In the 1830s and 1840s, railways were available to relatively few communities, with many encountering them on paper and in public discourse long before they had the opportunity to see them in person. This chapter examines what preceded the slow integration of railway infrastructure into narrative infrastructure: fantastical visions of technomodernity that did not fit well into established plots. Documenting efforts by railway companies, journalists, and cartographers to articulate steam-powered transit exposes how widely authors struggled to find a fitting form for railways on the page. Examples include Charles Dickens’s false starts in weaving railway imagery and mobility into prose, via The Pickwick Papers (1836–37) and Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44). By changing track to explore the notion of ‘fellow passengers’ in A Christmas Carol (1843), and taking time and space away from writing on the move to develop a more deliberately engineered structure for his 1848 novel, Dombey and Son, Dickens adapts his approach to plotting long-form fiction in the steam age. These readings reveal the importance of carefully laying groundwork – or infrastructure – for large-scale shifts in novel form.

This chapter surveys portrayals of money within US speculative fiction. While they may take us to alien planets or alternate universes, such works also serve to remind us how strange “ordinary” money already is. Speculative fiction has often sought to reimagine money in some more rational or explainable form. These thought experiments often propose money based on some purportedly stable and incontrovertible value, such as labor, time, energy, or motion. There is a second and somewhat distinct tendency, which envisions reputation-based currencies and other “storied moneys,” often capable of reflecting diverse incommensurable values. Then there are portrayals of large fortunes that, whether or not they come with overt speculative elements such as magic or futuristic technologies, can also take on an aura of the fantastic. In particular, large fortunes become storied money to the extent that they reflect and enact their owners’ personal characteristics, relationships, and histories. Speculative fiction also often blurs with speculative practices, from Josiah Warren’s Time Store in the 1820s to the Technocracy movement of the 1930s to contemporary cryptocurrency, Non-Fungible Tokens, and blockchain finance. This porous boundary invites the question: might money itself be understood as a kind of speculative fiction?

Attending to Latinx South American writing generates a more expansive understanding of how violence and migration shape Latinx literary history and narrative forms. This chapter elucidates the theoretical salience of el Hueco through its multiple significations as gap, hole, hollow, space of detention, liminal status, and form of undocumented migration. Likewise, the chapter demonstrates how the term desaparecido illuminates the emotional holes and the gaps in kinship structures left by those who are disappeared by state terror practices and immigration policies. Using texts by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Romina Garber, Juan Martinez, Carolina de Robertis, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Daniel Alarcón, and Cristina Henríquez, the chapter demonstrates how prose narrative draws linkages between various kinds of state-perpetrated violence in the Américas. The chapter analyzes genres – from creative nonfiction to speculative fiction – and narrative strategies – from temporality and spectrality to focalization and characterization – to illuminate how Latinx South American fiction activates narrative as a form of reappearance and as a means of imagining different Latinx futurities.

This chapter explores Latinx speculative fiction – the capacious term for genres that include anything from science fiction, fantasy, and apocalyptic fiction to horror, alternative histories, and supernatural fiction and their vast array of subgenres – and asks why Latinx writers turn to speculative tropes to tell their stories, and what unique narrative possibilities genre fiction offers. The chapter argues that Latinx speculative fiction offers a powerful tool for examining race, ethnicity, national belonging, and diaspora, revealing how Latinx identities and Latinidad have been shaped by violent historical forces that veer on the otherworldly, and how reading through this lens uncovers tropes and narratives that might otherwise remain hidden. The chapter illustrates the importance of Latinx speculative fiction as a paradigm for reading, one that exceeds national boundaries, establishes thematic networks across time and space, offers new avenues for discussing identity formations, and, moreover, requires a redefinition of Latinidad as a speculative endeavor.

Of late, Asian Americanist literary and cultural critics have turned their attention to “genre” fiction, especially popular genres that fall under the heading of “speculative fiction.” This chapter argues that this turn to genre – distinct from, though related to, the “genre turn” in Anglophone cultural production – is the latest installment in a perennial contestation over the objects and theories of realism. What appears to be attention to increasingly minute subgenres, moreover, is in fact evidence of a critical realist reading practice that is responsive to the increasing salience of Asia’s capitalist modernity relative to the account of racial formation that has traditionally grounded Asian American studies.

