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What is Speculative Fiction?
Most generally speculative fiction is a term used instead of
science fiction. The reason why it's used instead of simply
calling a story science fiction is because most science fiction doesn't
have a lot to do with science. That is to say, a story about a space
ship trip to a distant star might include a great deal of accurate
science, or it might not: in either case it's called science
fiction, which isn't very helpful to people who want to be accurate
about things like that, and which is why people thought of a new word
that includes all of the other stories that might be called science
fiction: speculative fiction.
Why was it called science fiction, then? The term isn't all that old, and
 Hugo
Gernsback |
only goes back to 1926, when Hugo Gernsback, the editor of
 Amazing
Stories Cover, October 1932 |
Amazing Stories coined the term "scientifiction." That term didn't stick,
but people quickly massaged it around into "science fiction," which did
stick. (You can read more about Hugo Gernsback and Amazing Stories
here.)
In the next couple of decades people noticed that a lot of
science fiction didn't have a lot to do with science. Some of the best
stories ignored science altogether, in fact. So in 1947
Robert Heinlein,
one of the best known science fiction authors in the world, suggested
the term speculative fiction. At first the term was used to describe a
subset of science fiction (extrapolation from known science and
technology to create a new world), but people have since started to use
it in a more general sense, as a term to describe all of science
fiction, as well as many other genres of writing, including horror and
fantasy. (In fact, another way of describing science fiction is to say
that it is a fantasy of the future.)
So, you ask, that's all very interesting, but what is speculative fiction?
Well, one way to describe speculative fiction is to say that it's fiction
that asks "what if?" questions. That's not to say that ordinary fiction doesn't
ask "what if?" questions. But speculative fiction doesn't ask ordinary "what if?"
questions, like "what if a young and naive boy met an escaping slave?" Speculative
fiction asks fantastic "what if?" questions, like "what if dragons were real?" or
"what if we could visit distant stars?" Speculative fiction explores possibilities
that are not contained in the real world of the present day.
Most people are familiar with speculative fiction from Star Wars, Star Trek,
and Harry Potter. But there is a lot more to speculative fiction. You may want
to acquaint yourself with some of the variety of speculative fiction. Your teacher
or librarian will be delighted to help you with advice on where to start.
Here's a list of stories that might be called speculative fiction these days:
You see that the list goes back to the beginnings of story telling. The
stories have changed over time, of course. Where people used to wonder what
strange creatures might live in the uncharted oceans, we now wonder what
marvels will be uncovered with the next supercollider, or in the next
test tube. We also wonder about things that cannot reasonably ever happen,
like magic, or alternate histories. There's no telling how speculative
fiction will evolve in the future, as we discover new horizons beyond which
we cannot yet see.
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