{"id":3113,"date":"2023-12-13T13:51:46","date_gmt":"2023-12-13T13:51:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=3113"},"modified":"2023-12-13T13:52:08","modified_gmt":"2023-12-13T13:52:08","slug":"sf-and-speculative-fiction-speculating-on-labels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2023\/12\/13\/sf-and-speculative-fiction-speculating-on-labels\/","title":{"rendered":"SF AND SPECULATIVE FICTION: SPECULATING ON LABELS"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Ann Leckie and Cat Rambo, both SF authors and good friends, participated in a delicious session<\/a> 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<\/em> 2013, Ancillary Sword<\/em> 2014, and Ancillary Mercy<\/em> 2015), complained against the use of the label \u2018speculative fiction\u2019 to mean science fiction, a complaint I wish to subscribe, despite knowing we are both going against the current tide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            A post<\/a> in the blog by David Wilton, Word Origins<\/em>, indicates that the label \u2018speculative fiction\u2019 has been around at least since 1856, \u201cin the sense of a broader imaginative literature.\u201d Wilton quotes from the North British Review<\/em> (August 1856) a sentence which refers to a novelty as \u201cwhat may be called the literature of philosophical and speculative fiction.\u201d By 1889, Wilton explains, speculative was linked to what was then called \u2018scientific romance\u2019; in this case he refers to a review in Lippencott\u2019s<\/em> Monthly Magazine<\/em> (October 1889), which refers to Edward Bellamy\u2019s utopia Looking Backward<\/em> and other texts as \u201cspeculative fiction put in the future tense.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Heinlein begins his essay \u201cOn the Writing of Speculative Fiction<\/a>\u201d (or, see 219-228 in The Nonfiction of Robert Heinlein: Volume I<\/em>, Heinlein Trust, 2011) with \u201cThere are at least two principal ways to write speculative fiction\u2014write about people, or write about gadgets.\u201d For Heinlein, \u201cMost science fiction stories are a mixture of the two types\u201d but he himself preferred \u201cthe human-interest story, that being the sort of story I myself write.\u201d In the same essay, however, he distinguishes between the \u2018gadget story\u2019 as \u2018science fiction\u2019 and the \u2018people story\u2019 as \u2018speculative fiction\u2019, noting that \u201cIn the speculative science fiction story accepted science and established facts are extrapolated to produce a new situation, a new framework for human action.\u201d In a letter penned in 1949, Heinlein insisted that \u201cSpeculative 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,\u201d beyond sciences and engineering. Heinlein firmly rejected the idea that fantasy is also speculative fiction, as this needs to obey \u201cthe laws of nature\u201d or their extrapolation to the realistic environment of SF, where magic and the supernatural should have no place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Today, at the end of 2023, however, the label \u2018speculative fiction\u2019 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\u2019s Nebula, an award traditionally honouring the best SF, is Nettle and Bone<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            The MLA database reveals that the first use of \u201cspeculative fiction\u201d in academic work corresponds to a 1974 dissertation whose third part is called \u201cImages of Women in Recent Speculative Fiction.\u201d There seems to be a connection indeed between women and this label, a link consolidated by Marlene Barr\u2019s Alien to Femininity: Speculative Fiction and Feminist Theory<\/em> (1987). The 1990 chapter by Elaine Jordan, \u201cEnthralment: Angela Carter\u2019s Speculative Fiction\u201d (in the collective volume Plotting Change: Contemporary Women\u2019s Fiction<\/em>) further suggests that women have led the growth of \u2018speculative fiction\u2019 as a label to encompass other genres than just SF. Carter never wrote science fiction, her territory was, rather, fantasy of a postmodern turn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            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 \u2018speculative fiction\u2019 have grown enormously. The label even started being used for genres outside the fantastic, such as historical fiction (\u201cSpeculative Fictions: Contemporary Canadian Novelists and the Writing of History,\u201d by Martin Kuester, 2003, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies<\/em>), 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 <\/em>(eds. Sarah Falcus, and Maricel Or\u00f3-Piqueras, 2023), a volume suggesting that SF is not<\/em> speculative fiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Readers do not go to bookshops seeking \u2018speculative fiction\u2019 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 \u201cAre We Losing The Essence Of Science Fiction<\/a>?;\u201d 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 \u2018what if\u2026?\u2019 fiction to mundane, realist fiction, but even so, I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            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 \u2018gender-fluid\u2019 appeared in 1993, \u2018genre-fluid\u2019 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 \u2018genre-fluid\u2019 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\u2019s Surface Detail<\/em>, which is space opera, described through the itemizing of its tropes on TV Tropes<\/a>. On GoodReads Banks\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Here\u2019s the conundrum for me: I am currently writing a book on men\u2019s 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 \u2018science fiction\u2019 rather than \u2018speculative fiction\u2019, 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 \u2018science fiction\u2019, 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 \u201cimaginative genres\u201d (I\u2019m quoting from its website) are mixed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            The additional problem, as you can see, is that if we mix all the \u201cimaginative genres\u201d in an undifferentiated mass, we need to do the same with the rest, to create yet another mass. Should we perhaps call them \u201cunimaginative genres\u201d? 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<\/em> 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\u2019s note to his historical epic Maror<\/a><\/em>, \u201cthey don\u2019t give you one of those for a book about elves.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            I\u2019m still confused, but firmly convinced that science fiction needs to be distinguished from other genres and \u2018speculative fiction\u2019 used with much caution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1031],"class_list":["post-3113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-fiction","tag-speculative-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3113"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3114,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3113\/revisions\/3114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}