Ann Leckie and Cat Rambo, both SF authors and good friends, participated in a delicious session at Festival 42, last month here in Barcelona. During their conversation with Leticia Lara, Leckie, known for her Imperial Radch space opera trilogy (Ancillary Justice 2013, Ancillary Sword 2014, and Ancillary Mercy 2015), complained against the use of the label ‘speculative fiction’ to mean science fiction, a complaint I wish to subscribe, despite knowing we are both going against the current tide.
A post in the blog by David Wilton, Word Origins, indicates that the label ‘speculative fiction’ has been around at least since 1856, “in the sense of a broader imaginative literature.” Wilton quotes from the North British Review (August 1856) a sentence which refers to a novelty as “what may be called the literature of philosophical and speculative fiction.” By 1889, Wilton explains, speculative was linked to what was then called ‘scientific romance’; in this case he refers to a review in Lippencott’s Monthly Magazine (October 1889), which refers to Edward Bellamy’s utopia Looking Backward and other texts as “speculative fiction put in the future tense.” By the time SF writer Robert A. Heinlein used this label as a synonym of science fiction, in 1947, it had been around, therefore, for close to a century.
Heinlein begins his essay “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction” (or, see 219-228 in The Nonfiction of Robert Heinlein: Volume I, Heinlein Trust, 2011) with “There are at least two principal ways to write speculative fiction—write about people, or write about gadgets.” For Heinlein, “Most science fiction stories are a mixture of the two types” but he himself preferred “the human-interest story, that being the sort of story I myself write.” In the same essay, however, he distinguishes between the ‘gadget story’ as ‘science fiction’ and the ‘people story’ as ‘speculative fiction’, noting that “In the speculative science fiction story accepted science and established facts are extrapolated to produce a new situation, a new framework for human action.” In a letter penned in 1949, Heinlein insisted that “Speculative fiction (I prefer that term to science fiction) is also concerned with sociology, psychology, esoteric aspects of biology, impact of terrestrial culture on the other cultures we may encounter when we conquer space, etc., without end,” beyond sciences and engineering. Heinlein firmly rejected the idea that fantasy is also speculative fiction, as this needs to obey “the laws of nature” or their extrapolation to the realistic environment of SF, where magic and the supernatural should have no place.
Today, at the end of 2023, however, the label ‘speculative fiction’ is used for practically all narrative genres which do not reflect mundane reality: science fiction, fantasy, horror/gothic, fairy tales, magical realism, utopia/dystopia, etc, in an extreme case of genre fluidity which is threatening to blur boundaries into meaninglessness. This is good and bad. On the one hand, it is about time we question the usefulness of genre labels, but, on the other hand, this should not be done by erasing distinctions which many authors, publishers and readers/viewers still find useful. The incoherence, besides, is beginning to be alarming. The winner of this year’s Nebula, an award traditionally honouring the best SF, is Nettle and Bone by T. Kingfisher, a fantasy novel. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, which awards the Nebula, includes, besides, among its ranks writers of romance, which is not technically fantasy, unless it includes magical elements. YA authors, also welcome by SFWA, do not always use fantasy, either.
The MLA database reveals that the first use of “speculative fiction” in academic work corresponds to a 1974 dissertation whose third part is called “Images of Women in Recent Speculative Fiction.” There seems to be a connection indeed between women and this label, a link consolidated by Marlene Barr’s Alien to Femininity: Speculative Fiction and Feminist Theory (1987). The 1990 chapter by Elaine Jordan, “Enthralment: Angela Carter’s Speculative Fiction” (in the collective volume Plotting Change: Contemporary Women’s Fiction) further suggests that women have led the growth of ‘speculative fiction’ as a label to encompass other genres than just SF. Carter never wrote science fiction, her territory was, rather, fantasy of a postmodern turn.
