Speculative Fiction
Entry updated 7 April 2025. Tagged: Theme.
Item of Terminology used by some writers and critics for a period after World War Two in place of Science Fiction. Its first known use is by the reviewer M F Egan in "Book-Talk" (October 1899 Lippincott's Monthly Magazine), which describes Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888) as "speculative fiction". In the symposium published as Of Worlds Beyond: The Science of Science Fiction Writing (anth 1947) edited by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, Robert A Heinlein proposed the term to describe a subset of sf involving extrapolation from known science and Technology "to produce a new situation, a new framework for human action". Michael Moorcock, considering ways forward for sf in his fanzine article "Blast Off 1960" (August 1960 Bastion #1 ed Eric Bentcliffe), drew a distinction between adventure fiction in the mode of E C Tubb and "speculative fiction" in the mode of Brian W Aldiss.
Judith Merril borrowed the term in 1966, spelling out her version of "speculative fiction" in rather more detail (see Definitions of SF) in such a way as to de-emphasize the science component of sf (which acronym can equally stand for "speculative fiction") while keeping the idea of extrapolation – in other words, Merril's use of the term was useful for that kind of sociological sf which concentrates on social change without necessarily any great emphasis on science or Technology. Since then the term generally appealed to writers and readers who are as interested in Soft SF as in Hard SF. Though this designation proved attractive to many, especially perhaps academics who found it more respectable-sounding than "science fiction" and perhaps lacking the Pulp-magazine associations, nobody's definition of "speculative fiction" has as yet demonstrated much descriptive rigour; indeed, the term, despite the implication it inevitably bears of defining sf as a form of cognition, came to be used with a very wide application (as by Samuel R Delany in his Original-Anthology series QUARK/), as if science fiction were a subset of speculative fiction rather than vice versa. Within a range of assumptions that prioritizes cognition in fantastic narratives, "speculative fiction" does remain a useful term; but it is distractingly diversionary in any wider twentieth-century application that might incorporate Fantasy as a whole, and fails to address the jostle of genres characteristic of more recent work. As Gary K Wolfe points out in Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy (1986), critics tend to worry more about the demarcation of genres than writers do, and the frequent use in this encyclopedia of the gatherum term Fantastika, which implies a self-knowing looseness as to the "precise" nature of a text being so described, reflects a terminological caution that Wolfe might think wise. [PN/DRL/JC]
see also: Mainstream Writers of SF; New Wave; Slipstream SF.
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