Speculative Fiction in Historical Perspective
On Thursday, November 8, 2023, the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest hosted Dr. Heather J. Hicks, Professor and Chair of English at Villanova and an expert on post-apocalyptic fiction and gender in post-modern fiction; Dr. Travis Foster, Associate Professor of English and Academic Director of Gender and Women’s Studies at Villanova whose expertise includes gender, sexuality, race, and genre; and Dr. Patricia Lott, Assistant Professor of American Studies, African American and Africana Studies, and English at Ursinus University, whose expertise includes Afrofuturism, emancipation, and public collective memory. The event was be moderated by Dr. Maghan Keita, Professor of History and Global Interdisciplinary Studies, and Founding Director of Global Interdisciplinary Studies and Africana Studies at Villanova.
Watch the event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIExsealTB0&list=PL_Z9mt0HJesnqXQRRe8bYlPcFpOOi6KTc&index=1
“To study speculative fiction in history is to study the futures of the past.”[1] Some of these futures pointed toward the end of the world, while others imaged radical black liberation. Speculative fictions bear witness to what any given era thinks of its own moment, and the aspirations, dreams, and fears it has for its future. Attending to these “futures of the past” can develop our own imaginations, potentially allowing for other, more hopeful futures. This recent event hosted by the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest made clear that the study of a moment in time, past or present, remains incomplete without the study of that moment’s speculative fictions.
Moderator Dr. Maghan Keita framed the event by asking the panelists to reflect on what “speculative fiction” meant to them, how they interpret “speculative,” how they conceive of speculative fiction historically and what role speculation plays beyond the historical. Each panelist began their presentation by defining speculative fiction, either in terms of its origins (Dr. Heather Hicks), its genre conventions (Dr. Travis Foster), or its rhetorical situation (Dr. Patricia Lott), before exploring speculative fiction case studies according to their respective areas of expertise. Dr. Hicks compared the apocalyptic tradition of the last twenty-five hundred years with the climate fiction of the last thirty years. Dr. Foster applied his expertise on the philosophy of genre to a consideration of the relationship between history and speculative fiction by exploring Martin R. Delany’s Blake, or the Huts of America (1859–1861). Finally, Dr. Lott considered speculative fiction through the sub-genre of Afrofuturism.[2]
Both Dr. Hicks and Dr. Lott referred to Robert A. Heinlein’s 1947 article, “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction,” where Heinlein coined the term “speculative fiction” to differentiate his stories which he felt were more focused on how human experience was changed through new technology than the dominant strain of science fiction at the time, which focused on technology at the expense of the human element. Expanding from this, Dr. Lott quoted critic John Reider, who notes how speculative fiction has “a higher degree of literary ambition, less concern with attaining a high volume of sales, and [focuses on] reaching a more highly educated, more artistically sophisticated and demanding audience.”[3]
Dr. Foster noted that we tend to look for speculative fiction in either the science fiction or fantasy section of a bookstore. According to Dr. Foster, genre is a textual convention, an interface that allows readers to bring certain expectations to their experience of the text and provides writers parameters for their imagination while devising narratives. Because speculative fiction generally sits at the intersection of fantasy and science fiction — which is often concerned with “what if” scenarios — the reader can expect to find not merely speculations about what technological advancement might entail but also invites fantasy about what life might be like were it wholly different. When a reader looks for a book in the genre of fantasy, they expect an “otherworldly context in which characters possess unusual powers,”[4] and these expectations shape the meanings discovered therein. “We bring to fantasy our desires about what the world might be, severed from the rules of reality, in favor of a whimsical and magical place.”[5] Thus, speculative fiction does not merely raise ethical questions regarding technology, but also presents us with worlds where race, gender, and other societal power dynamics may be other than what they are in the real world, thereby challenging the unspoken assumptions of those power dynamics.
