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Speculative Fiction: How it differs from the other genres

Speculative fiction is a genre that promises anything and everything beyond the real world. As much as we hate the fact that Sherlock is a fictional character and Hogwarts is not real, speculative fiction is so much more than a genre. The ability to create worlds different from the world we live in is an art in itself. We used to create and believe in things that did not exist at children, unicorns, dragons, colorful pandas, talking dogs, you name it, and someone somewhere has already tried that out.

We see and experience things out of reality almost every day, maybe we see it in our dreams or imagine it while we daydream, but it's quite common. As we see and experience these things, and often forget them. A stray light blinking questionably might seem scary at some point, but you’ll forget about it soon enough, but what lives on, is speculative fiction through literature and cinema. You might think you have special powers if you do a calculation faster than normal, or predict correctly what someone is thinking.

What’s so special about speculative fiction is its ability to encompass everything, from fantasy to sci-fi, horror to crime/thriller in its fold. Even if this is the first time you’re hearing about speculative fiction, you’ll probably read or watched a dozen of pieces from this specific genre. Speculative fiction allows writers the liberty to play around with the plot and characters more boldly. For example- your story is Harry Potter and all the books under this book series. Rowling’s target audience was youth. She aimed HP to be a YA book series, so the theme of all the books wasn’t dark, neither was the tone too blunt or bloody. If Rowling wished to write Harry Potter in a darker sense, she could have picked up the structure of speculative noir fiction. Maybe Harry Potter may have died in the end; maybe the entire story was Harry’s dream and he wakes up one morning and lives under the scrutiny and torture of the Dursleys.

This is the broader sense speculative fiction offers to writers. Writers can pick up a traditional storyline and play with the tone and theme of the story. It allows character flexibility on a grander scheme of story structuring and writing.


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