Doris Lessing was one of the most restless novelists of her generation. She toggled between realist bildungsromane, autofiction, postmodernist experimentation, and speculative fiction. Despite her restlessness, she remained committed to the novel of ideas, using these different subgenres to entertain philosophical debates about autonomy, group membership, racism, and social progress. Surprisingly, as this chapter demonstrates, Lessing’s swerve into speculative fiction was conditioned by her status as a target of MI5 surveillance. Although Lessing knew she was being watched, she did not turn to the paranoid style of George Orwell. Instead, she used her fiction to suggest that an imperialist intelligence network could be outwitted by individuals who harness the powers of intelligent perception, or ESP: reading minds, forecasting future events, even communicating across species. The way to beat a repressive police network was to mimic its capabilities, bringing the arts of surveillance into the fold of human consciousness itself.

The erosion of democracy has shown itself to be a necessary political precondition for the implementation of neoliberalism. Utopian culture quickly attuned itself to this crisis of democracy, and while there certainly are not many works of utopian culture that uncritically embrace the dominant post-1989 narrative that hails democracy as the universal cure for whatever ailment may exist in the world, we begin to see the emergence of works that foreground the profound danger inherent in the waning of democracy precisely in times of its instrumentalization by Western capitalist nations and the forces of economic globalization. Authors reveal neoliberal utopias as antidemocratic dystopias against which democracy must be defended. Moreover, we also see the emergence of novels that address a second pressing question: how can democracy survive when populations decide to democratically abolish it?

This chapter discusses Afrofuturism with reference to a wide range of literary works, influential critical and theoretical accounts, and artistic manifestos, identifying its overlaps and distinctions from the broader speculative turn apparent in African American literature from the 1980s onward. The chapter focuses on two rubrics that lend cohesion to the array of genres, styles, and aesthetic principles associated with the label of Afrofuturism: the politics of time and the idea of race as technology. Through various devices of temporal dislocation, Afrofuturist works invent revisionist histories, shatter consensus narratives about the present, and challenge prevailing discourses of futurity. In addition, the chapter argues that Afrofuturist literature at its best defamiliarizes established ways of reading race through its innovative engagement with race-making techniques and technologies ranging from genre conventions to genetic engineering.

In N. K. Jemisin’s science fiction short story “The Effluent Engine” (2011), Jessaline, a Haitian spy and “natural” daughter of Toussaint Louverture, arrives in New Orleans in the early years of Haitian independence. Her world is both like and unlike our own: in the tale, Haitians have learned to convert gases from sugarcane distilleries into fuel for airships. Turning “our torment to our advantage,” as Jessaline puts it, Haiti effectively bombed French ships to win the Revolution; became the world’s leading manufacturer of dirigibles; and secured diplomatic standing in the United States, even constructing an embassy in New Orleans.1 And yet, despite Haiti’s steampunkesque political and technological power, there is much in “The Effluent Engine” that recalls a less optimistic history. The French are still “hell-bent upon re-enslaving” the nascent republic; although the United States begrudgingly recognizes Haiti, it remains “the stuff of American nightmare”; and Jessaline confronts white supremacist terrorism and the threat of racial-sexual violence in the US South, where she fights the Order of the White Camellia.

This chapter reads Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad as a Janus-faced text in American literary history that looks back toward the persistent political conundrums illuminated by twentieth-century American fiction and reconfigures them in generative ways for the twenty-first century. Like earlier twentieth-century neo-slave narratives by Ishmael Reed, Octavia E. Butler, and Toni Morrison, Whitehead’s novel critiques a naïve historical story of inevitable Black progress, and it even flirts with the notion that American democracy and African American oppression are inextricable. But Whitehead rejects fatalistic narratives of inevitable injustice by showing how American normative myths can still be politically efficacious. Establishing himself as a key literary figure in contemporary Black political thought, Whitehead uses the speculative fiction genre to transform celebrated concepts in American political theory – e.g., individual freedom, legal equality, constitutional rights, representative democracy, popular sovereignty – by contextualizing them within Black experiences across time. Ultimately, his political vision amounts to a wary optimism, which Whitehead himself has called a politics of “impossible hope.”

