![]() ![]() ![]() But, to diverge a bit from Le Guin, there are books and short stories set in the real world, grounded in the real world, or an alternate timeline of our world, that have fantastical elements or fall squarely under the fantasy genre. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth Trilogy, etc.) don’t quite count. I agree that narratives that take place in a purely secondary world (e.g. Contemporary Speculative Fiction Examplesįrom the above exploration, I’d like to think of speculative fiction as a mix of the what-if scenario interacting with a basis in our world. These narratives are not set in our world today that world does not exist. So in this respect, we might define speculative fiction as it relates to the world we know and live in today. Earthsea) classify separately as fantasy. Le Guin said that science fiction is speculative fiction when what is written about could really happen, whereas narratives that cannot, under any circumstances, happen in our world (i.e. The Handmaids Tale, she is chillingly accurate to her definition in that regard.Ītwood also mentions a debate she had with Ursula K. The worlds of science fiction and speculative fiction “don’t exist, and their non-existence is of a difference in order than the non-existence of the realistic novels.” Additionally, Atwood draws the line between what science fiction stories are considered speculative fiction: “plots that descend from Jules Verne’s books about submarines and balloon travel and such-things that really could happen but hadn’t completely happened when the authors wrote the book.”Ītwood places her own work in this category, and as we’ve seen lately in the world, i.e. Margaret Atwood writes in her book In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imaginationthat science fiction and speculative fiction are fluid terms. To explore this caveat, we need Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. For example, there are books of horror that are still set in our world with our rules. However, as I mentioned in the beginning, not all science fiction and horror necessarily counts as speculative. And what genres better ask these questions than science fiction, fantasy, horror, etc.? Caveats In Speculative Fiction The questions “What if this happened?” or “What if the world were this way?” often are the seedlings to speculative fiction stories. So I think it’s best to sit down and ponder the term “to speculate.” To theorize. ![]() With all these definitions and listed genres, it can get overwhelming. defines speculative fiction as “a broad literary genre encompassing any fiction with supernatural, fantastical, or futuristic elements.” Additionally, the Speculative Literature Foundation describes it as a “catch-all term”: eant to inclusively span the breadth of fantastic literature, encompassing literature ranging from hard science fiction to epic fantasy to ghost stories to horror to folk and fairy tales to slipstream to magical realism to modern myth-making - and more. Recent Definition(s): What Makes It Speculative Now that we have an idea of when it was coined, let’s look at some current definitions. Because of that, some see speculative fiction as too broad a term, nebulous and unproductive. There are those who have used the term for media and other forms of art. Most recently, the term goes even beyond the scope of literature. I’ll explain more of Atwood’s take below. Writers such as a Margaret Atwood proposed new, adjusted definitions. Over time, though, this definition became unpopular.
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