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This course is part of the Creative and Critical Writing major within the Bachelor of Arts program. The course will equip you with a range of skills required in the workforce, and in professional writing practice, including interpreting and responding to market submission guidelines, meeting deadlines, and writing to purpose. Students enrolled in the course will be invited to submit their work to the student-led USQ magazine.
This course contributes to your development of the Creative and Performing Arts Threshold Learning Outcomes, and USQ Graduate Capabilities.

Speculative fiction extends readers understanding of themselves and the world in which they live through imagining different worlds or cultures that are better (or worse), brighter (or darker) and stranger than our own. Works of speculative fiction hold a mirror up to our world, confronting and warping our assumptions about race, class, and sex/gender, but also reflecting and subverting various ways of knowing or describing the world. Inviting us to question our settled ideas about science and scientific enquiry, for example, or about faith and religiosity, language, light and even what it is to be alive (or dead!).

In this course, you will explore the genre of speculative fiction: a collective term for a range of different types of genre fiction that includes (but is not limited to) science fiction, fantasy, horror and alternative history. You will read and write speculative fiction works, focusing on short fiction, as well as engaging with contemporary debates within the vibrant, noisy and hugely energetic SF/F/H (Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror) community.

During the course, you will be guided through the process of researching, pitching, writing and editing works of short fiction and non-fiction suitable for publication in professional speculative fiction markets.

On successful completion of this course students will be able to:

1. explore and apply the practices, languages, forms, materials and techniques used in writing speculative fiction essays and short fiction;
2. develop, research and evaluate ideas, concepts and processes through creative, critical and reflective thinking and practice;
3. apply relevant skills and knowledge to produce and realise works of speculative fiction;
4. interpret, communicate and present ideas, problems and arguments in modes suited to a range of audiences;
5. work independently and collaboratively to select and review contemporary works and markets, and to develop your own and others’ creative works;
6. recognise and reflect on social, cultural and ethical issues, and apply local and international perspectives to both the reading of, and the production of, essays and short fiction.