Speculative Fiction: The Genre Of Dystopian Fiction

Dystopian fiction is a contemporary literary sub-genre that falls under the umbrella genre of speculative fiction. This type of fiction predicts the possible, oppressive, futuristic sociopolitical changes that deprive the society of worldly pleasures. Dystopian fiction was defined by many scholars. Basu, Broad, and Hintz in their edited book Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers (2009) defined dystopia as a fiction that “describes non-existent societies intended to be read as “considerably worse” than the reader’s own” and that is the opposite of utopia which is “the non-existent society “considerably better” than the current world” (Basu et al. 2). Therefore, dystopia gives the illusion of a highly moral and perfect society that could exist in real life which is a feature of speculative fictional writing. According to P.L. Thomas’ book Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction: Challenging Genres (2013), speculative fiction is a fiction that “deals all too often with a dark future that is looked upon as both a representation of current society and as a lived possibility” (Thomas 108). Moreover, speculative fiction was defined in comparison to science fiction which is “a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative frame- work alternative to the author’s empirical environment”. However, the difference between them is that