estrangement effect of speculative fiction to priming the audience for
questioning the dominant status quo and its androcentric biases. It also invested works of
speculative fiction with the power, even responsibility, to voice alternative views that can
move the world in the direction of gender equality.
When in “Earthsea Revisioned” (1992) Ursula K. Le Guin reflected on having written her
early fantasy and science fiction works “as an artificial man”9—that is, by gendering her
writing male—she spoke to the concerns that animated many other female authors who
turned to speculative fiction in the 1960s and 1970s: Lois Gould, Rhonda Lerman, Judith
Merril, James Tiptree Jr., Angela Carter, Kate Wilhelm, Carol Emshwiller, Suzy McKee
Charnas, Octavia Butler, Tanith Lee, Doris Lessing, Sally Miller Gearhart, Barbara
Ehrenreich, and others. These authors used the textual power of speculative fiction to
challenge the predominantly male literary establishment and patriarchal social reality—
including the dominant androcentric traditions of science fiction. But speculative fiction
for these feminist authors meant something more than science fiction. This broad use of
the term was popularized by Judith Merril in the twelve Year’s Best SF anthologies she
edited between 1959 and 1969. While Merril’s definitions were always a work in
progress, by 1967 she had arrived at an understanding of speculative fiction as a new
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mode of literature, at once indebted to the traditional scientific methods of hypothesis

and extrapolation but freer than science in their use. Speculative fiction, in her words,
constitutes “a special sort of contemporary writing which makes use of fantastic and
inventive elements to comment on, or speculate about, society, humanity, life, the cosmos,
reality [a]nd any other topic under the general heading of philosophy.”10 Merril’s ideas
about speculative fiction as a cluster of non-mimetic genres striving for social change
rippled through a spate of other collections and monographs, including Kate Wilhelm’s
Infinity Box: A Collection of Speculative Fiction (1975), Natalie M. Rosinsky’s Feminist
Futures: Contemporary Women’s Speculative Fictions (1984), and Marleen Barr’s Alien to
Femininity: Speculative Fiction and Feminist Theory (1987). Merril’s influence did not
stop there: her “Spaced Out” collection donated to the Toronto Public Library in 1970
was peculiar enough to earn the description on the library website as containing
“contemporary speculative literature including science fiction, certain aspects of fantasy
fiction, satire, surrealist, and other speculative, future oriented, and conceptually
experimental work, whether in fiction, poetry, drama, essay, or other forms as well as
critical and bibliographic materials relating to science fiction and the associated areas of
contemporary speculative writing.”11 It grew to become a major resource for speculative
fiction known, since 1991, as the Judith Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation,
and Fantasy. More recently, Ritch Calvin’s The Merril Theory of Lit’ry Criticism (2016)
provided the long-overdue, single volume overview of Merril’s own critical reflection.
Less than a decade after Merril’s search for a comprehensive definition came perhaps the
most theoretically sustained exploration of speculative fiction to date: Robert Scholes’s
Structural Fabulation: An Essay on the Fiction of the Future (1975). Writing about science
fiction—which he defined in a way that applies to most non-mimetic literature: “works of
fiction that insist on some radical discontinuity between the worlds they present to us and
the world of our experience”12—Scholes envisions Western literature as an evolving
system grounded in each period’s time-consciousness. The most socially transformative
type of literature capable of capturing the modern, post-Einsteinian time-consciousness
is, in his opinion, fiction set in the future that has a license to speculate about it.13 When
he avers that the future is the only lever to nudge the present in a better direction,14
Scholes appears to speak in the same language as Merril. When he stresses that modern
literature ought to be primarily concerned with fictional explorations of human situations
arising from the implications of modern science—in order to help readers “break the
circle of indifference and act in accordance with a structural perception of the universe”15
—he seems to reiterate Heinlein’s position. His focus is different though. The literature
Scholes advocates is first of all a means to move modern readers away from the
“intensely materialistic and propertarian”16 heritage of the dominant forms of life and
fiction in the post-Enlightenment West.
Within this framework, realism has clearly been the voice of the dominant, materialist
tradition. Fantasy, horror, science fiction, and non-mimetic genres, by contrast, emerge as
strands of the subversive and diverse “fictional form that is both old and new, rooted in
the past but distinctly modern, oriented to the future but not bounded by it.”17 This form
that addresses reality indirectly through patently fictional or non-mimetic devices Scholes
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calls fabulation. He then locates its development diachronically, identifying three

