INTRODUCTION: Speculative & Science Fiction: What is Past& Present … & What is Future?

Summary

For this fascinating edition of AfricanLiterature Today, it is useful to suggest this guidingbroad picture as heuristic genre marking. The speculative is trappedin the realm of suggestion. It is a half-birth in terms of a tactilereality. Science fiction on the other hand, through systematicpractice, appears to make sure that what is suggested as imaginedenjoys strong tactile and kinesthetic probability and full birth.That was how the Greek word techne/tekne anticipated the system from where theword technology became what we know today. African speculativefiction may tell how the tortoise or spider travelled to heaven toencounter God. Science fiction, typified by works by writers likeJules Verne and H.G. Wells, stakes a different trajectory andterminus. Their creative mantra rode on, as the saying goes, whatone man can imagine, another man can create. In other words, you donot just imagine or speculate without the possibility of creatingand actualizing. Clearly not so for speculative fiction which onlyprojects open-ended possibilities. Unless we get this distinctionclear, the missions of the two enterprises and their different goalswill keep causing needless debate and confusion with the concomitantcomparison of scales of importance or the familiar binary ofinferiority/superiority. It is ostensible that those writing aboutthe tortoise going to see God did not intend that mission to beactualized. Those whose writings anticipated submarine warfare andjourneys to the moon and elevators and so forth before rockets andsubmarines and elevators became real believed that technology couldmake them be or happen.

What is speculative fiction and which is science fiction? What ispast and present? And what is future? We may proffer a-racial ora-political answers. In the end, the answers under careful scrutinywith appropriate trenchant scalpels are likely to be found wantingwith all the various labels having no easy escape from the tags ofspurious or questionable because of the frame. Here, for instance,is our distinction between the speculative and science fictioncoming out of our ruminations so far. What is obvious from awholesome African way is that the African now is both speculativeand scientific very much like the African modernity orpostmodernity.