Why is speculative fiction popular

However, as I mentioned in the beginning, not all science fiction and horror necessarily counts as speculative. For example, there are books of horror that are still set in our world with our rules. The Handmaids Tale , she is chillingly accurate to her definition in that regard.

Atwood also mentions a debate she had with Ursula K. Le Guin. Le Guin said that science fiction is speculative fiction when what is written about could really happen, whereas narratives that cannot, under any circumstances, happen in our world i. Earthsea classify separately as fantasy. So in this respect, we might define speculative fiction as it relates to the world we know and live in today. These narratives are not set in our world today; that world does not exist.

I agree that narratives that take place in a purely secondary world e. But, to diverge a bit from Le Guin, there are books and short stories set in the real world, grounded in the real world, or an alternate timeline of our world, that have fantastical elements or fall squarely under the fantasy genre. Those I would support being defined as speculative. With that in mind, below is a small list—a jumping off point—of books based on a culmination of the above definitions. Red Clocks envisions a future that could, frighteningly, become our own.

It follows five women and takes place in an America where abortion is illegal everywhere, in-vitro fertilization is banned, and a new amendment has been added to the constitution that grants rights to every embryo.

This book is the first in a series and takes place after a climate apocalypse. Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho uses fantasy tropes like magic and romance , all the while examining matters related to gender and racism. How many people have read the journal Science, Technology and Society? Now, how many people read Ready Player One?

We can confidently say that the general public is much more likely to read popular sci-fi novels or go watch a fantasy movie than they are to seek out research articles pertaining to technology. In that way, fiction and other forms of popular entertainment play a huge role in shaping public opinion and knowledge — particularly the public perception of contemporary issues regarding technology.

For instance, there is much discussion around that fact that AI and automation has lead to the redundancy of many kinds of jobs, leading to whole classes of workers struggling to find employment.

However, reading a science fiction book that closely examines the issue — all the while incorporating favorite tropes of the genre — might incite you to think more deeply about the implications of technology and the consequences it can have.

This could happen , many commented — while others noted this has basically already been happening. Black Mirror is another example of a popular TV series that looks at current technological trajectories and pushes them just far enough that they feel speculative, but not so much that they feel completely fantastical.

Both these examples demonstrate how speculative fiction offers cautionary advice by presenting readers with a version of the world that is hard to look at — and a world that may not be in the distant future, but in the near future.

Readers can be encouraged to not only see the potential pitfalls of current trajectories, but also the potential solutions to them.

No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be. You can find him on Twitter. Well put! Whereas science fiction generally engages with technological developments and their potential consequences, speculative fiction is a far broader, vaguer term.

Read more: Guide to the classics: the Epic of Gilgamesh. Next step, surely, mainstream popularity! After all, millions of moviegoers and television viewers have binge-watched the rise of fantastic forms, and audiences are well versed in unreal onscreen worlds. One reason for this new interest in an old but evolving form has been well articulated by author and critic James Bradley: climate change. Writers, and publishers, are embracing speculative fiction as an apt form to interrogate what it means to be human, to be humane, in the current climate — and to engage with ideas of posthumanism too.

The year was declared the hottest on record, echoing the previous year and the one before that. People under 30 have never experienced a month in which average temperatures are below the long-term mean. Hurricanes register on the Richter scale and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has added a colour to temperature maps as the heat keeps on climbing.

What are we to do about this? There is an infographic doing the rounds on Facebook that shows sister countries with comparable climates to warming regions of Australia. Associate Professor Michael Kearney, Research Fellow in Biosciences at the University of Melbourne, points out that no-one anywhere in the world has any experience of our current CO 2 levels.

Elsewhere, biologists are gathering evidence of algae that carbon dioxide has made carbohydrate-rich but less nutritious. So the plankton that rely on them to survive might eat more and more and yet still starve.

Fiction focused on the inner lives of a limited cross-section of people no longer seems the best literary form to reflect, or reflect on, our brave new outer world — if, indeed, it ever was.