historically staggered and ideologically distinct forms of fabulation. Dogmatic fabulation,
going back to pre-modern fantastic voyages, through Dante’s The Divine Comedy (1320)
and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), is based on a closed system of belief, usually
stemming from a religious dogma. Speculative fabulation that emerged with humanism—
exemplified in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726),
Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759), or Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1836)—draws on
more liberal and secular reflection but lacks a firm grounding in the modern scientific
understanding of life and its processes. This was provided, Scholes continues, by the
arrival of the Darwinian revolution, Einstein’s theory of relativity, and the discovery of the
many complex structures that inform the cultural and biochemical systems in which
human lives are lived. All these led to the emergence, sometime in the early 20th century,
of structural fabulation. “A new mutation in the tradition of speculative fiction,”18 as
Scholes calls it, structural fabulation combines sublimation, estrangement, and cognition
—the qualities that were later identified by Suvin as fundamental for science fiction. Yet,
Scholes insists, it is “neither scientific in its methods nor a substitute for actual
science.”19 Instead, it draws equally from the human and the physical sciences, departing
from what we know through philosophical, sociological, scientific, and other
extrapolations about what modern humanity has due cause to hope for or fear. As this
description suggests, the mutation of speculative fiction called structural fabulation
transcends any single genre. Indeed, Scholes is careful to note that not all science fiction
qualifies as structural fabulation and admits that certain works of modern fantasy share a
structural perception of the universe in which magic, religion, and science become
indistinguishable. Although he barely mentions other non-mimetic genres and implies
that most fantasy may best be thought of as speculative rather than structural fabulation,
Scholes deserves the credit for being the first to sketch out a spectrum of speculative
fiction that encompasses three forms of fabulation across several genres and forms of
time-consciousness.
If Merril’s and Scholes’s works exemplify a reflection on speculative fiction that emerged
in the science fiction field, claims about speculative fiction were also articulated by
fantasy scholars. Two early studies, especially, merit attention: Diana Waggoner’s The
Hills of Faraway: A Guide to Fantasy (1978), and Kathryn Hume’s Fantasy and Mimesis
(1984). Both monographs were subsequently displaced from mainstream fantasy criticism
by a spate of genre-focused works, but then again, the same happened to Scholes’s
Structural Fabulation. Within four years it was eclipsed by Suvin’s genre-oriented
Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, which almost immediately established itself as the
core critical approach to science fiction and has remained so until the present. If the
argument for a larger field of speculative fiction was ahead of its time, Waggoner and
Hume were among the first to theorize fantasy by placing it firmly within this broader
tradition.
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Where Scholes’s main criterion for defining an inflection of speculative fiction called
structural fabulation was what we know about the world, Waggoner’s criterion was
exactly the opposite: what we do not know and thereby can only speculate on. Somewhat
like Scholes, though not limited to fabulation or non-mimetic traditions alone, Waggoner
proposes a classification of all Western literature into four broad classes of fiction
depending on their treatment of the supernatural: pre-realistic literature, realism, post-
realistic fabulation, and speculative fiction. Drawing on the taxonomies introduced by
Northrop Frye, Waggoner uses the label of pre-realistic literature for myth, romance, and
Frye’s high mimetic modes—archaic and pre-modern literary forms that, other than in
theological and religious senses, project no distinction between the natural and the
supernatural phenomena. In these narratives the supernatural is real, as is the case in
The Divine Comedy where the narrator experiences Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise as
tangible places, not fundamentally divorced from ordinary reality. Over the course of the
16th and 17th centuries, Waggoner then argues, the worldview that informed pre-realistic
literature was superseded by one based on scientific materialism and skeptical
empiricism. This created conditions for the rise of literature based on the careful
observation of life and a strict division of phenomena into real/natural versus unreal/
supernatural. Since the supernatural was no longer accepted as part of the real world, it
had no place in realistic fiction. Events that seemed supernatural were therefore
explained away in realistic fiction as manipulation, coincidence, or illusion. The problem
with this approach, Waggoner notes, was that the narrowly defined realism disregarded
other faculties than reason, especially the irrational yet nonetheless very real phenomena
of the unconscious mind. Realism thus offered a limited view of the human experience.
The rise of sentimental fiction, the gothic, and other genres that began to move away
from mimesis was a reaction to these restrictions. By the second part of the 19th century,
this process led to the emergence of a class of fiction that Waggoner, employing Scholes’s
term from The Fabulators (1967), has called “post-realistic fabulation.” Post-realistic
fabulation broadened the scope of realism to include the irrational. Nevertheless, its
treatment of the supernatural was limited to casting it as a form of madness—when
resulting in outward behaviors as in Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861)—or framing it
as a form of dream or hallucination, as in Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
(1865). Put otherwise, in post-realistic fabulation, the supernatural was granted qualified
reality: it was acknowledged as something that is psychologically and subjectively real
only for some people.
If post-realistic fabulation was thus able to handle descriptions of both everyday life and
psychological phenomena in ways that realism was not, neither realism nor post-realistic
fabulation considered the possibility that the supernatural might, in fact, be real. This
seminal question, Waggoner asserts, “created modern speculative fiction.”20 As she
defines it, speculative fiction is a broad category of modern literature “that treats
supernatural and/or nonexistent phenomena (such as the future) as a special class of
objectively real things or events.”21 After all, the idea that what is real must be
perceptible or measurable is only an assumption. Consequently, to claim that the
supernatural—including different dimensions, extrasensory perception, different forms of
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non-human intelligence, existence, or powers, some of these dubbed as magic—can only

refer to mere projections of the human mind overlooks the possibility that at least some
of these might be objectively real, though unprovable or unmeasurable phenomena. The
emergence of speculative fiction, Waggoner concludes, was a development that provided
a means by which otherwise realist texts can speculate on unprovable realities. And while
speculative fiction comprises a number of non-mimetic genres, fantasy stands out among
them, for in it the gap between the natural and the supernatural is the widest. According
to Waggoner, fantasy must establish realistic credibility for the supernatural; if it does
not, it fails not just formally but entirely, regardless of the quality of its writing. As the
most visionary genre of speculative fiction, fantasy is less constrained by the limitations
of physical reality than other genres, especially science fiction, which is bound by the
ideas of scientific plausibility.22
Positing fantasy as the ultimate expression of speculative fiction obviously reveals

