Speculative Fiction and the Evolution of Stories:
A History in Eight Storytellers
Stories are the great connector of humanity. Since the inception of language, they have been used to instruct, entertain, and sway audiences to a point of view. Humans have used stories to frame the big questions of life and make them more understandable. While the formats and the language used to tell them have changed immeasurably, the work that they do in helping us define our existence remains the same.
Speculative fiction is defined as “stories set in a world that is different from the one we live in, or that deals with magical or imagined future events” (Cambridge, n.d.). Science fiction and fantasy are types of speculative fiction that have entranced story-consumers since the beginnings of storytelling, even though the language used to describe them didn’t exist until far later. These narratives, set in fantastical worlds, have found a way to hijack the listener into accepting new situations while recognizing how they work as metaphors for the world that is.
The Epic of Gilgamesh, a story of a king with terrible priorities who quests for immortality, appears to have been written between 2100-1200 BCE and remains studied to this day. In the first section, Gilgamesh and his best buddy Enkidu kill the monster Humbaba and steal his wood. However, Gilgamesh’s bad personality leads him to insult the goddess of fertility and use violence for his own ends resulting in the death of Enkidu. This prompts Gilgamesh to face his own mortality, “Shall I not be like him, and also lie down, /never to rise again through all eternity?” (George, 2003, X.69-71).
The Gilgamesh poet recounts Gilgamesh’s unsuccessful quest for eternal life as a way to show the folly of trying to live forever even as he shows the universality of the longing to just keep existing. This is a story that still resonates with those brave enough to piggyback on Gilgamesh’s journey.
God has done a lot of great things. God made everything and has kept an eye on it forever. God’s hold on the universe is well earned and, as every third worship song ever written says, God is worthy of our praise. God also has some great storytellers in God's employ.
Early creation myths have long sought to explain God (or a God-substitute) - but no one spins a yarn better than the Creator God’s-self in a work called The Bible. The Bible, written between the narrow window of 1500 BCE and 100 AD lays out every single thing that would help a God-worshipper live a good and fulfilling life, along with a lot of other stuff that has been confusing readers for millennia. God, and God’s son Jesus, used stories to bring order from chaos, to make clear the path, and to scare humans into being moral with the constructs of heaven and hell. While some might think it disrespectful to refer to the Bible as speculative fiction, the afterlife bits are certainly set in a world with which the reader is unfamiliar and paint a picture of a future that is unknown.
According to Jonathan Gottschall, “for all the bland satisfactions of heaven, it’s the Christian stories of hell that are, and always have been, shiver-inducing in their raw carnality” (2021). It is easy to interpret scripture to say what is most expedient for the purposes of the storyteller and heaven and hell are the ultimate carrot and stick. Suffice to say, the stories of heaven and hell have caused some discord in the religious world and the way that scripture is understood has led to many people having a more profound sense of the otherworldly even as its influence on our world has done some systemic damage.
Enter Martin Luther. Luther, baptized a Catholic, was responsible for igniting the protestant reformation through his writing, primarily of The Ninety-Five Theses, also known as Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences. These tips for better Bible-ing, nailed to the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral in 1517, when Luther was a professor of moral theology at the University, were translated from Latin into German and disseminated through the miracle of print. While it is a stretch to call Luther’s work speculative fiction, his list of improvements were shocking to his contemporaries and led to systemic changes in Christianity as well as some wars and stuff.
In his lectures on Hebrews at the University of Wittenberg, Luther steps into the heaven and hell debate by calling out those who fear by doubling down on their inherent uncertainty of the speculative nature of those endpoints. “Whoever fears death or does not want to die is not yet a sufficient Christian, for he fails in resurrection faith, so long as he loves this life more than that which is to come.” (1517) It’s almost as if he is entreating believers to trust the unknown world to come more than the physical world they currently inhabit.
