What Is Speculative Fiction

Before we can successfully discuss speculative fiction, it would be helpful to know what speculative fiction actually is. In the past, speculative fiction has been defined several ways.

Some authors whose stories appear to be science fiction instead choose to categorize their work as speculative fiction to avoid some perceived stigma associated with the other genre. I find this to be deceitful and manipulative personally, and rather insulting to the science fiction genre, which contains works of classic literature as well as more mainstream escapism (both of which I happen to enjoy). In the end, it's also useless as a genre definition, since if we are only using it to refer to stories that are actually another genre, then it has no real purpose.

We could try to figure out what speculative fiction is from the root word speculative. Speculative comes from the word speculate, which means, essentially, to think about things that haven't happened. As such, speculative fiction could mean any story that is about things that haven't happened. Sounds good on the surface, but there's a small problem. By definition, fiction is always about things that haven't happened, which is why we call it fiction rather than history or biography or some other such category. So, this definition is also useless, since it refers to all fictional works.

For purposes of this site, and the magazine sold here, I'm defining speculative fiction as dealing with stories that involve things that cannot happen at the time the story is written. This wide umbrella includes science fiction and fantasy, some horror fiction, cyberpunk, steampunk, magic realism and more. It serves the purpose of bringing all these similar yet individual groups together under one roof to make discussions easier. That is the definition used by the reviewers of submitted stories, and for stories included in the newsletters and speculative fiction anthologies available here.

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