Waggoner’s personal preferences. Nonetheless, her theorization of speculative fiction as
a broad, multi-genre category that emerged at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries in
reaction to the representational limits of post-realist fabulation shares many affinities
with the arguments made by Merril and Scholes. Waggoner’s book was thus the first clear
articulation of a trend for conceptualizing fantasy as a strand in a larger tradition of
speculative fiction that involves other non-mimetic genres. This claim sets it apart from
the bulk of fantasy scholarship of the 1970s and 1980s, focused as it was on defining
fantasy as a genre: Tzvetan Todorov’s The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to Literary
Genre (1970), C. N. Manlove’s Modern Fantasy: Five Studies (1975), W. R. Irwin’s The
Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy (1976), Eric S. Rabkin’s The Fantastic in
Literature (1976), Stephen Prickett’s Victorian Fantasy (1979), Roger C. Schlobin’s The
Literature of Fantasy: A Comprehensive, Annotated Bibliography of Fantasy Fiction
(1979), Eric S. Rabkin’s Fantastic Worlds (1979), Brian Attebery’s The Fantasy Tradition
in American Literature: From Irving to Le Guin (1980), and Christine Brooke-Rose’s A
Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, especially of the Fantastic
(1981). Even though some of these authors acknowledged that fantasy cannot be
absolutely separated from other non-mimetic genres—suggesting, as Schlobin does in The
Aesthetics of Fantasy Literature and Art (1982), that fantasy “can be found in all types of
fiction”23—their focus remained on fantasy as a genre, a mode of thought, a formal
element of the narrative structure, or a reader’s response to the text. Often cited as
foundational works of fantasy criticism, each of these studies sought to arrive at an
exclusive definition of fantasy, usually through isolating its outstanding examples or
operational modes rather than describing the field at large.
It is against this background that Kathryn Hume’s Fantasy and Mimesis (1984) stands out
as one of the most ambitious attempts to describe the scope of fantastic literature without
limiting it to any single genre. Written at a transitional cusp, when it became apparent
that genre-focused approaches fail to capture the larger contours of fantasy’s
entanglement with other non-mimetic genres, Hume’s study challenges taxonomies, in
which fantasy is treated as a genre opposed to realism. Instead, Hume postulates that
fantasy and mimesis are two impulses involved in the creation of all art. They are, she
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posits, two responses to reality and two epistemological orientations in any human
activity. This approach projects fantasy as “an element in nearly all kinds of literature,”24
but problematizes any sharp distinctions between mimetic and non-mimetic fiction.
Suggesting instead that texts on each pole of the spectrum contain both realistic and
nonrealistic elements, Hume proposes a synchronic taxonomy of literature based on its
specific blends of mimetic and non-mimetic components: the literature of illusion that is
primarily escapist; the literature of vision that engages the reader with new
interpretations of reality; the literature of revision characterized by the dominance of the
didactic component; and the literature of disillusion, in which reality is declared
unknowable. Being “an impulse native to literature and manifested in innumerable
variations,”25 fantasy, like mimesis, appears in all of these categories, but is put to
different uses across a range of genres and stylistic conventions. In each case, though,
fantasy marks a deliberate departure from consensus reality; consequently, the works in
which the fantastic impulse is dominant constitute a tradition of fiction opposed to that
informed by the mimetic imperative. Although Hume prefers the term “fantasy” to
“speculative fiction,” she consistently speaks of the field that encompasses many genres.
As for Scholes, so too for Hume, the common aspiration of the works in this field is to
wean the reader away from a limited perception of reality—whether for escape,
education, enrichment, or sobering embarrassment.
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Recent Formulations: Advantages and

