Speculative fiction is a blanket term for all the genre that goes beyond realism. It doesn’t imitate reality. It falls into the realm of imaginative genre. Supernatural, futuristic in nature, it encompasses all imaginative genre. It speculates everything under the sun and above the sun. This genre has a wide array of works in it. Like think about Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, or the television series, ‘Vampire Diaries’. Does it come across life-like? Is it Dickensian?

It is not natural even though it is imaginary. The characters in Jane Austen novel are a fictive of our imagination but are flesh and blood. On the contrary, speculative fiction is speculative of something not found in reality. It even goes around science fiction, like not based on current scientific developments but something set in the future.

Going back to ancient history, the Greek dramatist Euripides and his play Medea made the protagonist kill her own children unlike the true incident recorded in history. Attracting the ire of Athenian crowd, the playwright speculated an alternate ending. Thus, one can trace back the beginnings of speculative fiction to the ancient times. Shifting characters in time and place, in historiography, is known as historical invention. Speculative fiction was previously termed as that. Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, shifted the time and space in bringing together characters; like Roman god Cupid, Amazonian Queen Hippolyta and such others. Similarly in mythography, speculative fiction is mythopoeia, creation of myths and lore. The best example is J.R.R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings set in Middle Earth.

From the above discussion, we gather that speculative fiction is ahistorical, a hypothetical retelling, paranormal outnumbering the real and reveling in what if and what could.  

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