title: Speculative Fiction
subtitle: Cyberfeminism
About the Concept
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Speculative Fiction is a practice that mobilizes creative powers to think
possible alternative. “What if?” can be considered as the starting point of the
fiction. SF is an umbrella genre that includes science fiction, Alternate
history, horror, and has a many practioners questioning genre issues.
Sources
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Margaret Atwood The Prophet of Dystopia
Exploitation
What if
In writing “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Atwood was scrupulous about including
nothing that did not have a historical antecedent or a modern point of
comparison. (She prefers that her future-fantasy books be labelled
“speculative fiction” rather than “science fiction.” “Not because I don’t like
Martians . . . they just don’t fall within my skill set,” she wrote in the
introduction to “In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination,” an essay
collection that she published in 2011.)
Speculative Fiction is an umbrella term that encompass many areas of fiction,
but has the important quality to envision its grounding on a transformatio of
existing context to propose a transformative narrative.
Speculative Fiction is intertweened with different realities contexts and
personnas however it by transforming existing elements it allows the
immagination of a completely tranformed world and imaginaries. Speculative
Fiction has bee a fertile terrain to envision different gender distributions in
society, including characters who change gender unexpetely, wear 2 genders
and/or a third one, and many other manipulations, those experiemnts are fertile
in proposing new scenarios for change. There are many discussions about the
necessity of a classification such as speculative fiction, and Margaret Atwood’s
affirmations: " Atwood’s claim that speculative fiction is the antithesis of
those cheesy, escapist fantasies about talking squids in outer space." certainly
did not help the conversation, however the oposite might be true as some serious
scientific litterature proposes that maybe octopuses are alien species brought to us from out of space by
meteors.
Tree of Significance
SYNONYM
: paradigm-changing narration
ANTONYM
: realism, naturalism, information, non-fiction
HYPERNYM
: ethics, politics, assemblage, allegory, narrative fiction
HYPONYM
: mythopoesis,historical fiction, science fiction, anticipation, alternate history, uchronia