Limitations
Although insightful, the pioneering work on speculative fiction by Merril, Scholes,
Waggoner, and Hume has been ignored by genre criticism to the extent that the re-
emergence of the term in the early 2000s can hardly be attributed to their direct
influence. Nevertheless, there were larger trends operating in literary reflection on non-
mimetic genres that made their merger into a field of speculative fiction almost
inevitable. The most important among these has been the variously articulated yet
undeniable perception of family resemblance between fantasy and science fiction. The
sense of empirical convergence of these genres, especially when set against mimetic
fiction, has been shared by publishers, readers, and critics. Specialized magazines,
starting with Astounding Tales (since 1930), would publish stories across the generic
range of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. Readers would intuit that their favorite
genre’s achievement is a facet of a larger cultural phenomenon that includes works in
related non-mimetic genres. Authors would publish award-winning works in different non-
mimetic genres—the fact recognized in the creation of the Nebula Award (since 1966)
curated by an organization called Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
Scholars, finally, would often address fantasy and science fiction together, even though,
as Gary K. Wolfe has noted in his Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy: A
Glossary and Guide to Scholarship (1986), fantasy and science fiction developed their
own critical terminology largely apart from each other. Lloyd Arthur Eshbach’s Of Worlds
Beyond (1947) and Everett F. Bleiler’s The Checklist of Modern Fantastic Literature
(1948) were the earliest critical works in this tradition. But it was only in the 1970s—at
the height of sustained definitional battles aimed at identifying genre boundaries—that a
growing number of scholars would again take up the “fantastic” as a blanket term for the
many forms of non-mimetic art. It was clear from its usage that the term included fantasy,
science fiction, and horror. It was less clear what non-mimetic genres, if any, it excluded.
Or on what grounds.
This open-ended use of the fantastic for a continuum of non-mimetic fiction was reflected
in titles of such studies as Rabkin’s The Fantastic in Literature (1976) or Christine
Brooke-Rose’s A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, especially of
the Fantastic (1981), but also in professional events such as the International Conference
on the Fantastic in the Arts, an annual event since 1980. Attracting scholars, authors,
publishers, and fans of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and other non-mimetic genres, the
conference led to the founding, in 1982, of the International Association for the Fantastic
in the Arts, and the establishment of its periodical, the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
(since 1990). The fantastic as a shared multi-genre space was also validated in several
reference works, starting with the much-celebrated Gary K. Wolfe’s Glossary that
included entries on forty-five genres related to, yet distinct from science fiction and
fantasy. One argument in favor of the use of the fantastic has been that it enables
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discussing modern and historic forms of fantastic literature. The framework of the
fantastic, for example, allows Richard Mathews in Fantasy: The Liberation of Imagination
(1997) to trace the literary history of the fantastic all the way to the Egyptian “Tale of the
Shipwrecked Sailor” dated about 2000 BCE. Another advantage has been that the
fantastic better captures the flows of fantastic motifs and themes across various media,
including radio, film, drama, computer games, poetry, even fan culture—cross-pollinations
that are multidirectional and circulate through rather than merely flow out of the literary
fantastic. Examples of such studies are legion, from George Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin’s
Flights of Fancy: Armed Conflict in Science Fiction and Fantasy (1993) to Judith B.
Kerman and John Edgar Browning’s The Fantastic in Holocaust Literature and Film
(2014).
Given all these advantages, the fantastic has been extensively used especially by fantasy
scholars. Brian Attebery has drawn on it consistently. In Stories about Stories: Fantasy
and the Remaking of Myth (2014), he defines the fantastic as “creative and disruptive
play with representations of the real world.”26 The term’s wide currency is likewise
evoked in the titles of numerous journals, including the newly established Fantastika
(since 2016). The fantastic has also been embraced by many science fiction scholars—or
embraced more widely than other supergenre labels including L. Sprague de Camp’s
“imaginative fiction,” Suvin’s “estranged fiction,” the politically problematic “magical
realism,” or even the most recent “fantastika”—a Slavic term adopted into English by
John Clute. In their co-edited 2002 issue of Historical Materialism, for example, Mark
Bould takes the fantastic as a blanket term for a broad range of non-mimetic genres,27
while China Miéville famously declares that science fiction “must be considered a subset
of a broader fantastic mode—[in which] ‘scientism’ is just sf’s mode of expression of the
fantastic (the impossible-but-true).”28 Despite its apparent uses and scope, however, the
fantastic has been weighed down by unfortunate semantic and etymological associations.
For one, it has been opposed by many science fiction scholars, from Suvin through
Jameson, whose insistence on the unique cognitive value, epistemological gravity, and
peculiar estrangement offered by science fiction have made them exclude fantasy, horror,
and other non-mimetic genres from the science fiction field. For another, it has been
resented as supposedly suggesting the primacy of fantasy over science fiction—or fantasy
encompassing science fiction as one among its subgenres—which is a contestable claim
at its mildest and rather hard to accept for those who, like Jameson, see fantasy as
“technically reactionary”29 and thus the opposite of science fiction.
The term speculative fiction, while essentially gesturing at the territory staked by the
fantastic, is free from the legacy of genre wars and hostile taxonomies. How and when its
recent rise began is hard to say, but something happened around 2000—something that
surged up against genre boundaries that 20th-century criticism erected around different
modes of narrative speculation based on preferences for different sets of tools. This shift
resists accurate description, and its significance will be contested. But it can be intuited if
one looks at two events that happened at that time and attest to an expanding perception
of non-mimetic narrative forms. The earlier of these tipping points was the publication of
Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (2000). Edited
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by Sheree R. Thomas, this landmark collection was the first to recognize an extremely
rich tradition of speculative fiction by authors of color and challenged the perception of
speculative genres as predominantly written by and addressed to the white audience. The
collection includes twenty-nine stories accompanied by five critical essays by black
scholars, including Delany’s seminal 1999 “Racism and Science Fiction.” In her
introduction, “Looking for the Invisible,” Thomas employs the metaphors of the
“invisible” and the “Black Matter” to stand, at once, for the speculative fiction of black
writers, for the long tradition of their marginalization, and for these stories’ generic
hybridity.30 This last aspect is represented in the volume by eleven stories that fall into
science fiction; eleven in fantasy; and seven in horror, slipstream, and other designations.
It is telling that despite its wide generic range, Dark Matter won the 2001 World Fantasy
Award for Best Anthology.
The other event happened in 2001, when the World Science Fiction Society, which for
over four decades chose its Hugo Awards on genre-specific criteria derived from Suvin,
opened a new chapter by selecting J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
(2000) and Ang Lee’s film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) as its Hugo Award
winners. These were followed in subsequent years by several other awards given to
novels and films outside of science fiction proper, yet no argument was raised about these
works’ ineligibility for recognition by the World Science Fiction Society. Both of these
events were historic in acknowledging not just the rapprochement between fantasy and
science fiction, but a de facto expansion of non-mimetic genres’ authorship, diverse
cultural roots, and storytelling modes—all of which imply their new positioning within a
larger field of the genres of alternative thought that comprise speculative fiction.
Besides circumventing the problematic semantic legacy of the fantastic, the term
“speculative fiction” brought other advantages as well. It has directed attention away
from interminable taxonomic debates that had so far preoccupied scholars of non-mimetic
fiction. Instead of asking what works belong or should be excluded from particular
genres, critics in the field of speculative fiction are apt to identify the criteria of inclusion,
irrespective of whether the text represents a generic hybrid or a more unambiguous
articulation of a single genre. This lens, in turn, allows for exploring the nature of the
text’s speculative performance with the reader. A switch to using the term “speculative
fiction” may also account for the dwindling of the inherently unsolvable discussions about
hierarchical relationships among various non-mimetic genres. Within this new
framework, scholars may investigate, for example, whether utopia is a subgenre of
science fiction or rather science fiction emerged as a node in the developmental
trajectory of utopia, but all these conversations and their various outcomes can be
accommodated as strands in the exploration of speculative fiction without entailing
claims about these foci’s central importance for the field. Most of all, speculative fiction
has proven a useful term to deflect the historically-loaded emotional charge that has
accrued around debates on the relationship between science fiction and fantasy.
Historically, each of these supergenres has claimed a number of subgenres, some of
which have been treated as border outposts that imply territorial claims. For example,
The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (2009) features entries on twelve subgenres
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of science fiction—alternate history, apocalyptic science fiction, arthouse science fiction

