speculative fiction n. 2

The stories included in this collection were written and published over a period of some fifteen years; I think they are the forerunners of the speculative fiction of tomorrow.

Alexei Panshin’s suggestion that we need a new name to cover the diverse fields/subgenres of science fiction, fantasy, science fantasy, etc. is a good one, but honestly, I don’t think ‘creative fantasy’ is a very good over-all term…. Despite its bad connotations, ‘speculative fiction’ would be a more appropriate label.

We had not, during the span of these writings, fully developed the current usage of the term SF to mean speculative fiction, and we had not yet worked out the clarifying proposition that science fiction and fantasy were equal branches of it.

It doesn’t help anyone to classify every form of non-realist literature, whether it’s magic realism or surrealism or literary metafiction, under the same rubric of ‘speculative fiction’. These different forms bear at best a tangential relationship to each other, to the so-called ‘mainstream’, and to fantasy and science fiction.

We have tried to include works that are representative of the various modalities of…speculative fiction, ghost stories, hard science fiction, absurdist fiction.

Some critics are intensely interested in how individual works relate to genre, and some others believe that the ‘field’ is all just speculative fiction and that finer definitions don’t matter.

A larger theme was the distinction between fantasy and science fiction, working up to a position that their modern forms are two aspects of speculative fiction with more in common than separates them.