SF vs. SF: "Speculative Fiction" and "Science Fiction"

"SF" as an abbreviation in literature is confusing. Perhaps that's deliberate.

What is "Science Fiction"?

This term didn't apply to this literature until the late 1920s and 1930s, when it was made popular in the U.S. by magazines like Amazing Stories, Astounding Stories, and even Popular Mechanics. Before that, from the late 18th century onward, this type of work was called "scientific romance." This distinguished it from the novel, and made clear some expectations readers should and should not have. (See The Novel and the Romance: Some Distinctions.)

In both "science fiction" and "scientific romance," "science" is the descriptor. The nouns are "romance" and "fiction," and the word "fiction" can mean a number of different things.

Here's the best definition out there, from the OED:

Fiction in which the setting and story feature hypothetical scientific or technological advances, the existence of alien life, space or time travel, etc., esp. such fiction set in the future, or an imagined alternative universe.

The contemporary novelist Margaret Atwood (we'll return to her later) says this about Science Fiction: "for me, this label denotes books with things in them we can't yet do or begin to do, talking beings we can never meet, and places we can't go."

What is "Speculative Fiction"?

The term "speculative fiction" has a history of conflicting meanings. These can be summed up as

• spec is a part of science, or
• spec goes beyond science, or
• science is a part of spec.

The original (but mostly lost) understanding of this had it as a subset of science fiction. Lippincott's Monthly Magazine: A Popular Journal of General Literature, in 1889, first used this term in a review of Walter Besant's novel, The Inner House. The reviewer noted that in his writing, Besant "has become both a prophet and a reformer." His work, then, is "speculative fiction put in the future tense."

That last phrase is a perfect example of a critic who does not know what to say about a text, and so throws words at it, whther they make sense or not. But the implications of the term are there; speculative fiction must include both a prediction or warning about a possible future (the prophet), and a consideration of a state of affairs that does not currently exist (the reformer).

In modern usage, most point to Robert A. Heinlein, the famed science fiction author, and his distinctions:

In the speculative science fiction story accepted science and established fiefs are extrapolated to produce a new situation, a new framework for human action. As a result Of this new situation, new human problems are created—and our story is about how human beings cope with those new problems. The story is not about the new situation; it is about coping with problems arising out of the new situation.

He's reacting against the history represented by pulp magazines like Amazing Stories, filled with amazing gadgets, the wonder of progress, and the marvels delivered by future technology—usually at the expense of scientific feasibility and human development.

By the late 1970s, this understanding of the term was in its ascendancy. In 1978, The New York Times defined "speculative fiction" as "stories that go beyond sci-fi and deal with ‘ethical and moral demands’ made in new worlds to come."

In 1979, Darko Suvin—the Croatian critic whose work in the field did much to add to the legitimacy of considering science fiction as a legitimate literary genre—wrote that "the so-called speculative fiction . . . clearly began as and has mostly remained an ideological inversion of 'hard' SF."

But more recently, the term has been used as an all-encompassing category for many types of writing that deliberately choose not to imitate the “consensus reality” of everyday experience. When used thus, it covers many other genres, like fantasy, horror, gothic, science fiction, superhero fiction, science fantasy, utopian and dystopian fiction, supernatural fiction, cyberpunk, steampunk, post-apocalyptic fiction, alternate histories, slipstream, and a number of hybrids between all these.

By 2011, The Guardian was using the term in this sense, considering authors like HG Wells, George Orwell, JG Ballard, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, and Philip K. Dick to be writers of speculative fiction.

Here's a succinct phrasing of the current understanding:

The field of speculative fiction groups together extremely diverse forms of non-mimetic fiction operating across different media for the purpose of reflecting on their cultural role, especially as opposed to the work performed by mimetic, or realist narratives.

What's this non-mimetic stuff?

Mimesis, at it's core, is imitation. The imitation we're concerned with is the representation or imitation of the real world in a work of literature (but it applies to all other arts as well). It can be summed up in the idea that "art imitates life." It's what we expect, to a greater or lesser degree, from every piece of art we encounter.

"Serious" literature tries to reflect or embody the complexity of this world and human society. In doing so, characters become complicated, motivations are mixed, plots don't always resolve themselves nicely, and moral judgements get muddy.

The Novel and the Romance: Some Distinctions works here. The Novel is "serious" literature, especially as it attempts to be mimetic. Romance is representative of "popular" literature, and it isn't bound by the same rules. So reality gets simplified, characters become stock or stereotypes, good and evil are easy to distinguish, and narratives are all tied up with a bow.

So, why read SF?

So maybe the acronym "SF" works well because it's ambiguous.

Does it signify speculative fiction or science fiction? Yes. It may not distinguish between the two, but it separates all these texts from the mimetic, realistic fiction that's out there.

Margaret Atwood made a list of what SF can do that realistic fiction can't:

1. Explore the consequences of new and proposed technologies in graphic ways, by showing them fully up and running.
2. Explore the nature and limits of what it means to be human in graphic ways, by pushing the envelope as far as it will go—see, for instance, Ursula Le Guin.
3. Explore the relation of humanity to the universe in graphic ways, an exploration that often takes us in the direction of religion and can meld easily with mythology. Again, an exploration that can take place within the conventions of realism only through conversations and soliloquies.
4. Explore proposed changes in social organization in graphic ways, by showing what they might be like for those living under them. Thus the utopia and the dystopia.
5. Explore the realms of the imagination in graphic ways, by taking us boldly and daringly where no one has gone before. Thus the spaceship, the inner space of Fantastic Voyage, the cyberspace trips of William Gibson, and The Matrix—the last, by the way, an adventure romance with strong overtones of Christian allegory, and thus more closely related to The Pilgrim's Progress than to Pride and Prejudice.

Notice that all of these begin with the word explore. Atwood recognizes that the counter-factual, the things that aren't real, the things that may or may not come true in the future, show us just as much aout ourselves as anything grounded in the reality we know.