film, blockbuster science fiction film, dystopia, eutopia, feminist science fiction, future
history, hard science fiction, slipstream, space opera, and weird fiction—but since many
among these have also been called by alternative names, the effective range of genre
labels within science fiction is much broader. Likewise, in its many theorizations, fantasy
has been broken down into taxonomies ranging from as little as two—high versus low
fantasy—to proposals spanning over a dozen subgenres, including, yes, science fiction,
science fantasy, animal fantasy, toy fantasy, mythopoeic fantasy, heroic fantasy, epic
fantasy, sword and sorcery, gritty fantasy, postcolonial fantasy, magic realism, fantastic
fabulation, fabulist fiction, colonial fantasy, urban fantasy, feminist fantasy, ghost fantasy,
time-slip fantasy, situated fantasy, organic fantasy, and more. One also has to contend
with the historical attempts by each supercategory to colonize related genres—fantasy
claiming myth and the fairy tale, or science fiction claiming horror and utopia—as if other
non-mimetic genres were unthinkable outside of the perimeter of either fantasy or
science fiction. Well, they are. For example, the rise and decline of the American female
gothic described by Jeffrey A. Weinstock in Scare Tactics (2008) occurred largely
independently of the trajectories of fantasy and science fiction, and was fueled by the
social usefulness of the supernatural tale “to express the specifically female anxieties and
desires” experienced by women in the patriarchal culture of the 1850s through the
1930s.31 Likewise, the history of horror, although often intersecting with fantasy and
science fiction, reveals a unique trajectory of this third major genre cluster which may
flout scientific speculation and the supernatural alike to produce ever new, genre-
transgressive offshoots such as the New Weird. Within the larger framework of
speculative fiction, each of these genres enjoys more autonomy and agency in identifying
its alliances, inspirations, and predecessors.
This inherent valuing of diversity is another force that accounts for the growing
popularity of the term “speculative fiction.” Unlike fantasy, science fiction, horror and
other genre labels, which are culturally situated designations that arose to describe
European and North American developments in the Western literature field, speculative
fiction opens a new discursive space for the voice of minorities and ethnic others within
non-mimetic narrative forms without relegating them to the ghetto of “ethnic” literatures.
Historically, fantasy was an inflection on the (Western) novel form that developed within
(Western) literature as a reaction to the dominant (Western) mindset that banned the
supernatural: it was a response to the limiting of reality to the palpable and explainable
that never occurred in other cultures. Likewise, science fiction—if traced to Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)—emerged as a questioning of the (Western) narrative of
scientific progress and has continued to interrogate (Western) technological advances,
both of which were foundational to the (Western) colonial expansion that had led to the
crippling of non-Western cultures and the near erasure of their science and technologies.
But if “fantasy” and “science fiction” have historically been oppositional terms,
“speculative fiction,” in its modern use, is even more so. A truly global phenomenon that
arose in the modern multicultural world, speculative fiction rejects the “science for the
West, myth for the rest” mindset informing traditional Western non-mimetic genres—
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especially fantasy and science fiction, with their often colonialist and imperialist visions
of spiritual or technological (con)quests. Today’s speculative fiction affirms not merely
the existence of ethnic traditions of science and spirituality but the cognitive value of
speculative visions of the world formulated from a postcolonial or minority perspective.
The creation of the James Tiptree Jr. Award for speculative fiction that explores gender
(since 1991) and of the Carl Brandon Society—aiming to increase racial and ethnic
diversity in the production of and audience for speculative fiction (since 1999)—are just
two of the many indicators about how well the term “speculative fiction” has served the
much-needed minority voices. Dark Matter was quickly followed by other collections of
diasporic speculative fictions: Nalo Hopkinson’s Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root:
Caribbean Fabulist Fiction (2000); Sheree R. Thomas’s Dark Matter: Reading the Bones
(2004); Nalo Hopkinson and Mehan Uppinder’s So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial
Science Fiction and Fantasy (2004); Derwin Mak and Eric Choi’s The Dragon and the
Stars (2010); Sandra Jackson and Judy Moody-Freeman’s The Black Imagination: Science
Fiction, Futurism and The Speculative (2011); Grace Dillon’s Walking the Clouds (2012),
as well as the Kickstarter-funded grassroots anthologies by Rose Fox and Daniel José
Older, Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History (2014) and its sequel
Hidden Youth (forthcoming).
Informing all these works is a conviction that forms of ethnic cultural expression must be
recognized on their own terms, especially in how they subvert the Western dichotomy
between the real and unreal, natural and supernatural, scientific and unscientific. As
Hopkinson argues in So Long Been Dreaming, speculative fiction written from the context
of blackness and Caribbeanness is substantially different from mainstream science fiction
and fantasy in that it subverts these genres’ Westernized tropes and codes. “In my
hands,” Hopkinson declares, “massa’s tools don’t dismantle massa’s house—and in fact, I
don’t want to destroy it so much as I want to undertake massive renovations—they build
me a house of my own.”32 That house has its own space within the field of speculative
fiction. Neither excluding nor privileging traditional Western genres, speculative fiction
accommodates international works written in languages other than English, bifocal
cultural forms such as Ingrid Thaler’s eponymous Black Atlantic Speculative Fictions
