At its heart—its big, tender heart—speculative fiction is speculation. It demands from its readers what some call a suspension of disbelief, where reality takes a backseat, and our imaginations open their arms wide to the monsters hiding underneath our bed; or the technology that rears its head when we look away; or the neighbor brewing love and lust potions down the hall. One must pick their poison, but we, the speculative reader, gladly guzzle the Kool-Aid down. In fact, whenever we turn the page, we demand to be whisked away from reality. We scour bookstores to sniff out (ephemeral) escapes from personal and public melancholies and mundanities alike. These new worlds, from Middle-earth to Arrakis, from the Matrix to Velaris, welcome us if not warmly, then profoundly.
Hungry for full immersion, our disbelief suspends, our imaginations float, and we disremember silly little things. The passing of time. The lives we lead. The names we are known by. We may very well forget reality: forget that the creators of the novels we escape to are as real as we are. As human, too. That’s to say, despite the headshot hiding in the back of the book, the best speculative fiction convinces us that the author is god. Or at least, a god.
Accordingly, it is the task of these gods to imagine all that we—as a species or specific society—don’t, can’t, and, at times, won’t. As Gwilym Lucas Eades, the author of Spatialities of Speculative Fiction: Re-mapping Possibilities, Philosophies, and Territorialities, puts it, “The first duty of speculative fiction is to produce something new.” Here, Eades borrows from a long tradition of science fiction critique, which defines this as a “novum,” often involving a techno-cultural novelty.[1]
Of course, in actuality, speculative authors are not so almighty; like us, they are bound by reality. Whether we peruse the shelves of recent releases in stores, libraries, or most likely of all, Amazon, we are met with fantasy novels full of medieval, monarchical politics and sci-fi reruns of the Frankenstein complex—that is, the big bad robot. Those that dare to diverge, in setting or speculation, are banished to the back of the bookstore, or more often than not, altogether absent, making room for speculative makeovers of systems of racial, class, and sexual oppression in fantastical, historical, and futuristic settings. Monotheism and militancy are projected onto alien species, while dynasties and Latin languages are repurposed in far-off kingdoms. The latter should come as no surprise given Western fantasy’s forbears, the Oxford medievalists J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, who divided their time between consolidating Anglophilic academia and crafting children’s fiction within their “Inklings” writing group.[2] They’re not the last to intermingle interests—many an author’s biography betrays their inspirations, traces their inventions to their uncited sources. Reality, it seems, is not so forgettable.
That’s the power of speculative fiction, though perhaps not its point. These gods can defamiliarize—make strange—social issues, technologies, and philosophies, providing readers the distance necessary to gain new perspectives and identify critical analogies. Margaret Atwood, Octavia E. Butler, and Ursula K. Le Guin are among the most divine in this regard, appraising the social currents of modern society through speculative twists and turns. Stories like theirs, as the author of Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right, Jordan S. Carroll, notes, “might be read simultaneously as blueprint, warning, forecast, wish-dream, and counterfactual.”[3] However, speculative interpretations are not always so indeterminate; Carroll warns that the alt-right “reads science fiction as an imperative, dictating events that must happen or must not happen.”[4] (Frank Herbert’s depiction of the white savior trope in Dune, while critical in intention, need not be read thus in the eyes of white teenage boys.[5]) If a god appraises reality on the page, their readers may not heed their gospel. That’s the danger, the underbelly of the power of speculative fiction, for as Carroll notes, “The alt-right did not project speculative whiteness onto science fiction: it pieced it together out of components already found within the genre.”[6]
Then again, to repurpose Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto: “illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.”[7] To take these words to heart, perhaps these gods should turn their backs on our so-called reality—that nebulous idea of “humanity”—and shift their creative powers to something beyond. Something so divine it is entirely unrecognizable. For the more speculative the speculation, the harder it becomes for fascists to read white supremacist morals into the text.
And the easier it becomes for someone like a feminist to discover alternatives to reality. Or so Ursula K. Le Guin insists in her critique of Joanna Russ’ The Female Man:
The Confessional form is no longer useful to the movement. It was at first. It is now mere dog-returning-to-vomit. It’s time we stop whining about what awful things I have done to women and what awful things men have done to me, and then compensating by daydreaming about retaliation and the Perfectly Guiltless Society; it’s time we try to start intelligently and passionately and compassionately considering, proposing, inventing, and acting out alternatives. If even people in science fiction can’t do that, can’t look forward instead of back, it’s bad news for the women’s movement, and everybody else.[8]
But are the gods capable of such omnipotence? After all, they’re only humans borrowing the emperor’s clothes; perhaps they do not possess the power of poiesis—perhaps none of us, reader or writer, are capable of imagining something truly new. Whatever “novums” novels form may be mere recycling: conscious and unconscious adaptations of existing realities. As Michael F Thomas puts it:
We are not nearly as imaginative as we fancy ourselves to be: we just recombine phenomena that we already know and then project them onto a bigger screen. The trouble with science fiction is that, no matter how large a screen we project our imaginations onto, the projector—our imagination—remains the same size. Consequently, the bigger the screen, the fuzzier the picture. In a work of science fiction, one may visit dozens of planets or times or even alternate universes; however, each one taken as a whole has no more color, variety, or character (and often a good deal less) than would be contained in a single London neighborhood in a Dickens novel.[9]
There are borders to our imaginations, it seems, and to think outside of them—to truly create—may require a genius we can hardly imagine. Only, in the world of storytelling, the task is to speculate, not originate. The impossibility of originality does not prevent novelty on the page.
