The classification works pretty well. Margaret Atwood famously took issue with describing The Handmaid’s Tale as science fiction, insisting that it be considered speculative because everything in it could happen. (Let’s not ponder, as Atwood has done herself recently, whether Offred’s world is in fact dawning before our eyes. Will The Handmaid’s Tale one day be read as the prehistory of America’s 21st century? There I go, a-pondering.). Station Eleven likewise fits the speculative model, with its devastating global plague, whereas Larry Niven’s Ringworld – despite the big what-if smack in the title – doesn’t. Niven was always proud of the “science” at the heart of his big ideas.

No scheme of cubbyholes is ever perfect. The novel I’m writing features talking animals (though it’s not a children’s story). That’s the one big what-if, everything else is just-the-facts-ma’am, but the work itself is fantasy, obviously.