Speculation

How can the speculative imagination help us build a better world?
At a world-historical moment of global upheaval, speculative writing is enjoying a renaissance. This collection of poetry, stories, and essays engages speculation as both a ubiquitous feature of financial capitalism and a radical tool of collective imagination. By rejecting dominant ideas about what is possible, speculation empowers us to plot new paths to a more just world.
Creative works range over violence and healing, memory and erasure, and alternative worlds, while essays span the meaning of land and community in the African diaspora, Octavia Butler’s speculative fiction, and the ethics of the far future. Taken together, these works suggest that speculation is ultimately about our relationships with each other—as one contributor puts it, “what they have been, what they are, and most important, what they could be.”

Ed Pavlić is the author of Live at the Bitter End ; Who Can Afford to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listener ; Let’s Let That Are Not Yet: Inferno ; and other books. He is Distinguished Research Professor in the English Department and in the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Georgia and a Boston Review Arts Contributing Editor.

Ivelisse Rodriguez’s short story collection, Love War Stories , was a 2019 PEN/Faulkner finalist and a 2018 Foreword Reviews INDIES finalist. She is founder and editor of an interview series published in Centro Voices , the e-magazine of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College. She is a Boston Review Arts Contributing Editor.