For the purposes of our topic, we must skip over Shakespeare and Milton and Bunyan - Oh my! - and step into the mind of a teenage girl on the shore of Lake Geneva in 1816. At that house-party, Mary Shelley became embroiled in a drinking game with some romance-bros over who could write the best ghost story. While she did not technically tell a ghost story, she began, in that competition, something which became a work that is by many considered to be the first science fiction novel.
Frankenstein (For the love of God, it’s named after the doctor not the monster!) is a creation epic gone horribly wrong. The doctor reanimates dead flesh into something resembling life, and in the process destroys himself. This novel (or big, long story if you prefer) joins “two forces that ultimately combined - firstly and generally that of the supernatural and harrowing; secondly and specifically, the scientific” (Spark, 1951) and thus, science fiction is born.
The impact of the unknown on society is a staple of science fiction. In 1897, at the dawn of the twentieth century, a young socialist named H.G. Wells, who was beginning to be well known for his works of “scientific romance”, published a serialized story in Pearson’s magazine called The War of the Worlds. It described an invasion of Earth by Martians in an attempt to create a colony where their society could escape from their own dying planet.
Even though Mars was a known place at the time of publication, the inability of humans to visit it and the inscrutability of what might be lurking there was enough of a hook to make readers wonder, “What if?” Wells’ novel showed the reader that “man has no right to take control of the cosmic process for granted” (Costa, 1967). The same destructive fate that was the Martian’s impetus for invasion will come for us all.
Nearly 40 years later, the Mercury Theater Company looked at the impact of Wells’ work and said, “Hold my beer.” The Mercury Theater of the Air was a live broadcast of radio dramas that ran from July to December of 1938. The creator and host, Orson Welles (no relation), and his crew used music, sound, and first rate storytelling to present works of fiction to America. However, on October 30th, they vastly underestimated the power of story when their updated version of The War of the Worlds, which presented the story as a “live news” event, threw people into a panic. While the actual impact has been likely exaggerated as the resulting events are recounted, there were calls to emergency services by befuddled and likely terrified listeners who did not hear the disclaimer at the top of the show that it was a work of fiction. Certainly a lot of earthlings were nervous.
After the fateful broadcast, Welles said, “Well, everybody likes a good story and I think radio is just about the best storyteller there is” (Welles, 1938) and he had proved it by showing the way that media enhanced the scope of storytelling to a new degree. He eventually went on to great success in film and television. His final contribution to science fiction was the voice of Unicron in Transformers: The Movie, which surely says something about the power of science fiction, but what it is is difficult to articulate.
Ray Bradbury, a popular author of pulp science fiction, published Fahrenheit 451 in 1953. He later attributed his inspiration as stemming from the ideological miasma of the McCarthy hearings and a quick look back at bookburnings in Nazi Germany. He was also concerned with how television and other media were taking the place of reading literature.
The work takes place in a dystopian future where books are illegal and are destroyed when discovered, along with the lives of their readers. The government in the story were the “controllers of mass communication and other producers of entertainment [who] decided which ideas they would censor and which they would disseminate.” Which led the public to decide “what it will enjoy, what it will believe, and how it will act” (McGiverson, 1996). Even without a political takeover, the forms of technology employed today have the same power.
The hero of the novel, a fireman who goes from zealously burning books to valuing them, flees the doomed city and meets a group of book lovers sitting around a fire sharing stories before joining them to return to the destroyed city to rebuild it. In this scene, the books, so valued as artifacts, are turned into thoughts and spoken words. “The idea that [story] is safe only when locked away in memory is almost a startling one in this book that so privileges the literary text; it seems as if the author has come full circle to an oral culture” (Spencer, 1991).
The purity of spoken story in the face of exploitive media brings us back to the early storytellers whose work only lived on in the minds of those who initially heard their tales. There is clearly no going back to a world where this purity is intrinsic to all storytelling, but speculative stories remain a place where dystopia and utopia can both find a foothold.
It would be neglectful to skip a mention of Gene Roddenberry who in 1964 began creating a world that took viewers “where no man has gone before” (Roddenberry, 1966) and showed a universe where good doesn’t so much conquer evil as good overpowers evil with the charisma and bravery that made being on the wrong side of history seem uncool.
