Knowra Speculative fiction Speculative fiction Speculative fiction depicts worlds, events, or phenomena that depart from established assumptions about reality, often through science fiction, fantasy, or horror.
Science fiction : Fiction that explores imagined possibilities shaped by science, technology, or their effects. It grounds departures from reality in scientific or technological possibilities.
Mary Shelley : An English novelist whose works include Frankenstein, a foundational story of scientific creation and responsibility. Frankenstein joined imagined science to moral and social questions.
Ursula K. Le Guin : An American author whose fiction explores social systems, gender, power, and cultural difference. Her imagined societies make political and cultural assumptions available for comparison.
Magical realism : A literary mode that presents extraordinary or magical events as ordinary within an otherwise recognizable world. Its matter-of-fact treatment of the marvelous complicates genre boundaries.
Fantasy : Fiction featuring supernatural forces, magic, or worlds governed by invented laws. It makes departures through magic and supernatural worlds rather than scientific extrapolation.
Frankenstein : Mary Shelley's 1818 novel about Victor Frankenstein, who creates a living being and abandons it. The novel became an influential early model for fiction that imagines altered natural possibilities.
The Handmaid's Tale : Margaret Atwood's novel depicting a theocratic regime that subordinates women through reproductive control. Its invented regime intensifies existing political and social concerns.
Slipstream fiction : Fiction that blends literary realism with speculative or fantastical elements in ways that resist standard genre labels. It deliberately occupies the unsettled border between speculative and mainstream fiction.
Horror fiction : Fiction designed to evoke fear, dread, or revulsion, often through threatening or uncanny events. It can use impossible phenomena to unsettle assumptions about reality.
Gothic fiction : A literary mode featuring threatening settings, transgression, secrecy, and encounters with the uncanny. Gothic conventions helped shape speculative writing about fear and the unknown.
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