This wide-ranging and timely open access collection of essays is ideal for readers who want to incorporate speculative fiction into their teaching and research across disciplines.

The terms speculation and speculative fictioning are increasingly used in education and interdisciplinary research methods to describe approaches grounded in asking “what if” questions that can unsettle the assumed certainties of the past, present, and future.

An Introduction by editor Sarah E. Truman and a Foreword by Steven Shaviro describe what speculative fiction is and examine its critical implications, offering a theoretical framework for understanding its applications to research and pedagogy. The chapters that follow explore these modes of thinking in practice by drawing on speculative fictions to examine disciplinary concerns related to climate justice, disability justice, racial justice, prison abolition, genetics, AI, the future of work, educational technologies, and gender. Through reflective narratives and critical analyses, twenty-five international contributors engage literary works by authors such as Octavia Butler, Jorge Luis Borges, Ted Chiang, and N. K. Jemisin, alongside films and television series including Gattaca, The Matrix, Severance, and Star Trek, connecting these texts to their own research and thinking. Each chapter also includes discussion and writing prompts for use in classrooms and research seminars.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the University of Melbourne.