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The introduction establishes the focus of the book, reviews how previous approaches to speculative fiction have overlooked considerations of race or treated the topic through metaphor and allegory. Discusses how contemporary black literary and cultural theory invokes the conventions of speculative fiction and explains how the book will engage with black subjects’ alienation from and affinities for the genre.

This chapter addresses the energy imaginary within the industrial extraction boom. It also takes a look at how this imaginary shaped the political and social projections of speculative literature. Speculative genres such as hollow earth fiction, utopian fiction, and fantasy fiction burgeoned alongside industrial extraction. The chapter focuses on the ruminations on energy and exhaustion that grounded these literary speculations. Extractive energy supplied the material conditions from which speculative fiction takes flight, but these worldbuilding genres also offer imaginative resources for envisioning energy beyond extractivism, even as they narrate, through their secondary worlds, energy's determinative role in culture, environment, and society.

By the final decades of the nineteenth century, the notion of an Asiatic threat was well established in U.S. culture, in part through “Yellow Peril” propaganda, a product of the Pacific Coast anti-Chinese movement. Chapter 3 reads sensationalized Chinese invasion narratives alongside the key legal and political contexts that gave them narrative shape to tease out the racial fictions and counterfactual imaginings of this popular subgenre. From legal discourse to the forgotten novels of Pierton Dooner, Robert Woltor, and Arthur Dudley Vinton, the invasion trope dominated U.S.-China relations. The Janus-faced depictions of Chinese labor migrants as abject coolie-slaves and villainous agents of foreign aggression embodied the contradictions of American industrial modernity. In imagining the tragic consequences of unfettered Chinese immigration, the subgenre absorbed and refracted white anxieties over the end of western expansion—American Manifest Destiny—and the changing composition of the national polity after black citizenship and enfranchisement.

This introduction considers how characters of color are represented in Young Adult Speculative Fiction (YASF), how race affects or influences the structures of speculative worlds, and how racial ideologies are replicated or challenged in the genre. The introduction specifically considers why young people of color are so often underrepresented in YASF and examines the effect of colorblind ideology and postracialism on YASF. Drawing on critics such as Ebony Elizabeth Thomas and Mary J. Couzelis, the introduction argues that some YASF texts normalize many existing racial hierarchies and explains that the collection examines how race and racism are represented in YASF.

In this chapter, Joshua Yu Burnett demonstrates that Okorafor simultaneously critiques speculative fiction for its one-dimensional depictions of race and works within the confines of the genre to advocate for fluid, multifaceted intersectionality. While popular young adult dystopian/science fiction novels frequently depict white girls and young women overcoming societal expectations and oppressions, such novels often ignore the role whiteness plays in the protagonist’s ability to resist. This chapter argues that Okorafor takes an intersectional approach, recognizing the role that racialization plays and the toll it takes, as well as locates racialized otherness as a source of resistance and the overcoming of constricting social norms. Okorafor’s work is valuable for precisely this reason: she not only depicts Black and African girls in speculative settings, but she transforms their double marginalization into resistance and empowerment.

Summarizes implications of the study for further considerations of the interactions between race and genre in cultural production. Suggests new directions for black literary and cultural criticism that incorporates speculative fiction and for research in Science Fiction Studies that aims to think critically about race.

Chapter 2 shows in a compressed, somewhat truncated way, the unique history of science fiction (sometimes called speculative fiction). This chapter also shows some of the myriad theoretical approaches that have been used in the study of science fiction over time. It then demonstrates how those approaches have been used by giving close readings of science fiction texts intended for young adults. This is in an effort to show the difference between science fiction and dystopian literature. It shows that it is a literature directly concerned with the subject’s encounter with the o/Other.

This chapter argues that speculative fictions are a mechanism for struggling with speculative capital. Speculative fictions envision unrealized future scenarios, and share a similar strategy to speculative capital, the very forces whose fictions have become our realities. Through a reading of Gary Shteyngart’s contemporary dystopian novel, Super Sad True Love Story, and Deleuze and Guattari on writing and language, the chapter diagnoses how literature could still serve a critical function in light of the digital reorganization of life. Shteyngart models a data-centered world, whereby humans are products of their data for monetization, and interaction between beings has become mediated by a transactional reality. In the process, Shteyngart’s critique not only unravels the distinction between appearance and reality by demonstrating how language is a form of matter, but also his writing allows for concepts to become existence. This is one of speculative fictions major contributions for thinking ahumanly.

Recently, the concept of the Anthropocene has become increasingly important for environmentalism. For pessimists, it signals the enormous scope of negative human impact on the environment; for optimists, it means imagining the nature of the future as reshaped by humans. These discussions often draw (implicitly or explicitly) on tropes and narrative strategies from science fiction, especially the concept of terraforming, as do projects for “rewilding” and “de-extinction.” Speculative fiction also resonates in other controversies around the Anthropocene: the question of whether it imposes the urgency of a new environmental cosmopolitanism, or glosses over continuing socio-economic divides, and whether it overemphasizes human agency, in tension with posthumanisms that have foregrounded nonhuman agents in social networks. But some of these posthumanisms, including the idea of multispecies justice, offer the possibility of extending cosmopolitan models of thought beyond the human sphere without relying on “flat ontologies” that weaken the emphasis on differences within and beyond species boundaries. Orson Scott Card's Ender tetralogy exemplifies in a fictional context the transition from human-caused extinction to multispecies justice, and thereby demonstrates how the planetary storytelling mode of speculative fiction provides a model for designing new narratives of biodiversity, conservation, survival, and multispecies justice.

