| | After reading the initial entry here, I had to google the term "speculative non-fiction" because my understanding of it was totally different from Ted's. I did, indeed, find other websites, where the label applies as it does here, to works about aliens, star-trek technology, ESP and other "speculations." However, my understanding -- perhaps as much as five years old now -- is that it is a nominally true story, garnished with inventiions and literary devices to make the telling come alive for the reader. Another word for that is "bullshit."
Creative non-fiction (speculative non-fiction) is an artefact of post-modernism, the is-but-isn't world of academic writing. (In my own study, tired of being exposed for the failures of their bankrupt philosophy, Marxists now call themselves "critical" sociologists or "critical" criminologists, i.e., critical of capitalism and America.) When I was a kid, we had these biographies of Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson. You saw young Abe chopping wood or young Thomas running downhill, but the author really had no citation for that, nor was one needed. It was just understood for what it was, embellishment.[1]
Today, creative non-fiction is a new genre -- new to English Literature professors, that is.
"Speculative fiction" goes back to the 1970s, and the works of Kate Wilhelm. Science fiction has rules -- but rules are so limiting.... So, Kate Wilhelm just wrote stuff without causes or effects. Being 50% of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshops at Michigan State University, Wilhelm influenced an entire generation of young science fiction writers who were liberated from the necessity of consistency.
Now, we have "speculative non-fiction." Would that include Plato's Dialogues? Nietzsche's Geneaology of Morals? Apparently, it includes Ayn Rand's Introduction to the Objectivist Epistemology and Isabel Paterson's God of the Machine. How was it that these works were even written if the authors did not know what they were doing? Were they like the M. Jourdain in the Would-be Gentleman (Bourgeois Gentilhomme) who spoke prose for 40 years without realizing it?
Call the works "speculation" if you want, but, do not multiply entities beyond necessity.
[1] For a grown-up example from our own time, see this review of a work of "speculative non-fiction." When Her Dream of Dreams: The Rise and Triumph of Madam C.J. Walker by Beverly Lowry was published in April (Knopf, $27.50, ISBN 0-679-44642-7), it was billed as "a comprehensive biography ... of America's first black woman millionaire."
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0HST/is_5_5/ai_108312744
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