Introduction: Speculative & Science Fiction: What is Past & Present … & What is Future?

Egbunike, Louisa Uchum; Nwankwo, Chimalum

Abstract

For this fascinating edition of African Literature Today, it is useful to suggest this guiding broad picture as heuristic genre marking. The speculative is trapped in the realm of suggestion. It is a half-birth in terms of a tactile reality. Science fiction on the other hand, through systematic practice, appears to make sure that what is suggested as imagined enjoys strong tactile and kinesthetic probability and full birth. That was how the Greek word techne/tekne anticipated the system from where the word technology became what we know today. African speculative fiction may tell how the tortoise or spider travelled to heaven to encounter God. Science fiction, typified by works by writers like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, stakes a different trajectory and terminus. Their creative mantra rode on, as the saying goes, what one man can imagine, another man can create. In other words, you do not just imagine or speculate without the possibility of creating and actualizing. Clearly not so for speculative fiction which only projects open-ended possibilities. Unless we get this distinction clear, the missions of the two enterprises and their different goals will keep causing needless debate and confusion with the concomitant comparison of scales of importance or the familiar binary of inferiority/superiority. It is ostensible that those writing about the tortoise going to see God did not intend that mission to be actualized. Those whose writings anticipated submarine warfare and journeys to the moon and elevators and so forth before rockets and submarines and elevators became real believed that technology could make them be or happen. What is speculative fiction and which is science fiction? What is past and present? And what is future? We may proffer a-racial or a-political answers. In the end, the answers under careful scrutiny with appropriate trenchant scalpels are likely to be found wanting with all the various labels having no easy escape from the tags of spurious or questionable because of the frame. Here, for instance, is our distinction between the speculative and science fiction coming out of our ruminations so far. What is obvious from a wholesome African way is that the African now is both speculative and scientific very much like the African modernity or postmodernity.

Citation

Egbunike, L. U., & Nwankwo, C. (2022). Introduction: Speculative & Science Fiction: What is Past & Present … & What is Future?. . Boydell & Brewer. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781800102897.001

• Online Publication Date: Oct 7, 2022
• Publication Date: 2022
• Deposit Date: Jan 22, 2025
• Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
• ISBN: 9781800102897
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781800102897.001
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1930114
• Publisher URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/alt-39/introduction-speculative-science-fiction-what-is-past-present-what-is-future/0CDCA8EA25279140EE580A0CE1A8C667