Funnily, when I wrote my PhD dissertation on monstrosity (1993-1996), neither of my two supervisors referred to speculative fiction, and both understood that I was dealing mainly with gothic fiction, mingled with fantasy and SF in some cases. Yet, between 1998-2000 the academic fashions changed, and since then the titles of academic works bearing the label ‘speculative fiction’ have grown enormously. The label even started being used for genres outside the fantastic, such as historical fiction (“Speculative Fictions: Contemporary Canadian Novelists and the Writing of History,” by Martin Kuester, 2003, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies), though it was used mainly as a synonym of SF until the 2010s, when it expanded (or exploded). Quite confusingly, the most recent volume in the MLA database carrying that label in its title is Age and Ageing in Contemporary Speculative and Science Fiction (eds. Sarah Falcus, and Maricel Oró-Piqueras, 2023), a volume suggesting that SF is not speculative fiction.
Readers do not go to bookshops seeking ‘speculative fiction’ but far more specific genres, which means that the academic world is, once more, at odds with what the market requires and uses. The market, in any case, is in a state of constant transformation, to the point that some are asking “Are We Losing The Essence Of Science Fiction?;” as I have noted, aids such as awards (the Nebula or the Hugo) or websites (Worlds without End) are mixing motifs from diverse genres, so that it is increasingly difficult to find guidance. I generally prefer reading speculative ‘what if…?’ fiction to mundane, realist fiction, but even so, I don’t want to navigate such an immense field without a more selective approach. Even within science fiction, which is the genre I prefer, I like to be informed about the specific sub-genres to which the novels I choose belong before I read them.
The solution to this problem is either surrendering to total genre-fluidity or using tags and tropes, as many booktubers and booktokers are doing. Curiously, whereas according to both Merriam-Webster and Google Ngram Viewer, the adjective ‘gender-fluid’ appeared in 1993, ‘genre-fluid’ seemingly only surfaced in 2019 (check Reddit and the Urban Dictionary), mainly in relation to popular music. LGTBI+ poet Dan Webber published in June 2019 a collection with that title, which suggests that, most likely, a gender-fluid person coined genre-fluid, whether this was Webber or somebody else. I have not seen, however, the adjective ‘genre-fluid’ applied to fiction. On the other hand, we might get rid of genre by using, as I have noted, tags or tropes. I had great fun recently seeing the novel I am currently working on, Iain M. Banks’s Surface Detail, which is space opera, described through the itemizing of its tropes on TV Tropes. On GoodReads Banks’s novel is labelled science fiction, space opera, science fiction fantasy and speculative fiction, which gives no idea at all of its being, above all, a story of corporate patriarchal villainy in a different timeline form ours and in another end of the galaxy.
Here’s the conundrum for me: I am currently writing a book on men’s self-representation in science fiction, but my selection of 17 novels includes some which are genre-fluid and deviate a bit from the science fiction acknowledged as such. I still want my title to mention ‘science fiction’ rather than ‘speculative fiction’, since I do not deal with fantasy or horror/gothic, yet I am no longer 100% sure that I am doing what is right. The collection to which I have submitted my proposal uses the label ‘science fiction’, as do most of the volumes in it, so it seems correct to use that same label for my book. In contrast, you may check Routledge Studies in Speculative Fiction for an example of a collection in which different “imaginative genres” (I’m quoting from its website) are mixed.
The additional problem, as you can see, is that if we mix all the “imaginative genres” in an undifferentiated mass, we need to do the same with the rest, to create yet another mass. Should we perhaps call them “unimaginative genres”? We have been using labels such as mainstream, literary, realistic, mimetic, but, again, there is a world of difference between, say, romance fiction and experimental literary fiction. On the other hand, funnily, Prophet Song by Irish novelist Paul Lynch, the novel that has won the 2023 Booker Prize, is a dystopia, and, as such, part of the speculative fiction offered by the imaginary genres. I find this funny because Israeli author Lavie Tidhar, a genre-fluid author who writes science fiction and fantasy, has announced his intention to abandon those genres because he wants to win a Booker. As he has written in the author’s note to his historical epic Maror, “they don’t give you one of those for a book about elves.” Well, they give them to dystopias without fantasy elements, which, still, can be called speculative fiction, so all it needs is for the Booker Prize judges to be a bit more open-minded.
I’m still confused, but firmly convinced that science fiction needs to be distinguished from other genres and ‘speculative fiction’ used with much caution.