Many Black intellectuals and artists have called for a counter-historiography that would redress the silencing of Black voices and the inadequate representation of Black experiences in earlier comics. This chapter identifies three categories of graphic historiographies, each with thematic and formal recurrences: those that propose a frontal look at the context of enslavement, from the horrors of the Middle Passage to the violence of the plantation world; those focusing on the political and social struggles of Black communities after the Civil War, from the Jim Crow era and the courageous actions of Civil Rights leaders to twenty-first-century police brutality; and, finally, those that imagine new Black futures in the mode of speculative fiction, while metaphorically referencing past forms of exploitation and repression. The chapter studies the specific devices of several of these works, including the use of temporal shifts in the graphic adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred, the reliance on oral history and photo-based illustrations in John Lewis’s Run, Book One, the depiction of Black women’s subordination in Shirlene Obuobi’s ShirlyWhirlMD webcomic, and the futuristic metaphors of slavery and capitalism in Roxane Gay’s The Sacrifice of Darkness.

This chapter argues that there is a special relationship between Blackness and speculative fiction (SF). Taking Afrofuturism as a point of departure, it shows that Black SF offers unique and important ways of theorizing key concepts in contemporary Black studies, including pleasure, power, and death. After examining these qualities, it engages in a close reading of the Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah short story “The Finkelstein Five” to show the relevance of Black SF to scholars and authors writing in what poet Elizabeth Alexander calls “the Trayvon Generation.” While Alexander uses the term to describe children coming of age under the post-millennial regime of anti-Black policing and BLM protest, this chapter uses it to explain that authors and scholars entering the profession in the same period have turned to the speculative to critically interrogate the violent rupture of police murder against oxymoronic promises of racial advancement. The speculative thus offers important framing for both the lived experiences of racial violence and fantasies of making a just and livable world.

The making of the Asian Australian novel is the unmaking of oppressive notions of history, subjectivity and literary form. Locating ethnic representational politics within power structures of race and nation, this chapter contends that Asian Australian identity is a site of hybrid instability realised through nonlinear forms of storytelling. The chapter examines national and diasporic paradigms across historical and contemporary trajectories of this literature: earlier Chinese Australian novels that blur boundaries between fictional and factual claims; Bildungsroman novels that trouble ethnocentric narratives of either assimilation or return; multicultural novels that unveil ongoing racism in liberal-pluralist ideals; and transnational novels that reimagine the Australian relationship with postcolonial and globalising Asian modernity. Reflecting on the limits of a critical humanist agenda, the chapter identifies an alternative paradigm of Asian Australian storytelling that employs speculative tactics to depict the land, species, climate change and Asian–Indigenous connections. This ecocritical paradigm challenges a normative ideal of the modern, autonomous and sovereign individual as one the migrant subject should integrate into, while pointing to an under-explored terrain for Asian Australian writers whose focus on diversity and justice would offer important insights into the shifting human condition.

This chapter investigates the response of the Australian novel to the Anthropocene. It considers ways in which new, speculative fictions have sought to represent deep time and planetary interconnection, and interrogates how this connects to long-standing settler-colonial relations to land. It considers such writers as James Bradley, George Turner, and Tara June Winch, and emphasizes the region of Western Australia as a place of particular environmental urgency.

Since the turn of this century, science fiction, fantasy, and horror have become cornerstones of African literature. This chapter looks at speculative fiction from across the continent that radically reimagines slavery, examining the ways writers have sutured questions of subjection and desired freedom into cyberpunk worlds, revisionist histories, invented mysticisms, and alien encounters. What, this chapter asks, is the function of the sizable body of African speculative fiction that imagines slaveries removed from the middle passage and chattel slavery in the Americas, including works with no clear historical analogue?

In Latin American literature almost all paths lead to the fantastic; the region has the distinct anomaly of giving the fantastic mode a central place in its narrative tradition. This essay will not discuss the similarities or differences between fantastical literature, science fiction, and horror, given the numerous hybridizations between subgenres and the fact that this conceptual discussion escapes the limits of the current work. Instead, I have chosen to group them under the rubric of speculative fiction. My aim is to point out some of the possible paths and bifurcations that the genre has taken since 1980, conscious of the possibility of multiple other readings. This essay will discuss the way in which the transition to democracy, neoliberal policies, and technological and social changes in Latin America were portrayed in literature through fictional universes, dystopias, and alternative histories; cyberpunk, hackers, and cyborgs; Chile’s “freak power,” virtual reality, and internet fictions; monsters and other fantastical creatures, eco-horror, and stories from the Anthropocene.