# Speculative Fiction

**URL:** https://ps.zoethical.org/t/speculative-fiction/2244
**Category:** 3TS Reader
**Tags:** concept
**Created:** [March 6, 2019, 12:46pm UTC](https://ps.zoethical.org/t/speculative-fiction/2244 "2019-03-06T12:46:29Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![system](https://ps.zoethical.org/uploads/default/original/2X/9/9eb088232ae3ace61d2d35e92896da8d59b6f2b3.png) [@system](https://ps.zoethical.org/u/system)
#### Post date: [March 6, 2019, 12:46pm UTC](https://ps.zoethical.org/t/speculative-fiction/2244/1 "2019-03-06T12:46:30Z")

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## title: Speculative Fiction subtitle: Cyberfeminism

## About the Concept

{: #concept .intro }

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

{: #sources .intro }

[Margaret Atwood The Prophet of Dystopia](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/17/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](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/octopus-aliens-scientists-theory-meteors-space-earth-cambrian-explosion-a8358631.html).

## 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