In the New Philosopher, Professor of Philosophy Patrick Stokes raises this loophole by referring to H.P. Lovecraft’s short story “The Colour Out of Space,” where science fiction meets horror, and a globule imbedded within an alien meteorite is described by stressing its indescribability: its color “almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they called it colour at all.”[10] Dr. Stokes points out that “perhaps the true horror in Lovecraft’s tale lies in the thought that there might be things we cannot imagine.”[11]
Ambiguity is, of course, not a novel idea in speculative fiction. The debate between hard and soft worldbuilding—Brandon Sanderson’s rational, rule-based magic systems vs George R.R. Martin’s atmospheric and mysterious magic—weighs on the shoulders of all the gods, whispering into their ears as they speculate on the page. And yet, reality defines 2025’s bestsellers, their heroes roaming the nine circles of academic hell (Katabasis by R.F. Kuang), reimagining—in gothic hues—tales of courtly love (The Knight and the Moth by Rachel Gillig), and, most notably, revisiting The Capitol of Panem that bears a striking resemblance to our own 1% (Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins, a prequel to the bestselling Hunger Games stories). The general consensus is that these titles are well worthy of their acclaim, but their domination begs a question distinct (though not detached) from our imaginations:
What is it that ties the gods to reality?
Perhaps it is a matter of markets, and a fear that dramatic experiments with the basics—for instance, the human physique and diet—could overwhelm potential consumers. Perhaps the task of the speculative is audacious enough, and something like historically-human political systems is a necessary tether for the gods’ own sanity. Or perhaps the fault lies in us, the disciples, when we read ourselves—our hierarchies, morals, and systems—into these stories, and as a result, fail to read “novum” into them too. Representation cannot be discounted in the stories we consume, but neither can imagination.
Indeed, imagine this: what might happen if we replaced analogy with novelty? Are we such creatures of habit that we cannot court the unfamiliar—the uncomfortable? Is the unknown, even if only on the page, so threatening that we must alchemize it into something fathomable? What if we, the readers, who may very well be writers too, are no better than Dr. Frankenstein and Dr. Moreau, anatomizing the other into something we may deem “human”?
Reflecting on Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller” and Byung-Chul Han’s book Non-Things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld, Professor of Sociology Dave Beer unpacks the discomfort of non-things in today’s world:
Everything is in service of information. Urgent social media feeds and their flowing fragmented bits of content may not always be full of explanation, although we can see this in the rush for the hottest-take on the trending news, yet there is certainly a sense of a lack of time and space. Embodied in the quick flick downwards through those tumbling notifications, more open forms of storytelling have been pushed out by an impulse to consume the new.[12]
If speculative fiction has succumbed to the “immediacy of today’s information economy,” if its worldbuilding is “pre-digested,” already categorized in terms of reality, then the divinity we grant authors is just another name for the unknowable made known: made human. In the speculations of our supposed gods, “there is little room left to fill in the gaps, everything comes already accounted for.”[13]
Naturally, this is all a speculation of my own. Problems that I (and many others) raise, but refuse to solve, for if it is ambiguity I pray for, then I ought to heed my own hunger. The challenge is to build a tower of Babel that poses more questions than answers—to underscore our shared humanity by teasing the beings and bodies we cannot entirely comprehend.
To return to Jordan S. Carroll, danger lies not only in how the alt-right weaponizes science fiction for fascist means, but even more dangerously, that it “seizes upon speculative genres to dictate who has the right to speculate in the first place.”[14] That is, fascists dictate who has the right to imagine. To build worlds. To play god. My prayer for bigger, bolder speculations, in many ways, is an appeal for diversity, in divine terms. That is not only a challenge of who tells stories—and whose books are banished to the back of the bookstore—but also how they may tell them.
Hear me, gods: here lies the power of speculative fiction, and its point, too. In the unfathomable, novelty awaits.
Miranda Jensen is a creative activist with roots in the San Francisco Bay Area. Through her writing and critical theory, she seeks not merely to interpret the world, but to change it. She is a Casa Uno Residency recipient, and her work has been published in Nature Futures, Across the Margin, and Pictura Journal (nominated for Best of Net 2026), among others. You can find her at www.mirandajensen.com and on X @MirandaLJensen.
Notes
[1] Eades, Gwilym L. 2024. Spatialities of Speculative Fiction: Re-mapping Possibilities, Philosophies, and Territorialities. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
[2] Cecire, Maria S. 2020. “Empire of fantasy.” Aeon, November 30, 2020. https://aeon.co/essays/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-oxford-school-of-fantasy-literature.
[3] Carroll, Jordan S. 2024. Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 9.
[4] Carroll 2024, 9.
[5] Durrani, Haris. 2020. “Dune’s Not a White Savior Narrative. But It’s Complicated.” Medium, Sep 11, 2020. https://hdernity.medium.com/dunes-not-a-white-savior-narrative-but-it-s-complicated-53fbbec1b1dc.
[6] Carroll 2024, 13.
[7] Haraway, Donna J. 2016. “A Cyborg Manifesto.” In Manifestly Haraway, 5-90. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 9.
[8] Smith, Jeff, ed. 1975. Khatru, Women in Science Fiction, 111.
[9] Thomas, Michael F. 2025. “The Limits of Imagination.” Substack, January 12, 2025. https://holyfoolishness.substack.com/p/the-limits-of-imagination.
[10] Lovecraft, H. P. 2020. The Colour Out of Space. N.p.: Penguin Books Limited, 6.
[11] Stokes, Patrick. 2025. “The limits of imagination.” Philosophy and you - Society & Culture, July 30, 2025. https://www.newphilosopher.com/articles/the-it limits-of-imagination/.
[12] Beer, Dave. 2022. “The discomfort of non-things.” The Fragment, Aug 11, 2022. https://davidbeer.substack.com/p/the-discomfort-of-non-things.
[13] Beer 2022.
[14] Carroll 2024, 10.