INTRODUCTION

There has been a longstanding tradition of inventing ‘other’worlds in literary writings. In Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, there arerepresentations of supernatural events that have a grounding inthe cosmology of the Igbo people. Thus, the author appears toengage in the speculative, based on the rich folklore ofsouth-eastern Nigeria. However, can the creativespecialization(s) of Achebe in these two narratives beconvincingly factored into the equation of speculative fiction?What really qualifies as speculative fiction? The termspeculative fiction has been explained by different scholarswith diverse, sometimes, parallel and overlapping views; but, inmost of the definitions, there appears to be an attempt to goadspeculative fiction (spec-fi) and its related genre, sciencefiction (sci-fi), on a race for supremacy. Writers such asMargaret Atwood differentiate speculative fiction from sciencefiction by explaining that speculative fiction refers to a storythat ‘could happen but hasn't yet [happened]’ while sciencefiction dwells on stories of ‘fantasy [that] could not happen’(In Other Worlds: 7). Then,can the supernatural events in Things FallApart and Arrow ofGod happen in real life?

While Atwood explains speculative fiction as stories that arecapable of happening in real life, Diana Waggoner defines it asa broad category of modern literature that treats ‘supernaturaland/or nonexistent phenomena (such as the future) as a specialclass of objectively real things or events’ (The Hills of Faraway: 9). Also, JudithMerril states that speculative fiction ‘makes use of fantasticand inventive elements to comment on, or speculate aboutsociety, humanity, life, the cosmos, reality [a]nd any othertopic under the general heading of philosophy’ (‘Introduction’:3). While Atwood offers a narrower idea of speculative fiction,Waggoner and Merril's definitions are more encompassing.

However, the Dutch bilingual novelist and poet, SébastienDoubinsky, admits that capturing the term, speculative fictionwithin a definition is problematic. Nonetheless, he offers aninteresting explanation: