The speculative anthology as a formal experiment in futurity

This article theorises the ‘speculative anthology' as a formal experiment in futurity that challenges how anthologies have been used to publish, and promote, science fiction from the Global South in the international literary marketplace. It focuses on the ‘Futures Past' series of anthologies published by Comma Press – Iraq+100 (2016), Palestine+100 (2019), Kurdistan+100 (2021), and Egypt+100 (2024) – in which indigenous writers are asked to imagine regional futures one century after a major historical event that has defined the pasts and presents of these existing, or aspiring, nation states. Building on recent scholarship in postcolonial print culture which has proposed new strategies for reading evolving genres of the anthology, I first consider the speculative anthology as a heterogeneous literary form which has the capacity to facilitate creative collaboration and collective forms of critique. At the same time, I show how such anthologies reveal a homogenising impulse, often rooted in national imaginaries, and can encourage an anthropological approach to literary writing, especially by minoritised authors. Reading across the paratextual infrastructures of the ‘Futures Past’ series, I then compare how individual anthologies are shaped by various speculative editorial and publishing practices. I conclude that this experiment in futurity undertakes meaningful, yet imperfect, speculative work as it imagines how writing about the future by authors from the Global South might be anthologised otherwise.