It has been around since humans began to speak. The earliest forms of speculative fiction were likely mythological tales told around the campfire. Speculative fiction deals with the "What if?" scenarios imagined by dreamers and thinkers worldwide. Journeys to other worlds through the vast reaches of distant space; magical quests to free worlds enslaved by terrible beings; malevolent supernatural powers seeking to increase their spheres of influence across multiple dimensions and times; all of these fall into the realm of speculative fiction.
Speculative fiction as a category ranges from ancient works to cutting edge, paradigm-changing, and neotraditional works of the 21st century. It can be recognized in works whose authors' intentions or the social contexts of the versions of stories they portrayed is now known. For example, Ancient Greekdramatists such as Euripides, whose play Medea (play) seemed to have offended Athenian audiences when he fictionally speculated that shamaness Medea killed her own children instead of their being killed by other Corinthians after her departure. The play Hippolytus, narratively introduced by Aphrodite, is suspected to have displeased contemporary audiences of the day because it portrayed Phaedra as too lusty.
Frontispiece to the 1825/1826 edition of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage by Lord Byron, published by W. Dugdale, Russell Court, Drury Lane. The engraving is by I. H. Jones.
Credit: I. H. Jones (illustration), Adam Cuerden (restoration)
Frontispiece to the 1825/1826 edition of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage by Lord Byron, published by W. Dugdale, Russell Court, Drury Lane. The engraving is by I. H. Jones.
... that David Colbert was given permission to publish the book The Magical Worlds of Harry Potter only if there was a note on the cover stating that it had not been approved by J.K. Rowling?
The draugr or draug (Old Norse: draugr; Icelandic: draugur; Faroese: dreygur; Danish and Norwegian: draug; Swedish: draug, dröger, or drög) is an undead creature from the sagas and Scandinavian folktales.
Commentators extend the term draugr to the undead in medieval literature, even if it is never explicitly referred to as such in the text, and designated them instead as a haugbúi "barrow-dweller" or an aptrganga "again-walker" (Icelandic: afturganga). (Full article...)
The EVE Gate, a natural wormhole leading to New Eden, collapses in 8061.
In 802,701, The Time Traveller encounters a garden world and sees Humanity has divided into the meek Eloi on the surface and the subdwelling, cannibalistic Morlocks.
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