Written by Stephen Thompson | 22 June 2009

It often surprises me that the mundane world of traditional culture still does not recognise the term speculative fiction as a genre. Even after it has dominated the film industry – what is it? 9 of the top 10 biggest grossing films of all time? – and the genre's domination of fiction in recent times – Harry Potter, vampire lovers and the Da Vinci escapades – there are still a lot of people out there who do not know what speculative fiction is.

Take last weekend, for example.

I went to a dinner party on the Friday and got into a conversation with a musician and a maths tutor. I mentioned speculative fiction. It was obvious from their blank expressions that I needed to elaborate.

'Science fiction? Fantasy?' and here I doo-dooed a few bars from The Twilight Zone and added a rather dramatic, 'Tales of mystery and imagination.' (We'd had a few cab savs by then.)

This they understood, and the conversation progressed to how much they liked the genre.

Strange, I thought, how they like this sort of fiction but don't know the term to describe it. Granted, speculative fiction is hardly an elegant term; with all that guttural hacking and rolling tongue it can sometimes sound like a preparation for a good spit – like expectorate. I prefer truncating the term into one word (or should that be oneword?), myself, into specufiction, but if I'm the only person in the world who understands the term it isn't much good. So speculative fiction in all its ugliness is what we've got. It seems we can thank Harlan Ellison for coining it, although the term "speculative literature" was in vogue in various places at the time, ostensibly, it appears, so that some writers could distance themselves from science fiction writing.

The following evening I went to a 50th birthday party and, while in the company of a man from Hervey Bay, a physics professor and a photographer from Vietnam, I mentioned I wrote speculative fiction.

'What's that?' Hervey Bay asked, 'Stories about the stockmarket?'

After the beer-fuelled giggles had died down I tried to explain: 'Stories that use scientific, fantastical or uncanny elements as an essential part of its character.' Well, that's what I wanted to say, the actual words were somewhat less articulate. And then I added the few bars from The Twilight Zone and said, 'Tales of mystery and imagination,' using my dramatic voice.

'Aaahh,' the penny said as it dropped.

'Science fiction without the science,' the physics prof added.

Later, on reflection, I wondered why it was that they knew about science fiction, recognised a snippet of off-key music and identified a certain type of literature that dealt with mystery and imagination. Surely fiction in general deals with imagination, and surely it is the thriller genre that deals with mystery. Although, as Neal Stephenson said somewhere, thrillers are just speculative fiction that involves the US President, like many cop shows on tv are speculative fiction with murders in them, and hospital dramas are speculative fiction with doctors and forensic scientists in them.

Speculative fiction is all over the place, so why is it that people still don't know the term? Why is it that the great mundane world prefers to talk about science fiction? We even have a television channel called SciFi Channel. Why is that? The majority of what they show has nothing at all to do with science? The tv channel should really be called SpecFi Channel, but I suppose the brand is scifi and there's no point in changing it.

Clearly the word "speculative" has an image problem. People can barely say the term without faltering, and many who aren't associated with it on a regular basis can never quite remember the word. Wouldn't it be so much easier if you could say 'I write speculative fiction' and people would ask an informed follow up question and save us the need to play charades just to define the term.

On the Sunday of my speculative weekend I helped a friend move house. One of my co-helpees was a scriptwriter, so we naturally got talking about writing. I said I wrote speculative fiction and it drew the usual blank expression (somewhat surprisingly).

'You knoiw,' I said, 'X-files, Twilight Zone —' I didn't do the music this time.

'Oh,' she said, and dramatically added, 'Tales of mystery and imagination.'

Quite!