It has been around since humans began to speak. The earliest forms of speculative fiction were likely mythological tales told around the campfire. Speculative fiction deals with the "What if?" scenarios imagined by dreamers and thinkers worldwide. Journeys to other worlds through the vast reaches of distant space; magical quests to free worlds enslaved by terrible beings; malevolent supernatural powers seeking to increase their spheres of influence across multiple dimensions and times; all of these fall into the realm of speculative fiction.
Speculative fiction as a category ranges from ancient works to cutting edge, paradigm-changing, and neotraditional works of the 21st century. It can be recognized in works whose authors' intentions or the social contexts of the versions of stories they portrayed is now known. For example, Ancient Greekdramatists such as Euripides, whose play Medea (play) seemed to have offended Athenian audiences when he fictionally speculated that shamaness Medea killed her own children instead of their being killed by other Corinthians after her departure. The play Hippolytus, narratively introduced by Aphrodite, is suspected to have displeased contemporary audiences of the day because it portrayed Phaedra as too lusty.
Space Invaders is a 1978 shoot 'em uparcade video game developed and published by Taito. It was released in Japan in April 1978, with the game being released by Midway Manufacturing overseas. Commonly considered to be one of the most influential video games of all time, Space Invaders was the first fixed shooter and the first video game with endless gameplay (meaning there was no final level or endscreen) and set the template for the genre. The goal is to defeat wave after wave of descending aliens with a horizontally moving laser cannon to earn as many points as possible.
It is easy to imagine fantasy as physical and myth as real. We do it almost every moment. We do this as we dream, as we think, and as we cope with the world about us. But these worlds of fantasy that we form into the solid things around us are the source of our discontent. They inspire our search to find ourselves.
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—Evan Harris Walker (1935-2006), The Physics of Consciousness: The Quantum Mind and the Meaning of Life (2000).
Frontispiece to the 1825/1826 edition of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage by Lord Byron, published by W. Dugdale, Russell Court, Drury Lane. The engraving is by I. H. Jones.
Credit: I. H. Jones (illustration), Adam Cuerden (restoration)
Frontispiece to the 1825/1826 edition of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage by Lord Byron, published by W. Dugdale, Russell Court, Drury Lane. The engraving is by I. H. Jones.
The Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story is given each year for science fiction or fantasy stories told in graphic form and published or translated into English during the previous calendar year. It has been awarded annually since 2009. The Hugo Awards have been described as "a fine showcase for speculative fiction" and "the best known literary award for science fiction writing".
In the 19 nomination years, 106 works from 66 series have been nominated, including Retro Hugos. Works from 13 different series have won the award, including Retro Hugos. Girl Genius, written by Kaja and Phil Foglio, drawn by Phil Foglio, and colored by Cheyenne Wright, won the first three awards. After their third straight win in 2011, the Girl Genius team announced that, in order to show the category was a "viable award", they were refusing nomination for the following year (after which the award was up for re-ratification); Girl Genius was nominated a fourth time in 2014. For the following five years, the award was taken by a different series or work every year, and included both webcomics and installments of published series. The 2017–2019 awards saw the second series to win three times, Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda's Monstress, and was followed since by different works each year until 2024, when Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples's Saga won for a second time. The three Retro Hugos were won by early comic books such as Bill Finger and Bob Kane's Batman #1, William Moulton Marston and H. G. Peter's Wonder Woman #5: "Battle for Womanhood", and Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's Superman: "The Mysterious Mr. Mxyzptlk". Saga has the most nominations at eight, followed by Monstress at seven and Howard Tayler's Schlock Mercenary at five, while Bill Willingham's Fables, Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang's Paper Girls, and Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon have been nominated four times. Nine other works have at least two nominations. (Full article...)
In 802,701, The Time Traveller encounters a garden world and sees Humanity has divided into the meek Eloi on the surface and the subdwelling, cannibalistic Morlocks.
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