Week 13: Speculation about Literary Speculation

Out of all the weeks during this course I have either been extremely familiar or at least somewhat familiar with the theme for that given class. But for this week I couldn’t quite grasp what exactly Literary Speculation was about. We examined a few pieces of media, one of which I found more interesting than the other, but I still couldn’t quite figure it out.

With Primer the story involved a pair of seemingly regular scientists/engineers who ended up creating a means of time travel while developing what seemed to be a levitation device. Everything had a low budget feel, which I think added to how believable everything was. The whole setting, the characters and their performance, everything seemed so real that what they were doing in the film could be happening right now is some engineer’s basement. So what I gathered about Literary Speculation from this was that it was taking an everyday, seemingly normal story and adding that sci-fi twist to it.

But then we read The Aquatic Uncle. It had things in common with Primer in that it was sort of in a plausible setting, the period in which water dwelling creatures began evolve into land dwellers.  Despite having a more scientific but still plausible setting, the story has a much more folk tale/ myth feel to it in that the story involves anthropomorphic creatures conversing with one another, which leads to the story’s ending that sort of teaches the moral “The grass isn’t always greener on the other side.” This story reminded me much more of one of Aesop Fables with a sci-fi element than anything that could have happened in modern times.

The legends and mythology of the past were created in order to explain how and why things happened back when science was still in its early stages of development, so I guess that’s kind of of how I see Speculative Literature. We use speculative fiction to theorize or predict how things are going to happen in the future or fantasize about how things happened in the past. Its purpose is to make us think and prepare us for what is to come.