Don't Call It "Speculative Fiction"

The expression "speculative fiction" seems to be escaping out of academic circles into general usage. It grates on me like fingernails on a chalkboard. It has always struck me as the sort of expression that would be used by a junior academic who has not yet achieved tenure and who therefore feels she has a lot at risk if her colleagues look askance at "science fiction" or, worse, "sci-fi." Look, Doc, don't use your anxieties about your future career to mislabel me.

I've been feeling alone in this point of view, until I came across this gem, written by SF author and critic Chip Delany, currently professor of English and of Creative Writing at Temple University, in his essay collection Shorter Views:

"Speculative fiction" was a term that had a currency for about three years — from 1966 to 1969. ... Robert A. Heinlein first used it in a Guest of Honor speech he gave at a World Science Fiction Convention in 1951[1]:he said that "speculative fiction" was the term he felt best fit what he was doing as a writer: whereupon everyone immediately forgot it for the next 15 [sic] years — until 1965 or '66, when a group of writers centered around the British SF magazine New Worlds resurrected it and used it for a very specific kind of thing. Basically, as these writers — the New Wave — first used the term, it meant anything that was experimental, anything that was science-fictinal, or anything that was fantastic. It was a conjunctive, inclusive term, which encompassed everything in all three areas. ...

By the end of 1969, in the world of practicing SF writers, editors, and fans, speculative fiction (like most conjunctive terms) had degenerated into a disjunctive, exclusive term (rather like the honorific "Ms.," which began as a conjunctive term meaning any wooman, married or single, but which today, through use, has degenerated into a disjunctive term used [almost] exclusively to mean an unmarried woman who's also a feminist): By the end of '69, "speculative fiction" meant "any piece that is experimental and uses SF imagery in the course of it.' ... A year later, the term simply dropped out of the vocabulary of working SF writers — except to refer to pieces written within that '66-'69 period, to which (usually) it had already been applied.

At about the same time, various academics began to take it up. Most of them had no idea either of its history or of its successive uses; they employed it to mean something like "high-class SF" or "SF I approve of and wish to see legitimated." Now that's a vulgar and ignorant usage of the worst sort. The way to legitimate fine quality SF is by fine quality criticism of it — not by being historically obtuse and rhetorically slipshod. I deplore that particular use of the term — and though I support your right to sue any terms you want, including "fuck," "shit," and "scumbag," I simply won't use the term in that way. It's uninformed, anti-historical, and promotes only mystification — all three of which are fine reasons to let this misused term die the natural death it came to fifteen years ago[2].

(Samuel R. Delany, 1990: "An Interview with Samuel R. Delany." Science Fiction Studies, 17, 1990. Reprinted as "The Second Science Fiction Studies Interview: Trouble on Triton and Other Matters," in Shorter views: Queer Thoughts & the Politics of the Paraliterary, Wesleyan University Press, 1999, pp.346-347)

Now I no longer alone, and have a well-respected ally in my dislike. So don't call it "speculative fiction" — it's uniformed, anti-historical, and it promotes only mystification. So there.

[1]Actually it was 1941, the DenVention, in Denver, Colorado.

[2]The interview was recorded in a classroom in 1986, and was not transcribed for publication until 1990.