(2014), and speculative fiction informed by Latin@, Asian American, Indigenous, and
other non-Western traditions, all of which share a legacy of marginalization. In other
words, speculative fiction today refers to a global phenomenon of non-mimetic traditions
from around the world, whose contemporary ethnic examples often articulate
multicultural reality better than the historically white and predominantly Anglophone
non-mimetic genres.
That last quality implies another much appreciated advantage of speculative fiction: its
inclusive open-endedness. Invariably, authors, scholars, editors, and online resources that
evoke speculative fiction explain that the term encompasses science fiction, fantasy,
horror and/or more genres. These, however, are always cited as examples rather than a
closed list. Instead of defining “speculative fiction” through boundaries, its advocates
suggest that the term’s wide scope is especially welcoming to texts from the margins:
generic, cultural, ethnic, or others. This has been the case at least since the
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establishment of the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (1995), which declares the
project to be “a community effort to catalog works of science fiction, fantasy, and
horror,”33 but includes entries on narratives that hybridize and go beyond these three. It is
likewise true of many recent initiatives, for example, the Current Research in Speculative
Fiction conference (since 2011) that aims to “promote the research of speculative fictions
including, but not limited to, science fiction, fantasy and horror.”34 The lens of speculative
fiction, finally, ignores the distinction between literary and popular articulations of non-
mimetic genres. These are noted merely as historically located markers in the evolution
of speculative fiction. If Scholes considered solely the evolution of mainstream Western
literature, and if Waggoner’s list of speculative fiction—filtered into a timeline of fantasy
—included seventy-six titles written by white authors, today’s speculative fiction is a
much wider and diverse category.
Contrary to what Heinlein, Merril, Scholes, or Atwood might have wished, “speculative
fiction” has not replaced the term “science fiction.” Instead, it has claimed a different,
much larger space in the cultural imagination. Today, a search of “speculative fiction” in
the Full Text box of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Database yields over thirty
thousand items. The works of speculative fiction range from the gothic surreal, unicorn
bedtime tales, and varieties of Shojo fan fiction, through post-apocalyptic zombie
romance, Afrofuturist eco-dystopia, and posthuman urban fantasy, to steampunk animal
superhero tales, alternate history magic realism, and postmodern fractured fairy tales.
With works appealing to all age groups and across a range of subculture audiences;
operating in printed, electronic, and hybrid formats; and available in all visual media,
contemporary speculative fiction spans anything from Spongebob to Avengers, Thor, the
Ice Age movies and The Hunger Games to a Southpark spoof of The Game of Thrones. For
those who value the term, it is the largest, the most diverse, and the most dynamic
category of modern storytelling.
Despite its perplexing heterogeneity, speculative fiction across the board shares two
qualities. First, it interrogates normative notions about reality and challenges the
materialist complacency that nothing exists beyond the phenomenal world. This,
incidentally, aligns it with science, which posits that all of the known kinds of matter and
energy make up, at best, only about 4 percent of the universe, whereas the nature and
properties of the remaining 96 percent remain anybody’s guess. Given that dark matter
and dark energy are now assumed to be a mathematical necessity, speculative fiction may
well be theorized as an imaginative necessity: a mode of critical inquiry that celebrates
human creative power. Second, speculative fiction offers no pretense of being factual or
accurate. This denial endows it with a potential for challenging consensus reality, besides
making speculative fiction politically scrappy, cognitively empowering, and affectively
stimulating. With all its borderless messiness, the field of speculative fiction can thus be
considered the unlimited cloud space for our multicultural world’s non-mimetic traditions
that help us share and reclaim forgotten or marginalized modes of engagement with
reality.
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Further Reading
Attebery, Brian. Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2014.
Atwood, Margaret. In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. New York: Nan A.
Talese, 2011.
Bleiler, Richard, ed. The Empire of the Future. In Political Future Fictions: Speculative
and Counter-Factual Politics in Edwardian Britain. vol. 1. Edited by Kate Macdonald.
London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013.
Bould, Mark, and China Miéville, eds. Historical Materialism 10.4 (2002).
Calvin, Ritch, ed. The Merril Theory of Lit’ry Criticism: Judith Merril’s Nonfiction. Seattle,
WA: Aqueduct Press, 2016.
Current Research in Speculative Fiction. Conference blogspace. Web.
Delany, Samuel R. The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. Rev.
ed. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009.
Dillon, Grace L, ed. Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction.
Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012.
Donovan, Stephen, ed. Speculative Fiction and Imperialism in Africa. In Political Future
Fictions: Speculative and Counter-Factual Politics in Edwardian Britain. vol. 3. Edited by
Kate Macdonald. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013.
Fowler, Karen J., Pat Murphy, Debbie Notkin, and Jeffrey Smith, eds. The James Tiptree
Award Anthology 3. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2006.
Fox, Rose, and Daniel José Older, eds. Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins
of History. Framingham, MA: Crossed Genres Publications, 2014.
Gunn, James, and Matthew Candelaria, eds. Speculations on Speculation: Theories of

