Boston Review 2022 Writing Contests

The world is always changing. But there are also inflection points in history when the world feels changed. Art can possess the prophetic quality to imagine where we are going. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that in a world-historical moment of global upheaval and transformation, speculative literature and other futurist arts are enjoying a renaissance.

As a creative faculty, speculation is Janus-faced, as likely to produce insight about the past as about the future.

The word itself invites thinking about how speculation has often driven the machinery of global politics. Speculation about the value of land and resources has fueled colonialism, empire, ideas of race and ethnicity, slavery and other exploitative labor systems, the booms and busts of commodities markets, and the ecological game of roulette that has left our planet teetering. Speculation continues to actively shape how and where we live through forces of displacement, gentrification, urbanization, and redevelopment.

But speculation can lead us to collectively imagine better futures, or better ways of understanding our past. Afrofuturism, for example, seeks to imagine a sustainable future for Black folks by first uncovering a workable past. Abolition, civil rights, and Black Lives Matter all speculate about a future free of racial violence, just as MeToo imagines one free of gendered violence.

In some of our most joyful private moments, we speculate about what will be delicious and pleasurable, about what notes will sound good played together on an instrument, about spirits and the afterlife, about what we wish a lover would say to us, about what aliens might be like if we ever met them. Such works of the speculative imagination are, thankfully, almost boundless, though we imagine them within the bounds of who we are and what we assume to be true about the world.

Speculation starts in the imagination but then goes out into the world with a variety of effects, not always predictable. Share with us your feats of imagining the past and future that help us better understand what it means to be present in the world. We welcome texts that deal with the roots, spaces, and impact of speculation. Tell us where speculation has gone wrong, and where it has triumphed. What roads have speculation led us to?