A Speculative Essay on Speculation

Why speculation isn't just for fiction writers and futurists.

Photo by Mikkel Frimer-Rasmussen on Unsplash

Without speculation, there would be no creation. No gods creating people. No people creating gods. I worry that there is a finite amount of speculation in the world and that it is dwindling every day. Every day, unceasing entertainment and stimulation carve roads into the great Speculative Range, where our ancestors were known to wander lost for months, feared missing, only to emerge transformed into geniuses. When my daughter says she is bored on a long car ride, I am hopeful. “Good,” I tell her. “Dwell there for a while.” From boredom, springs speculation.

The speculative privileges the “What ifs” of life. What if we could travel backwards and forwards in time? What if we could travel to inhabited planets quickly? What if monsters were real? Speculation defeats impossibility every time and keeps aloft our dreams of transcendence. “Speculative Fiction” has been used as a more elegant substitution for “Science Fiction,” as speculation does not always involve science and technology. Whenever I hear the term Science Fiction my thoughts flash to some 1950s era magazine with a cover depicting the rings of Saturn and a bubble-headed astronaut floating next to a 50s style rocket ship. Science fiction connotes to me something old fashioned, the past’s faulty predictions of the future. For an exercise, you might use the following faulty predictions as prompts (the following predictions can be found in full at https://mashable.com/2014/03/19/false-future-predictions/)

· In 1900, Ladies Home Journal predicted that by 2000, the letter C, X, and Q would no longer be used.

· Universal flying bicycles.

· Popular Mechanics predicted that everything would be coated in plastic and you’d simply have to hose down your furniture to clean it.

· The Associated Press predicted in 1950 that by 2000 we would have Smellevision.

· In 1952, the Kentucky New Era predicted universal space travel by 2000 (a popular year for predictions to not come true, it seems).

· In 1964, Isaac Asimov predicted “underground homes with automated kitchens.”

· In 1972, The Oshkosh Daily Northwestern predicted that by 2000 (of course), Hippies would be taking communal showers in their communal homes. I’m not quite sure how that rates as a prediction as it seems to me something that was likely happening a lot in 1972.

· And last, futurist Barbara Hubbard predicted in 1982, moon colonies by 2002. Moon colonies are a little passe, I think, but I’m sure in the right speculative mind, even that stale speculation could be made new again.

I should make clear that while I’m perhaps being a little disrespectful to the term, I mean no disrespect to the writers of science fiction. I belonged to a science fiction book club when I was a teen and Isaac Asimov and other science fiction writers kept me sane and speculative during my year at a boarding school far from home. I should likewise make it clear that I mean no disrespect to the person/people who predicted that C,X, and Q would be abolished or that universal flying bicycles would be the norm. I am thankful to them because they make me want to speculate back. I want to speculate a story about an editor at The New Kentucky Era in 1952, because (and here, I will let you in on a little-known fact), you can speculate backwards as well as forwards in time. It was Robert Heinlein who coined the term “Speculative Fiction” in 1947 and while “science fiction” had the upper hand as a term for many years, speculative fiction is the term a number of fiction writers in this vein prefer, as do I, but mostly because I love the word “speculative” and was never very good at science.

As for the speculative in nonfiction, I believe that I coined the term “speculative essay,” but this might be a delusion of speculative grandeur as I also admit that when I was very young I thought I had coined the word, “Cootie.” In 2012, when Nicole Walker and Margot Singer asked me to contribute an essay to their book, Bending Genre, I gave them a whimsical piece I titled, “Study Questions for the Essay at Hand, A Speculative Essay.” As I wrote the essay, I searched on the internet for the terms, “speculative essay” and “speculative nonfiction.” Nowhere could I locate the term speculative essay but I found that speculative nonfiction, though rare, was a kind of scientific nonfiction and/or predictive essay about the future. That’s not how I was using it at all. At the time, the literary world was buzzing about “facts” as the main ingredient of proper nonfiction. I was a colleague of John D’Agata and he had just come out with his controversial book, The Lifespan of a Fact. My thought was that we should sidestep the fact versus fiction argument by acknowledging that there are plenty of essays that aren’t concerned with fact at all. These essays, however, are distinctly essays and not stories or fictions. The essay, steeped in a long tradition of praising uncertainty and ambiguity, has never confined itself to fact. My go-to example of this has long been Virginia Woolf’s “Death of a Moth,” in which the author watches a moth flutter and die as it beats itself against a window. The moth is simply a vehicle for her to speculate on mortality and it matters not at all (to me at least) whether in fact she ever saw a moth beat its last against the windowpane. No one reads Woolf’s essay to learn anything factual about the lifespan of a moth, but to speculate with her on the brief intensity of the universal death force.

Not long after my essay was published, I started organizing panels on the topic and the term has now gained currency, so much so that I started seeing within the last several years, workshops on speculative nonfiction. Not long ago, I co-founded, along with Leila Philip, the journal Speculative Nonfiction, (Specuilativenonfiction.org) a home for these “tidal waves of fancy,” in the words of Mary Cappello. People are often baffled at first by the term and ask what speculative nonfiction is, but they eventually catch the speculative drift. Unlike speculative fiction, speculative nonfiction does not most often look towards the future or alternate realities. For the speculative essayist, the essay is aimed at the figurative not the future. One thing that speculative essayists and speculative fiction writers have in common is that they are both interested, intrigued, obsessed even with possibility. Consciousness is itself a kind of speculation, and our musings are our bold footfalls as we make our way, presumptively across deserts of stasis, of boredom, of doing nothing. The speculative is the mirage turned real.

Originally published in A-Z OF CREATIVE WRITING METHODS (Bloomsbury)