12+   Zing and Zap's flying saucer orbited the barren planet. "Why didn't global warming galvanise them into action?" Zing asked. It seems they were too busy posting cat videos," Zap replied.

I wrote this 30-word story for the daily prompt word, GALVANISE, during September 2024's #30Words30Days challenge on Twitter/X. Is it sci-fi or speculative fiction? (And does it matter?)

Margaret Atwood, author of the multi-award-winning 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale and its Man Booker Prize-winning 2019 sequel, The Testaments, asserts: 

Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we're probably not going to see.

The Handmaid's Tale (Amazon affiliate link) depicts a world that is eerily familiar to the theological autocracies of the Middle East and the modern-day lurch to an evangelistic, patriarchal, anti-women's reproductive rights society in America. By Atwood's definition, it's speculative rather than science fiction.

Similarly, Andy Weir's 2011 debut novel The Martian (Amazon affiliate link) is a work of fiction crammed with science. Yet Mark Watney's marooning on Mars and his (spoiler alert!) survival and rescue mission are things "we could actually do", as opposed to something "we're not going to see", like little green men rescuing Watney. 

So, is The Martian speculative fiction? According to Weir and the Hugo Awards judges, it's science fiction.

My Sci-Fi Journey

Unlike the young Weir, who grew up reading the stories of Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, I was not an avid science fiction reader. But as a teenager, I loved watching sci-fi on TV, like Lost in Space, Land of the Giants, and Time Tunnel, and classic movies such as Forbidden Planet with the iconic Robby the Robot. (TV in Perth in the 1970s featured a lot of American repeats from the 1950s and '60s.) 

In my mid-twenties, however, I discovered and binged on the classic works of Clark and Asimov, John Wyndham, Frank Herbert, and the "fathers of science fiction", H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. By my thirties, I'd graduated to contemporary books, with my all-time favourites including Contact by Carl Sagan, Timescape by Gregory Benford, and Replay by Ken Grimwood. 

Grimwood's Replay (Arbor House, 1986) proved particularly memorable for two reasons: 

1. I found it in a one-pound bargain bin in a corner shop in England in 1994
2. It deals with my favourite sci-fi subject: time travel or, more specifically, reliving your life. 

The main character, a 42-year-old radio newsman, Jeff Winston, dies of a heart attack in 1988 and regains consciousness as an 18-year-old in his college campus room in 1963. As the back cover blurb says: 

"[Winston] was about to relive 25 of the most violent years in world history. His foreknowledge could make him a wealthy man, but what then? Could he change the course of history? Would he be happy the second time around? Or the third? Or the fourth?"

Given the title and blurb, it's obvious that Winston replays his life several times. And (spoiler alert!) he ensures his wealth by buying Apple shares! (A tip I gave the 5-year-old me as a 57-year-old in a social media challenge I shared in a Memories and Imagination memoir piece.)

Again, is Replay a work of speculative or science fiction? Albert Einstein said time travel is theoretically possible, but only into the future. So, Grimwood's novel must be the stuff of little green men and sci-fi. But it also speculates how we might relive our lives if given a second, third and fourth chance.

Discovering Speculative Fiction

I became a father at 40, and in the following decade, I read fewer books for myself and more for and with my son. The closest I came to sci-fi during this time was likely reading Zombie Bums from Uranus and similar books by Andy Griffiths and other children's writers.   

It wasn't until my late fifties, during my then-teenage son's parent push-back, when I suddenly had more time to devote to myself and my reading and writing, that I discovered speculative fiction. Two standout pieces for me were Terra Nullius by Claire G. Coleman (I wrote a book review about it) and Every Version of You by Grace Chan (one of my favourite books of 2022).

Chan's book was more science-based than Coleman's, imagining a Metaverse 2.0-like virtual world, but both books speculated on what we "could actually do" or see in the not-too-distant future. And both inspired me to try writing speculative fiction.

I regularly write short stories for Furious Fiction, the Not Quite Write Prize, the Big Issue Fiction Edition, the Best Australian Yarn and other competitions. Since 2020, over a dozen stories have been speculative fiction, most similar to Coleman's Terra Nullius, speculating on a different world, but some with the science aspect of Chan's Every Version of You. Three of them involved time travel! 

In one of my favourites, the first-person narrator explains the science of time travel to the reader:

What's that? "Rubbish! I hear you cry. "Einstein said time travel was impossible!" 

Well, not exactly. Theoretically, Einstein's "E=mc2" allows for travel into the future for objects moving close to the speed of light. Yet here I am, in the past.

It seemed fair to me to "fudge" the science. After all, as Einstein said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."

Collection of Speculative Fiction

In addition to regularly writing for competitions, since 2020, I have published four short story and microfiction collections:

• Both Sides of the Story (2020)
• Twelve Furious Months (2021)
• Twelve More Furious Months (2022)
• Tall And True Microfiction (2023)

In November 2024, I'm publishing a new collection titled A Day in the Life of Alex's AI and Twelve Other Speculative Fiction Short Stories.

The collection will consist of A Day in the Life of Alex's AI, a longer futuristic speculative fiction piece I've worked on for over a year (you could call it a "long day"!), and twelve short stories I've written for various competitions since 2020.

I will also include my Zing and Zap 30-word story in the introduction. Yes, according to Margaret Atwood's definition, it's a little green men sci-fi story that "we're probably not going to see".

But if other lifeforms exist in the vast universe (and logic tells me they must!), imagine their astonishment that global warming didn't galvanise us into action to save our barren planet. All because we were too busy posting and commenting on cat videos on social media.

So, I think that makes my story speculative fiction because "we could actually do" something about it!

© 2024 Robert Fairhead

Thanks to Gen Matic for sharing the AI-generated Futuristic Sun image on Pixabay.

N.B. You might like to read one of my first speculative fiction stories from 2020, The Dark Web.