Can someone tell me how SF books are called that are based on reality? Books thus describing what can happen in the future (climate change, explosions, meteors, vulcanoes, diseases). So not the real fantasy but SF based on really possible events
I've heard books that refer to near future events, near future SF.
I usually hear this kind of literature referred to as the daily news.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but I always thought that was called speculative fiction. I'm not positive though...
Speculative fiction is a synonym for science fiction, invented by people who thought sf had to have spaceships and aliens in it, or wanted to distance themselves from sf. All fiction is fundamentally speculative. It's daft to insist that one type of fiction is more "speculative" than another.
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No, "speculative fiction" is a term invented by people who got tired of stupid pointless arguments over whether a particular work was science fiction or fantasy -- it's a useful all-encompassing term. There may be other uses, but that's the use I'm most familiar with, from rasfw back in Usenet days.
The term predates Usenet. I believe Heinlein first used it back in the 1950s.
And since all fiction is speculative, than both sf and fantasy are. And so is crime, mystery, thrillers, romance, westerns, mainstream, "literary"....
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*shrugs* Makes sense. I just kind of assumed it was a contemplation of the future but I get what your saying. That's what I get for assuming things...:P
Check out
http://www.jessesword.com/sf/view/438(credit to Ian Sales for posting an earlier link to this site)
1889 M. F. Egan Book-Talk in Lippincott's Monthly Mag. Oct. 597 Edward Bellamy, in ‘Looking Backward,’ and George Parsons Lathrop, in a short story, ‘The New Poverty,’ have followed the example of Anthony Trollope and Bulwer in speculative fiction put in the future tense.
1948 R. A. Heinlein On Writing of Speculative Fiction in L. A. Eshbach Of Worlds Beyond (1947) 11 There are at least two principal ways to write speculative fiction—write about people, or write about gadgets.
1949 R. A. Heinlein Let. 4 Mar. in R. A. Heinlein & V. Heinlein Grumbles from Grave (1990) 49 Speculative fiction is not fantasy fiction, as it rules out the use of anything as material which violates established scientific fact, laws of nature, call it what you will, i.e., it must
be possible to the universe as we know it. Thus, Wind in the Willows is fantasy, but the much more incredible extravaganzas of Dr. Olaf Stapledon are speculative fiction—science fiction.
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