The umbrella term for fiction that changes the rules of reality, encompassing science fiction, fantasy, horror, and everything between.
Speculative fiction is the big tent that holds science fiction, fantasy, horror, magical realism, alternate history, and any other fiction that departs from strict realism. It's less a genre than a category, useful for describing work that doesn't fit neatly into one subgenre or that deliberately blends several. If your novel has dragons and spaceships and nobody bats an eye, it's speculative fiction.
The label 'speculative fiction' solves a real problem: not all non-realistic fiction fits cleanly into 'fantasy' or 'sci-fi.' If your work crosses genre boundaries, this term gives you a way to describe it without forcing it into a box. It's also increasingly the term literary agents and publishers use when they want to signal openness to genre-blending work.
Part war novel, part science fiction, part satire. Resists any single genre label, making 'speculative fiction' the best fit.
Atwood famously called it speculative fiction rather than science fiction, insisting all its elements were based on real historical precedents.
Write a 500-word scene that could be classified as either science fiction, fantasy, or literary fiction depending on how you read it. Use ambiguity as a tool: is the character experiencing technology, magic, or a mental state? Let the reader decide. That borderland is speculative fiction's natural habitat.