A Brief History of "Speculative Fiction"

It's been a long, wild, squid-filled ride

Welcome to Talking Squids and Outer Space and You, the umpteenth iteration of a blog on my research into genre fiction shenanigans I have been writing on and off since 2015. (If you’re wondering where the heck that title comes from, stick around! Its namesake is discussed in this very post.)

I’ve been wondering for a while where to start trying to discuss my research with a wider audience. Spelunking in the deep caves of research that a dissertation requires can make it feel daunting and impossible to retrace your steps far enough to shout back to the surface-dwelling world you have left so far behind. Should I start with some foundational theory and then build to current trends? Just review whatever novels and monographs are coming across my desk at any given time? Try to adapt my finished dissertation chapters into bite-sized chunks?

Luckily, inspiration has come in the form of a guest lecture I’ve been generously invited to give on the topic of “speculative fiction” - specifically, its tumultuous history as a genre term. Being a genre theorist myself and this particular subject being a favorite hobbyhorse of mine, I have been eagerly collecting my thoughts - not just rehearsing a story I have told time and time again to seemingly anybody who would listen at any given department mixer or conference coffee break, but adding a little depth and sourcing. This post is the lion’s share of that preparation.

I won’t lie: as a genre theorist, I enjoy putting things in buckets - the science fiction bucket, the fantasy bucket, the “realism” bucket, etc. - to the degree that asking “which bucket should X novel go in?” or “what criteria does something need to meet before it can go in the science fiction bucket?” or “should the fantasy bucket be next to the science fiction bucket or not?” are inherently exciting questions to me. They are, fundamentally, the questions that are animating me to write a roughly 150-page book on the subject to complete my PhD.

I’ve learned the hard way that not everyone finds these apparent pedantics quite so exciting. (It’s okay if that’s you!)

What I do hope is engaging, however, is the very human history - filled with fear, pride, and self-interest - of how speculative fiction came to mean so many contradictory things to so many people. You may have your own conception of what this term means - most likely as some sort of nebulous umbrella term which gestures broadly at a lot of genres - and that conception is likely - unfortunately! - no more than half of the story...

Heinlein Coins a Phrase

It’s 1947, and the pulp magazine industry is in freefall. Unable to recover fully from the market disruption of World War II, and decreasingly able to offer per-word pay rates competitive with “slick” magazines like Playboy and mainstream presses like Doubleday and Simon & Schuster who are increasingly interested in publishing science fiction and fantasy, many of the pulp publications that have arguably popularized these genres in the US find themselves caught in a death spiral they won’t escape. Within two years, iconic pulp publisher Street & Smith will shut down their pulp and comic book imprints, maintaining only their “slick” lines. In response, writers of traditionally “pulp” genres like science fiction and fantasy are clambering to make their work marketable to the “slick” magazines and presses that have weathered the storm.

Enter Robert Heinlein, who in 1947 pens “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction” - his best advice for how to write science fiction well enough to “sell to the slicks.” He bluntly rejects the archetypical “gadget story” that pulp science fiction is known for - “a fictionalized framework, peopled by cardboard figures, on which is hung an essay about ‘the Glorious Future of Technology.’” Instead, Heinlein encourages his colleagues to write a different kind of science fiction - something more “human interest story” than science fiction at all:

“There is another type of honest-to-goodness science fiction story that is not usually regarded as science fiction: the story of people dealing with contemporary science or technology. We do not ordinarily mean this sort of story when we say "science fiction"; what we do mean is the speculative story, the story embodying the notion "just suppose-- " or "What would happen if--." In the speculative science fiction story accepted science and established fiefs are extrapolated to produce a new situation, a new framework for human action. As a result Of this new situation, new human problems are created--and our store is about how human beings cope with those new problems. The story is not about the new situation; it is about coping with problems arising out of the new situation.”

With this, Heinlein establishes “speculative fiction” as a term - one used to denote a well-written variety of science fiction with enough of the merit and technical hallmarks of the “slicks” to help the genre (and its writers) leave behind the sinking ship of its pulp legacy and make the leap to the money tree of mainstream fiction.

A Little Abbreviation

It’s 1959, and disagreements about where genre boundaries lie are leading to tensions. In the wake of the pulp crash, without a glut of ultra-niche magazines to clearly and commercially subdivide genre conventions, novels and short story anthologies - the dominant forms of genre fiction at the time - are blurring boundaries, experimenting (for fun and profit) with a mix of genre tropes and signifiers. What precisely denotes “science fiction” or “fantasy” anymore is becoming unclear - and when does something merit the hybrid label “science fantasy”? In a preface to the Year’s Best Science-Fiction and Fantasy, genre pioneer Judith Merrill keeps the peace with the playful declaration that the anthology is titled “SF”:

“SF is an abbreviation for Science Fiction (or Science Fantasy). Science Fantasy (or Science Fiction) is really an abbreviation too. Here are some of the things it stands for…

S is for Science, Space, Satellites, Starships, and Solar exploring; also for Semantics and Sociology, Satire, Spoofing, Suspense, and good old Serendipity…

F is for Fantasy, Fiction and Fable, Folklore, Fairy-Tale and Farce; also for Fission and Fusion; for Firmament, Fireball, Future and Forecast; for Fate and Free-Will; Figuring, Fact-Seeking, and Fancy-FRee.

