What is Speculative Non-Fiction?

Week 16 - in which we find ourselves reeling in the aftermath of opening to submissions, and wondering why people are more interested in fantasy than facts

At 12am on Monday, January 5th, 2026, WoodPig Press opened to submissions for the first time. As we’ve explicitly stated, we only open for 50 submissions at a go, 25 fiction and 25 non-fiction, and only re-open once everyone gets some feedback. This is so that we have the time to give each submission the consideration it deserves, and so that you aren’t left hanging around for months wondering when – or if – you’ll hear back.

Everyone also gets some brief, personalised feedback. This is a fictionalised example of the sort of thing you might get:

Dear author,

Thank you for submitting American Psycho to WoodPig Press. We know how much effort you've put in and what this means to you. However, we've decided not to go forward with the book.

Specifically, our editors felt that:

American Psycho is a contemporary psychological horror. The prose is sophisticated and the characterisation deft, and Mr Bateman’s inner monologue is grimly compelling. However, we found the central premise – a Wall Street financier moonlighting as a serial killer – somewhat unbelievable, given the high moral standards generally embodied by that profession. The graphic depictions of violence and dismemberment were also a tad gratuitous – and made us feel a bit queasy, if we’re honest – and just why Huey Lewis and the News had to figure quite so prominently was a mystery. But overall, as well written and no doubt worthy of publication as it is, the book is insufficiently “speculative” for our list.

We do sincerely wish you all the best with your writing, and please consider us for future submissions.

Best wishes,
WoodPig Press.

The part in bold is personalised, and the rest is boilerplate – though we mean those bits too: we know how much effort and courage goes into writing, and even if you’re rejected, you’re welcome to try us another time with a different submission.

Anyway, we opened at 12am GMT, and by 1:40am all fiction slots were filled. We hadn’t expected this. The choice of 12am was a bit arbitrary – it’s just when the calendar turns over. However, its unintended consequence was to exclude all but those eager night owls and people in a different time zone who were sat waiting to submit. We received a few disgruntled messages from those who missed out – apologies if you were one of them – and so our next submissions window will be at a more convenient time, and also with a higher submissions cap (probably 50 for each category). But please be patient; we’ll get to you eventually. We’re not going anywhere.

If you did submit, and you’ve already received a rejection, then this is simply because it was obvious to us from the first few pages that your book was not a good fit. We don’t accept memoir, erotica, romantic fiction or romantasy, or anything too obscure or academic. There were also some submissions of fiction through the non-fiction portal (please don’t do that). Such mismatches and errors are easy to dismiss – which is not a judgement on the quality of the work, but a simple matter of not meeting our basic criteria. I know that we say we may make exceptions to some of these genres if there is a sufficiently speculative element, but that has to be clear and strong. Also, for example, whilst we accept fantasy, it’s not enough for your story to have elves, or werewolves, or vampires (or whatever), but their presence should make us think deeply about what it’s like to be them, in what ways they’re different from us, and what that means about who we are as humans. A wonderful example of this is Joe Abercrombie’s The Devils, which has all of these creatures and more, but manages to flesh out their characters in such rich detail, exploring their distinct flaws and virtues, that you can’t help but love them all. It’s also speculative in a broader sense, set in an alternative medieval world where Christ was a woman, as is the pope, and magic and the supernatural are a commonplace part of life. It’s easily one of my books of 2025, and I’m praying for a sequel. If you like audio, I can also wholeheartedly recommend Steven Pacey’s superb and hilarious narration.

Anyway, the lesson here is just to read the submissions criteria carefully, and to be honest with yourself about your book: is it really a good fit? If you haven’t heard back yet, then this is a good sign, as it may mean that your book made it past the first “triage” stage where the obviously inappropriate submissions are weeded out. I think it’s easy for an agent or publisher to get into a negative mindset with submissions, and start to feel a certain relief in identifying a simple reason to reject a manuscript. This is a response to overwhelm, and one reason why we keep the submissions cap low. We want you to make it hard for us to say no, to force us to keep reading. We also want you to know that we’ve thought about your book, and haven’t just judged it on which genre boxes it ticks. But yes, read the submissions criteria!

The other thing I should mention is AI. We got our collective knickers in a bit of twist by announcing on social media the day before submissions that we were going to use AI to detect AI submissions – a sort of “set a thief to catch a thief” approach. However, there was such an outcry from the Internet that we had to rethink this – and I’m glad we did. It was never something we were particularly keen on – many of the companies that offer AI detection services also offer generative AI, so it’s a bit like the role nicotine patches serve in the tobacco industry: whether you’re using or quitting, you’re supporting the same evil. There’s also the question of author consent: as someone pointed out, the submitter should really be made aware that their work was being uploaded into an LLM. I tried to find detectors that swore they never kept data nor used it to train their models, but this wouldn’t have assuaged the ire of some of those we spoke to. However, the bottom line is that such detectors are very unreliable. There are too many false positives and negatives. So, we decided to rely purely on human intuition, and let the (micro)chips fall where they may.¹

However, when we did finally start reading submissions, it became obvious that the sort of writers who relied upon substantive AI help were unlikely to be those who also stood out in terms of story or voice. AI text is generic; it flattens and homogenises. It’ll help you turn out a passable potboiler or piece of pulp fiction, but beyond that – where our real interest lies – it’s not much help in creating distinct quality prose.