The first iteration of Star Trek showed brave explorers navigating a universe where they sought out new life and new civilizations. Even though it revolutionized science fiction on television, it did not last longer than three years. But it did not die. In 1987 Roddenberry was involved in the genesis of Star Trek:The Next Generation which brought the world he created to life again with a new crew, new technology and a new compliment of fans. In this world, storytelling was key, not just in the format of presentation, but in the stories themselves.
In what is arguably the best episode of the series, The Inner Light, the generally unflappable Captain Jean Luc Picard is laid low by a space probe that renders him unconscious. As he lies helpless on his ship, his mind is taken to a place where he is a young man on a planet with a tragic trajectory towards annihilation. He lives 40 years, watching the clock run out on this world as he marries and fathers children and, of course, learns to play the flute. As an old man, he watches the government send out a rocket containing all the knowledge of the doomed society and realizes “"Oh, it's me, isn't it?...I'm the someone... I'm the one it finds" (Gendel & Fields, 1992). Through the story programmed into the orb, he becomes the memory keeper of an entire people. This gift, and the burden it imparts, becomes something he will carry with him for the rest of his life.
In this narrative, Roddenberry, or more specifically, writers Morgan Gendel and Peter Allen Fields using Roddenberry’s structure, show the power of story to resurrect long extinct thoughts, places and experiences.
The world of Star Trek continues on apace and still informs viewers, readers and listeners of a future where exploration and connection are the primary goals of humanity and where stories are an engine which drive individuals to these goals.
Both technology and religion retain their hold on the consciousness of the story-informed citizenry and both have taken paths that appear to be harming more than healing. The rise of artificial intelligence and the ubiquity of the internet have taken us on a road that, not to catastrophize, seems to be leading us to a decline in intelligence, even as we have greater tools available for our evolution. But speculative stories continue to give us hope for the future of humankind, perhaps not on Earth as we know it, but in the great unknown.
REFERENCE
Cambridge dictionary. (n.d.). Speculative fiction. In Dictionary.Cambridge.org dictionary. Retrieved June 19, 2025, from https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/speculative-fiction
Costa, R. (1967). H.G. Wells. Twayne Publishers, Inc.
Gendel, M & Fields, P. (Writer), & Lauritson, P (Director). (1992, June 1). The Inner Light (Season 5, Episode 25) [TV series episode]. In G. Roddenberry (Executive Producer), Star Trek. Desilu Productions; Paramount Television.
George, A., Sandars, N. K., & Pasco, R. (2003). The epic of Gilgamesh (A. George, Trans.). Penguin Classics.
Gottschall, J. (2021). The story paradox. Basic Books.
Jarrow, G. Spooked: how a radio broadcast and The War of the Worlds sparked the 1938 invasion of America. Calkins Creek.
King, K. (2013). Quests for immortality and identity: The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Odyssey. In Schweizer & Segal (Eds.), Critical insights: The hero’s quest (pp. 99-114). Salem Press.
Luther, M. (1517). Lectures on Hebrews. In Marius, R. (1999). Martin Luther: the Christian between God and death (p.113). Harvard University Press.
McGiveron, R. (1996). What “carried the trick”?: mass exploitation and the decline of thought in Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451. In Bloom, H. (Ed.) Modern critical interpretations: Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451 (pp. 109-120). Chelsea House Publishers.
Roddenberry, G. (1966). Star Trek [TV series]. Desilu Productions.
Spark, M. (1951). Frankenstein. In Bloom, H. (Ed.) Modern critical views: Mary Shelley (pp. 11-30). Chelsea House Publishers.
Spencer, S. (1991). Literature - and the literate - will prevail. In deKoster, K. (Ed.) Readings on Ray Bradbury Faherenheit 451, (pp.100-106). Greenhaven Press, Inc.
Welles, H.G.. (1938, December 9). Campbell Playhouse [Radio broadcast transcript]. CBS. https://www.genericradio.com/show/1LACFNZFXUZ
