Here at Adafruit on SciFiSunday we like to talk about science fiction. But what about speculative fiction? Is that science fiction or fantasy or what? Foundational science fiction writer Robert Heinlein popularized the term withi his 1947 article “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction.” Many decades later, Margaret Atwood used the term to describe her particularly literary take on science fiction. Here’s more on the history of the term from Celadon Books:
Hugo Award–winning author Ursula K. Le Guin pushed back on Atwood’s assertion in a 2009 article for The Guardian, though, sparking a bit of a literary stir over precisely what “speculative fiction” means. In any case, if we follow Heinlein’s and Atwood’s lead, speculative fiction covers fantastical narratives that nevertheless contain some amount of believability, whether it’s Jules Verne’s adventure classic Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, popular dystopian fiction like Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, or more recent post-apocalyptic literature like Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel or The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
Needless to say, plenty of critics, authors, and readers disagree with this definition of speculative fiction, arguing that it’s too restrictive, misunderstands the limitless appeal of the genre, and is, for lack of a better word, snobbish. Almost in protest, some authors, especially writers like Ursula K. Le Guin and Doris Lessing, started using “speculative fiction” to refer to all types of sci-fi narratives. Some publishers even use the term interchangeably with “science fiction” to describe the works they publish.