The Two Speculations: The Poetics of Contemporary Speculative Fiction

Abstract

The 21st century has seen the increasing breakdown of boundaries between traditional literary genres, which has led to the establishment of umbrella terms like “speculative fiction” to encompass a large variety of genre traditions and admixtures. However, much uncertainty persists about how to describe what speculative fiction is and does, as the variety it encompasses makes a single comprehensive definition difficult and potentially flattening. This project works to establish “multiplicative speculation” and “predictive speculation” as poetic concepts which can be used to describe what speculative fiction can do, to analyze how the genre has evolved in the last two decades and how it interacts with contemporary politics and culture, and to build a model for how to organize texts using post-genre formations.