Dr. Lott’s conception of the rhetorical situation can help further clarify what qualifies as speculative fiction. According to Dr. Lott, the rhetorical situation is the multiple overlapping contexts of any text, which includes: the writer and their social-political situation, the topic, the purpose, the audience, and the historical, geographical, and cultural context in which the text originally came into being. Where genre defines the expectations readers and writers bring to texts, the rhetorical situation elucidates the conditions that surround a text’s or even a genre’s coming into existence. According to Dr. Lott, Afrofuturism’s broad rhetorical situation is the experience of Africans and African Americans in late twentieth and early twenty-first-century techno-culture, rooted in the histories of European colonial modernity and colonization. One purpose of Afrofuturism is to imagine counter-futures, that is, futures that work against what Dr. Lott calls the “futures industry.” This industry sells us images of the future through media, advertising, and technologies that writes black people out of the way we imagine the future. Speculative fiction can help reimagine the future in ways that might inform how we live in the present.
One recent subgenre of speculative fiction is climate fiction, which focuses on inciting a reimagination of how we might live in relationship to our environments. Dr. Hicks explored some of the main themes of climate fiction by comparing it to the much older tradition of apocalyptic literature. Whether due to climate change or other disasters, “humans have been predicting the end of human society since there were human societies.”[6] Both apocalyptic literature and climate fiction frequently function as social critiques of greed and corruption, providing moral judgment alongside the possibility of redemption. Both focus on the endangerment of individual children even as they consider threats to entire societies. These genres portray humans as fundamentally evil, celebrate the beauty and complexity of nature, and often valorize scientists as heroes. However, climate fiction has deviated from the apocalyptic tradition in one important respect: race. Many nineteenth-century apocalypse writers employed a racist logic by imaging the end of societies, especially America, as a result of “race mixing” or “weaker races” corrupting the otherwise “hardy white race.” However, recent climate fiction not only repudiates this kind of racist imagination, but also explores how climate change and climate disasters disproportionally effect people of color and focuses on efforts of environmental justice.
Dr. Foster and Dr. Lott continued the theme of speculation and race by charting the dynamics of the subgenre of Afrofuturism. Dr. Lott analyzed Sutton E. Griggs’ 1898 Imperium in Imperio by and Dr. Foster presented Delany’s Blake or the Huts of America. Griggs’ novel, which was written while the more liberative policies of the Reconstruction era were being rolled back and African Americans were increasingly subjected to Jim Crow apartheid, speculates about a future for African Americans beyond segregation by imagining a twentieth-century black nation-state centered in Waco Texas. Even as Reconstruction laws tried to write African Americans out of the nation’s future, Griggs speculated about a counter-future, in which the promises of wealth redistribution and political enfranchisement were realized in a free black state. Similarly, Delany’s serialized work of 1861, a story of a man who travels the world “establishing a transnational network of black revolutionaries,” regards “black futurity as a practice, not a promise.”[7] Delany wrote Blake for a black and indigenous audience, calling for both enslaved and free readers to join the work of black elevation and the “abolition of the supremacy of white feelings.” [8] With an audience of both enslaved and freed peoples, Delany speculated about a world made possible through black and indigenous organizing. These speculated futures are important not only for understanding the nineteenth-century black experience, but also for our own reimagining how our present would look if either vision had been realized, and then by implication, how we might live differently considering this reimagination.
Speculative fictions play a vital role in understanding the past rhetorical situations from which they come as well as how we imagine the future in the present. Afrofuturism counters white-washed ways of imagining a future that sees progress as the absence of blackness, while climate fiction draws attention to the climate crisis slowly violating our global existence. Historians of the future might look back on our moment and consider our speculative fictions, our histories, and the common rhetorical situation from which they spring, and see the seeds of hope for a future beyond whiteness and climate change. Indeed, according to Dr. Hicks, “new writers are doing the best sort of speculating, which is imaging futures of hope.”[9]
Appendix
Dr. Hicks’s Climate Fiction Recommendations
Akkad, Omar El. American War. First Edition. New York: Knopf, 2017.
Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2003.
Boyle, T. C. A Friend of the Earth. 60595th edition. New York: Penguin Books, 2000.
— — — . Blue Skies. New York, NY: Liveright, 2023.
Bray, Carys. When The Lights Go Out. First Edition. London: Hutchinson, 2020.
Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Sower. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1993.
— — — . Parable of the Talents. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1998.
Dimaline, Cherie. The Marrow Thieves. Toronto: DCB, 2017.
Erdrich, Louise. Future Home of the Living God. Large type / Large print edition. New York: Harper Large Print, 2017.
Hunter, Megan. The End We Start From. Grove Press, 2017.
Kingsolver, Barbara. Flight Behavior. Harper Perennial, 2012.
Lee, Chang-rae. On Such a Full Sea. New York: Riverhead Books, 2014.
Millet, Lydia. A Children’s Bible. First Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2020.
Robinson, Kim Stanley. The Ministry for the Future. First Edition. New York, NY: Orbit, 2020.
Ward, Jesmyn. Salvage the Bones. New York, NY London Oxford New Delhi Sydney: Bloomsbury USA, 2011.
Watkins, Claire Vaye. Gold Fame Citrus. New York, New York: Riverhead Books, 2015.
Dr. Hicks’s Historical References (be aware that these texts may contain racist themes)
Akkad, Omar El. American War. First Edition. New York: Knopf, 2017.
Dimaline, Cherie. The Marrow Thieves. Toronto: DCB, 2017.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Earth’s Holocaust. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 1844.
Hesiod. Works and Days. Edited by A. E. Stallings. Reprint edition. United Kingdom: Penguin Classics, 700.
Jefferies, Richard. After London or Wild England. Book Jungle, 1885.
Lucretius. De Rerum Natura: The Latin Text of Lucretius. Edited by William Ellery Leonard and Stanley Barney Smith. University of Wisconsin Press, 55AD.
Mitchell, J. A. The Last American. Murdock Publishing Company, 2006.
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion 1839. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 1839.
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. The Last Man. Ware: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 1826.
Wells, H. G. The Star. Fantastica, 1897.
Dr. Foster’s Recommendations
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. MARVEL, 2022.
Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Talents. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1998.
Delany, Martin R. Blake; or, The Huts of America: A Corrected Edition. Edited by Jerome McGann. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1859.
Delany, Samuel R. Dhalgren. 12th Edition. New York, NY: Vintage, 1974.
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Comet. Reprint edition. Mint Editions, 1920.
Griggs, Sutton E. Imperium In Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race. Greenbook Publications, LLC, 1898.
Hopkins, Pauline. Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Self: The Givens Collection. Original ed. edition. New York, NY: Washington Square Press, 1903.
Dr. Lott’s Recommendations
Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Sower. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1993.
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Comet. Reprint edition. Mint Editions, 1920.
Griggs, Sutton E. Imperium In Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race. Greenbook Publications, LLC, 1898.
Hopkinson, Nalo. Midnight Robber. First Printing-First Thus edition. New York, NY: Grand Central Publishing, 2000.
Okorafor, Nnedi. Who Fears Death. Reprint edition. DAW, 2014.
Schuyler, George S. Black No More. Dover Publications, 1931.
[1] Dr. Foster at the Lepage event.
[2] For a full reading list of books mentioned by the panel see the Appendix.
[3] Rieder, John. “What is SF? Some Thoughts on Genre.” A Virtual Introduction to Science Fiction. Ed. Lars Schmeink. 2012, 1–17, http://virtual-sf.com/?page_id=137.
[4] Dr. Foster at the Lepage event.
[5] Dr. Foster at the Lepage event.
[6] W. Warren Wagar, Terminal Visions: The Literature of Last Things, First Edition (Bloomington: Indiana Univ Pr, 1982).
[7] Dr. Foster at the Lepage event.
[8] Dr. Foster at the Lepage event.
[9] Dr. Hicks from the Lepage event.
