An exploration of contemporary speculative fiction's power to intervene in social, political, and environmental crises, this book demonstrates how the genre acts as a defense in the navigation of propagated falsehoods and the denial of firmly established scientific evidence.

Speculative fiction thrives on the creation of counterworlds that challenge status quo assumptions about what is possible – but it calls for a willing suspension of disbelief from the first page. In the face of conspiracy theories, election fraud claims, holocaust and climate change denials and vaccine resistance running roughshod over previously established fact, reality has seen lies advanced and accepted as truth on a massive scale. Trapped as we are in this current moment, the critical potential of speculative fiction is all the more important as it enables us to sidestep the barriers to dialogue raised by dogmatism and to imagine possibilities that can help us “escape” from fantastic right-wing demagoguery as well as the effects of normalizing the unconscionable and the disastrous.

In this optimistic appraisal of speculative fiction, John Rieder argues that the genre cannot carry the load by itself but must be supplemented by professional criticism and pedagogy within the institutional settings of secondary and higher education. Through readings of fiction by Amal El Mohtar and Max Gladstone How to Lose the Time War, N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth Trilogy, China Miéville's The City and the City alongside works by Minsoo Kang, Ann Leckie, Arkady Martine, and Rivers Solomon, Truth, Lies and Speculation illuminates how left-leaning intellectuals throughout the world can walk the line between despair at the apparent impotence of truth and outrage at the manifest power of lies.