I had a few conversations with people who used aspects of AI to help with issues relating to disability and neurodivergence, and I’ve a lot of sympathy for that. But even there, I tried to reassure them that the sort of things they were anxious about – spelling and grammar, sentence structure, plot holes and inconsistencies – were exactly the things we are there to help them with. Show us a rough diamond, something which has spark, spirit, vision and voice – and we’ll gladly help you iron out the kinks.² Every title published by WoodPig Press will go through at least five different stages of appraisal and editing. It’s OUR job (not ChatGPT’s, Gemini’s, or ProWriting Aid’s) to help you sort out your dangling modifiers and your passive voice, your soggy middles and your info-dumps. We have experienced and professionally qualified readers, developmental editors, line-editors, copy-editors and proofreaders coming out the wazoo (to use a technical phrase). Just give us something to work with.

One thing that did surprise us a little was the large disparity between fiction and non-fiction submissions. I’d done an online poll to test the waters, and it suggested that about 10 % of submissions would be non-fiction. This lines up more or less with official stats from Duotrope (the lovely people who run our very impressive submissions portal), where according to them non-fiction only accounts for 8% of submissions to a wide range of publishers and publications, the remaining 92% being filled up by fiction and poetry. Still, we were surprised by the low numbers: only four so far, two of which actually turned out to be fiction submitted through the wrong portal (as I said, don’t do that). Which got me to thinking: either not enough non-fiction writers know of this opportunity (in which case, please share it!), or else they are intimidated by that pesky word “speculative”. So, I’ll dedicate the remainder of this post to laying out exactly what we mean by “speculative non-fiction”, giving some examples, and generally pointing out that it’s not as intimidating as you might think.

First of all, what do we mean by “speculative”, in the context of non-fiction? If speculative fiction takes a “what if” premise and imagines a scenario where that is the case (what if zombies were real, what if the world were flooded, what if aliens landed), then speculative non-fiction also questions the nature of what is, or what might be, but instead of using story, it uses non-fiction narrative and hypothesis. It’s that simple.

This is probably best illustrated. Having written a bestselling book on the history of humanity, Yuval Harari followed up Sapiens with Homo Deus, a book that explored where he speculated humanity was heading, given likely developments in genetics, AI, and various existential threats such as climate change and population growth (or shrinkage).

But speculative non-fiction need not be to do with the future. In Is a River Alive?, Robert Macfarlane explores the possibility that rivers are not just collections of water molecules coursing along a ditch, but, in some sense, living beings. In other words, McFarlane is speculating that we are wrong in our categorisation and understanding of these natural water features, much as James Lovelock had previously argued in his book The Quest for Gaia that life on planet Earth is its own self-regulating organism.

But nor must speculative non-fiction be scientific in nature. In The Outsider, Colin Wilson had studied the lives of great writers, philosophers, artists and mystics, speculating that what they all had in common was a quasi-shamanistic urge to stand “outside” of society in order better to understand and serve its members.

And, nor does speculative non-fiction have to be serious (in form, at least). David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs is a provocative analysis of the contemporary employment market, speculating with sarcasm, humour and hyperbole that many jobs are simply unnecessary. And let’s not forget political satire. In his A Modest Proposal, Jonathan Swift speculates – in all (apparent) seriousness – that the best solution to the famine currently experienced by the Irish people is for them to eat their own children. Or there are self-help guides – for surviving the apocalypse, or packing for relocation to Mars. I once started to write a book based on the speculative question of “What would Hell look like from the point of view of the various philosophers that the Christian Church had consigned there?”, which would have been a sort of illustrated guidebook.³ And that’s the other thing, of course, because non-fiction doesn’t have to be text based. I thought Plato in Hell would make a fine graphic novel – maybe will, one day…

You can see from some of the above examples that “speculative” when applied to non-fiction has limitless potential – I’m sure you can think of other examples or possibilities. The point is not to restrict you. Speculation should be liberating and creative. We can speculate about anything, and it’s really just a radical, deep form of questioning.

Anyway, that’s it for now. Comments, as usual, are welcome. We will announce the re-opening for fiction submissions in the next few weeks (probably). In the meantime, you can find the non-fiction portal here.

Ooh! Portal…

1. Sorry. Consider that pun strike number one.

2. There should be some prize for the most metaphors you can mix in one sentence.

3. Which never found a publisher. If only there was one that was open to such daring speculative non-fiction!