UK-based international leaders in this field, Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby, argue in their recent book Speculative Everything that if we speculate more, and about everything in our lives, reality will become more malleable.
What's more, this sort of drama feels genuinely new: beyond the odd episode of Doctor Who and Quantum Leap, speculative alternate histories are rarely told on TV.
While much on social media was highly speculative, Di Stefano's fast and accurate tweets from the scene saw him put on 3,500 Twitter followers over 17 hours.
We know how to reduce the degree of leveraging in financial markets, how to tax the volume of transactions in those markets, how to protect banks' main holdings from speculative activity.
He is challenging what Emma Dabiri has called "a space for black people to write ourselves into speculative pasts and futures, to reimagine our identities beyond and before human history and form".
Certainly, the greenlighting of The Man in the High Castle, an adaptation of Philip K Dick's speculative history novel exec-produced by Ridley Scott, will come as no surprise to anyone who has viewed all of the most recent batch of pilots.
Police then sought a rehearing, and the appeals court concluded its earlier opinion had wrongly required officers "to engage in an essentially speculative inquiry" into demonstrators' minds.
There is, of course, a whole genre of speculative fiction devoted to Solange's difficulty in finding a role for herself that isn't taken up by her mega-star sister, the answer coming, apparently, in the one thing Beyoncé's varnished stardom denies her: authenticity.
Speculative positions in gold have risen for the sixth consecutive week -up 14 tonnes- to a fresh high since June, according to Barclays Capital.
The managing director of the ABC, Mark Scott, has confirmed the corporation is investigating ways of becoming "more efficient and effective" but described recent media reports about the future of ABC funding and TV production as highly speculative.
That has some experienced analysts – many of whom have witnessed speculative mining ventures come and go in Canada – raise their eyebrows in incredulity.