This chapter looks at the ways technologized bodies are designed and engineered, and especially how these processes are gendered. It argues that it is vital to understand the logic and techniques of design and engineering given that many disability experiences are produced through the intersection between body and technology, and the chapter analyses science and speculative fiction and film in which artificial, robotic and cyborg bodies are designed and produced, outlining how this production needs to be understood through a disability lens. The chapter will focus on texts where women are engineered, but also where they undertake the engineering; it also asserts that a disability-inflected conception of female engineering animates contemporary cultural production, highlighting the ideas of subject and community this produces.

The conclusion returns to and critically recasts the Chinese invasion subgenre studied at length in Chapter 3. Serialized in the NAACP’s Crisis magazine, the African American writer James D. Corrothers’s two-part tale “A Man They Didn’t Know” (1913–14) turned “Yellow Peril” anti-Chinese propaganda on its head, revealing its buried racial histories and ideological forms. Corrothers’s speculative fiction pushed the counterfactual imaginary of Chinese invasion to its limit, plying the disruptive potential of an Asiatic threat to America in his efforts to challenge the meaning of whiteness and existing racial hierarchies in a world reshaped by Plessy v. Ferguson and the global diffusion of white supremacist ideologies. Corrother’s tale suggests that our racial paradigms must move beyond the internal opposition of white and nonwhite to include racial minorities outside the nation-state, as new immigrants and class divisions within minoritized groups facilitate new and unexpected global realignments of race and racialization.

This chapter examines lesbian feminist speculative fiction from across the twentieth century in order to reconsider queer theory’s widespread rejection of reproduction, particularly in the wake of Lee Edelman's critique of 'reproductive futurism’. In queer theory, reproduction often signifies as simply a dreary and repetitive commitment to more of the same thing, and is frequently linked intrinsically, in any form, to a dominant and conservative heteronormative order. However, the fiction that this chapter addresses demonstrates the value to queer worlds of biological, social and cultural reproduction. In novels ranging from Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915) to Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975), to Suzy McKee Charnas's Motherlines (1978) to Sally Miller Gearhart's The Wanderground (1979) to Nicola Griffith's Ammonite (1993), the women-only lesbian worlds presented are structured around forms of reproduction – both biological and social copying (sometimes literalised in the form of human cloning) – that are none the less in no way heteronormative or even heterosexual. Moreover, these novels dramatise the importance of structures for reproduction – for keeping things the same – especially where the conditions being reproduced are the result of minoritarian struggle.

This chapter analyzes the Finnish author Johanna Sinisalo’s 2013 novel Auringon ydin [The core of the sun] in the contexts of speculative fiction, dystopia, and fairy tale to provide an illustrative example of Sinisalo’s oeuvre. The novel combines various elements, genres, and text-types in a self-reflexive and parodic way, which both gives the novel a peculiar twist and offers an interesting viewpoint on the Finnish weird. The novel’s fabulous thought experiment combines the depiction of human domestication with real documents addressing eugenics and sterilization and the domestication of silver foxes. The chapter also discusses dystopian and fairy-tale elements in the novel and suggests that while Sinisalo draws from multiple sources in her writing, she can be considered a science-fiction writer due to her focus on the thought experiment.

The period following the second decade of the millennium has witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of Gothic forms in what is frequently called ‘post-transitional’ South African fiction. Readily identifiable in the work of young writers in particular, these should be understood as an enunciation of real anxiety breeding in the postapartheid nation. The fall of apartheid marks South Africa’s postcolonial incorporation into a neoliberal world order, and the disorientation and unease of these circumstances is appearing in the fiction of South Africa’s new millennium in uneasy, indeed Gothic forms. This chapter outlines key dimensions of this millennial South African Gothic, focusing specifically on emerging speculative production in diverse media, including short fiction, graphic narrative, literary periodicals and film.

Turning to the publication of Martin Delany’s serial novel, Blake; or the Huts of America, in the Anglo-African Magazine in 1859, this chapter argues that black experiments with natural science helped to produce early works of black speculative fiction. This chapter casts Blake as a work of proto–science fiction that challenged the impoverished conception of the human found in both racial science and mainstream abolitionism. It is especially interested in a cosmic and existential model of fugitivity that Delany develops in both Blake and in his writings on astronomy in the Anglo-African.

This chapter examines the history of popular fiction in Canada. In Canada, popular culture reflects not only Canadian experience but also cultural anxieties as they have permeated and shaped the national imaginary since the days of settlement. The most significant component of that national imaginary in relation to popular narrative is probably what might be called an evolving Gothic sensibility. Gothicism refers to the portrayal of strange or frightening experiences in mysterious and daunting places and spaces. The chapter considers a number of earlier Canadian novels that stand out in the Canadian popular imagination, including L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables (1908), Margaret Laurence's The Diviners (1974). It also discusses genre fiction in the modern and contemporary periods, such as Harlequin Enterprises (founded Winnipeg 1949) and women's romances, crime fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction, notably William Gibson's cyberpunk novel Neuromancer (1984).

In his chapter “History and its Alternatives: War Games as Social Form,” Eric Hayot begins with prophecy and speculative fiction, which he defines as “histories of the future” from the early 20th Century that projected an impending world conflict before moving to the present moment’s fascination with internet and computer based “war games.” The chapter eventually goes on to outline three categories of historical fiction, “history of the future,” “history of the past/historical fiction” and “alternative history,” which Hayot examines through both fiction and different forms of video games. Along the way, the he explores the inherent challenges posed to those engaging in critical studies of video game representations of the Pacific War due to the very nature of a medium in which “form absolutely dominates content.”