Mix well. The result is SF, or Speculative Fun…”

We can credit Merrill with the idea of an abbreviation - SF - that includes and exceeds science fiction, encompassing a number of genre traditions and sidestepping (if not settling) all debate over genre boundaries. The groundwork is laid for a later meaning of another phrase that conveniently shares the initials “SF”…

The New Wave

It’s 1967, and brewing experimental artistic and literary phenomenon “the New Wave” is finally seeing its manifestos hit print. The New Wave is hip and happening, full of experimental literary techniques that nod back to Modernism and a revolutionary attitude that nods forward to cyberpunk. Harlan Ellison’s anthology Dangerous Visions is making “speculative fiction” a household phrase; in less than a year, Judith Merrill, original coordinator of Dangerous Visions, will publish her own anthology (England Swings SF!) and bring the best of the British New Wave across the Atlantic.

In the introduction to Dangerous Visions, Ellison calls for a revolution, a kind of ascension; after years of carrying low-cultural stigma, Ellison and his New Wave compatriots declare science fiction has died and been fully reborn as “speculative fiction,” its beautiful, destined higher form. To call this new writing “science fiction” is, for Ellison, a “misnomer;” science fiction is a “little backwash eddy of a genre,” good only as a source of “tools” that speculative fiction can put to better use. In the eyes of the New Wave, the genre’s roots in the science fiction pulps is, at best, an awkward teenage phase that the genre has grown out of. The presence of “speculative” works (works commentators hesitate to call “science fiction”) among the best-received novels of the time - Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange, Cat’s Cradle - is evidence that

“speculative fiction has been found, has been turned to good use by the mainstream, and is now in the process of being assimilated.”

Once more, “speculative fiction” serves as a waving battle flag signalling writers and readers to charge away from the science fiction “backwater” and into a separate realm defined by literariness and the high culture.

It’s Raining Subgenres

It’s the 1990s. The primacy of the “cyberpunk” subgenre which dominated the previous decade is ebbing away, and for what seems like the first time this century, this genre trend has no single clear successor in the field - yet another master narrative has crumbled. Some preserve the cyber while ditching the punk, like Kim Stanley Robinson in the Mars trilogy; others tip the rudder in the direction of the interstitial, the space between genres that have come before, as in the peculiar mix of Lovecraftian horror, surrealism, and magic realism of the New Weird. There’s only one term capable of encompassing all these subgenres and their myriad combinations, all the branching threads from this fraying (or expanding!) central line: “speculative fiction.” 

In another extraordinary history-book moment, for perhaps the first time, “speculative fiction” gains a popular colloquial meaning, not as a term of hierarchy, gatekeeping, and contempt, but as an inclusive umbrella term meant to unify and signify a vast diversity of increasingly complex and decreasingly distinct genre traditions. The Genre Wars are over! They’ll all be home by Christmas!

...unfortunately, it won’t last.

Talking Squids in Outer Space

It’s 2004, and Margaret Atwood is on press tour to promote the release of Oryx & Crake. In interview after interview, she’s fielded the same combination of delight at the novel and scandalized surprise that an author of her calibur and literary standing would deign to write science fiction. Whatever, asks one pearl-clutching interviewer after another, could have possibly driven her to take such a risk? The cognitive dissonance of high-culture sf is enough to make reviewers restate the old wisdom as if in an attempt to reinforce it: “science fiction will never be Literature with a capital ‘L’,” declares The New York Times, and yet, in the same review: “[Is] Oryx & Crake science fiction? Insofar as the term has any practical meaning, yes.”

Little surprise, then, when Atwood’s response to the usual polite furor in a BBC Breakfast interview is to claim that she doesn’t write science fiction at all. After all, science fiction is junk, little more than “talking squids in outer space.” What she writes is “speculative fiction,” which is about things that “could really happen.” 

(Needless to say, fans of “talking squids in outer space” were not at all amused.)

The distinction is nonsensical, clearly motivated by more than purely categorical concerns. It ignites a spat between Atwood and Ursula Le Guin, champion for genre, that will last over a decade, seeing volleys passed back and forth and back and forth in book reviews and pointed introductions and interviews galore. The good fight is fought… but it’s not enough.

It’s not long before, sensing the marketability and respectability of this ‘new’ genre, other prominent authors looking to dabble in genre tropes without catching “sf-cooties” jump on the bandwagon. Eventual Nobel winner Kazuo Ishiguro bristles at the suggestion that Never Let Me Go is science fiction, and come The Buried Giant even worries aloud to The New York Times that some might “say this is fantasy,” earning a fiery rebuke from Le Guin. In the meanwhile, countless promising genre authors launch or revitalize their careers with the claim that they, too, write this new, good, respectable thing called “speculative fiction.” Somehow, unlike other subgenre formations of the time, it is never accused of being a cash grab; at most, it is a regrettable but justifiable aversion to the stigmas that have long plagued genre.

Once more, speculative fiction is redefined as a term of exclusion.

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As for where that leaves “speculative fiction” in the here and now… we’ll have to return to that in another post, because that’s where my research comes in! And before we can talk about that, we’re going to need to discuss some foundational sf theory… specifically, the man, the myth, the legend: Darko Suvin’s landmark definition of science fiction.

In the meanwhile, let me know in a comment or reply if there’s particular content you’d like to see, and if you know of anyone who delights in bucket-sorting or “speculative fiction,” perhaps consider sharing the link to this little boondoggle - I’d be grateful.