Science Fiction. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005.
Hopkinson, Nalo, ed. Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction.
Montpelier, VT: Invisible Cities Press, 2000.
Hopkinson, Nalo, and Mehan Uppinder, eds. So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial
Science Fiction and Fantasy. Vancouver, CA: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004.
Hume, Kathryn. Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature. New
York and London: Methuen, 1984.
The Internet Speculative Fiction Database.
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Speculative Fiction
Jackson, Sandra, and Judy Moody-Freeman, eds. The Black Imagination: Science Fiction,
Futurism and The Speculative. New York: Peter Lang, 2011.
Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other
Science Fictions. London and New York: Verso, 2005.
Le Guin, Ursula K. Where on Earth. In The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories of
Ursula K. Le Guin. vol. 1. Easthampton, MA: Small Beer Press, 2012.
Le Guin, Ursula K. Outer Space, Inner Lands. In The Unreal and the Real: Selected
Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin. vol. 2. Easthampton, MA: Small Beer Press, 2012.
Lovecraft, H. P. “Supernatural Horror in Literature.”
Macdonald, Kate, ed. Fictions of the Feminist Future. In Political Future Fictions:
Speculative and Counter-Factual Politics in Edwardian Britain. vol. 2. London: Pickering
and Chatto, 2013.
Mak, Derwin, and Eric Choi, eds. The Dragon and the Stars. New York: Daw Books, 2010.
Oziewicz, Marek. Justice in Young Adult Speculative Fiction: A Cognitive Reading. New
York: Routledge, 2015.
Scholes, Robert. Structural Fabulation: An Essay on the Fiction of the Future. Notre
Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975.
Sederholm, Carl H., and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, eds. The Age of Lovecraft.
Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
“Special Section.” Extrapolation 50.1 (2009): 7–32.
Thaler, Ingrid. Black Atlantic Speculative Fictions. New York: Routledge, 2014.
Thomas, Paul L, ed. Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction: Challenging Genres.
Rotterdam, Boston, Taipei: Sense Publishers, 2013.
Thomas, Sheree R., ed. Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African
Diaspora. New York: Warner Books, 2000.
Waggoner, Diana. The Hills of Faraway: A Guide to Fantasy. New York: Atheneum, 1978.
Notes:
(1.) H. P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters, vol. 3, in The Weird Tale: Arthur Machen, Lord
Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James, Ambrose Bierce, H.P. Lovecraft, 178–179, ed.,
S. C. Joshi, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990). While Lovecraft’s most oft-quoted
creative statement is Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927), the most incisive recent
overview of the relevance of horror to our contemporary culture—with its intimations of
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Apocalypse, decentering of human meaning in the universe, posthumanist questionings,

