About the Concept
Speculative Fiction is a practice that mobilizes creative powers to think possible alternative. “What if?” can be considered as the starting point of the fiction. SF is an umbrella genre that includes science fiction, Alternate history, horror, and has a many practioners questioning genre issues.
Sources
Margaret Atwood The Prophet of Dystopia
Exploitation
What if
In writing “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Atwood was scrupulous about including nothing that did not have a historical antecedent or a modern point of comparison. (She prefers that her future-fantasy books be labelled “speculative fiction” rather than “science fiction.” “Not because I don’t like Martians . . . they just don’t fall within my skill set,” she wrote in the introduction to “In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination,” an essay collection that she published in 2011.)
Speculative Fiction is an umbrella term that encompass many areas of fiction, but has the important quality to envision its grounding on a transformatio of existing context to propose a transformative narrative.
Speculative Fiction is intertweened with different realities contexts and personnas however it by transforming existing elements it allows the immagination of a completely tranformed world and imaginaries. Speculative Fiction has bee a fertile terrain to envision different gender distributions in society, including characters who change gender unexpetely, wear 2 genders and/or a third one, and many other manipulations, those experiemnts are fertile in proposing new scenarios for change. There are many discussions about the necessity of a classification such as speculative fiction, and Margaret Atwood’s affirmations: “ Atwood’s claim that speculative fiction is the antithesis of those cheesy, escapist fantasies about talking squids in outer space.” certainly did not help the conversation, however the oposite might be true as some serious scientific litterature proposes that maybe octopuses are alien species brought to us from out of space by meteors.
Tree of Significance
- SYNONYM
- paradigm-changing narration
- ANTONYM
- realism, naturalism, information, non-fiction
- HYPERNYM
- ethics, politics, assemblage, allegory, narrative fiction
- HYPONYM
- mythopoesis,historical fiction, science fiction, anticipation, alternate history, uchronia