and ironic disavowals—can be found in Carl H. Sederholm and Jeffrey Andrew
Weinstock’s “Introduction” to The Age of Lovecraft (2016).
(2.) Kate Macdonald, “General Introduction: Utopian Ideals in Edwardian Political Future
Fiction,” in The Empire of the Future, ed. Richard Bleiler (London: Pickering and Chatto,
2013), vii.
(3.) Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a
Literary Genre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 7–8, 63.
(4.) Brian Attebery, “Special Section,” Extrapolation 50.1 (2009): 7–9.
(5.) Raymond Williams, “Science Fiction,” in Tenses of Imagination: Raymond Williams on

Science Fiction, Utopia and Dystopia, ed. Andrew Milner (Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang,
2010), 15.
(6.) Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Cardigan, U.K.: Parthian, 2011), 68.
(7.) Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 38–41.
(8.) One of the first to use this term was Tzvetan Todorov in The Fantastic: A Structural
Approach to Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland, OH: Press of Case
Western Reserve University, 1973). For Todorov’s definition of the fantastic as an effect,
see 33.
(9.) Ursula K. Le Guin, “Earthsea Revisioned,” (Cambridge, U.K.: Children’s Literature

New England and Green Bay Publications, 1993), 7.
(10.) Judith Merril, “Introduction,” in SF: The Best of the Best (New York: Delacorte Press,
1967), 3.
(11.) Judith Merril, Agreement between Judith Merril and the Board of the Toronto Public
Library, in “History of the Merril Collection,” Available at http://
www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/merril/history.jsp.
(12.) Robert Scholes, Structural Fabulation: An Essay on the Fiction of the Future (Notre
Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), 1.
(13.) Ibid., 18.
(14.) Ibid., 75.
(15.) Ibid., 74–75.
(16.) Ibid., 25.
(17.) Ibid., 27.
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(18.) Ibid., 39.
(19.) Ibid., 41.
(20.) Diana Waggoner, The Hills of Faraway: A Guide to Fantasy (New York: Atheneum,
1978), 8.
(21.) Ibid., 9.
(22.) Ibid., 20.
(23.) Roger Schlobin, The Aesthetics of Fantasy Literature and Art (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Indiana Press, 1982), x.
(24.) Kathryn Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature
(New York and London: Methuen, 1984), xii.
(25.) Ibid., 21.
(26.) Brian Attebery, Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2014).
(27.) Mark Bould, “The Dreadful Credibility of Absurd Things: A Tendency in Fantasy
Theory,” Historical Materialism 10.4 (2002): 52, note 4.
(28.) China Miéville, “Editorial Introduction,” Historical Materialism 10.4 (2002): 43.
(29.) Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other
Science Fictions (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 60.
(30.) Sheree Thomas, Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African
Diaspora (New York: Warner Books, 2000), ix–x.
(31.) Jeffrey A. Weinstock, Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 194.
(32.) Nalo Hopkinson, “Introduction,” in So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science

Fiction and Fantasy (Vancouver, CA: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004), 8.
(33.) The Internet Speculative Fiction Database.
(34.) Current Research in Speculative Fiction Blogpost.
Marek Oziewicz
University of Minnesota
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Speculative Fiction

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature

Summary and Keywords

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[horrifyingly inhuman] unknown,” which according to H. P. Lovecraft is the crux of horror

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History of Use and Main Approaches

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lasting influence on a number of female writers, including Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris

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An opposite view—expressed by one of the young voices, the editor of Foundation,

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To make sense of this most recent conceptualization of speculative fiction, it may be

If the growing acceptance of speculative fiction is a function of the emergent structure of

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Early Formulations about the Field of

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mode of literature, at once indebted to the traditional scientific methods of hypothesis

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calls fabulation. He then locates its development diachronically, identifying three

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non-human intelligence, existence, or powers, some of these dubbed as magic—can only

Positing fantasy as the ultimate expression of speculative fiction obviously reveals

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Recent Formulations: Advantages and

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of science fiction—alternate history, apocalyptic science fiction, arthouse science fiction

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Current Research in Speculative Fiction. Conference blogspace. Web.

Gunn, James, and Matthew Candelaria, eds. Speculations on Speculation: Theories of

The Internet Speculative Fiction Database.

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Lovecraft, H. P. “Supernatural Horror in Literature.”

“Special Section.” Extrapolation 50.1 (2009): 7–32.

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Apocalypse, decentering of human meaning in the universe, posthumanist questionings,

(4.) Brian Attebery, “Special Section,” Extrapolation 50.1 (2009): 7–9.

(5.) Raymond Williams, “Science Fiction,” in Tenses of Imagination: Raymond Williams on

(9.) Ursula K. Le Guin, “Earthsea Revisioned,” (Cambridge, U.K.: Children’s Literature

(13.) Ibid., 18.

(14.) Ibid., 75.

(15.) Ibid., 74–75.

(16.) Ibid., 25.

(17.) Ibid., 27.

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(18.) Ibid., 39.

(19.) Ibid., 41.

(22.) Ibid., 20.

(25.) Ibid., 21.