Name: _______________________Date: __________

Grade: ___________________ Section: ___________

Speculative Fiction
21 Century World Literature (Week 1-2)
st

 Writing a close analysis and critical interpretation of literary

texts, applying a reading approach, and doing an adaptation of
these, require from the learner to identify representative texts
and authors from Asia, North America, Europe, Latin America,
and Africa
 Compare and contrast the various 21st Century literary genres
and the ones from the earlier genres/periods citing their
elements, structures, and traditions
 Produce a creative representation of a literary text by applying
multimedia and ICT Skills

What I Need to Do
 That speculative fiction is a broad genre that encompasses
stories that take place in imaginary worlds as a result of one
or more “What ifs” questions.
 That speculative fiction explores that ‘what ifs’ of what is
possible in the world.
 That in speculative fiction, the author creates a world
entirely different from ours and speculates upon the results
of changing what is real or possible.
 That speculative fiction includes genres such as science
fiction, fantasy, supernatural fiction, utopian and dystopian
fiction, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, alternate
history, and parallel universe.

Gearing Up

Read the story of Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegot and

answer the questions that follow:

Harrison Bergeron
By: Kurt Vonnegaut Jr.
It is the year 2081. Because of Amendments 211, 212,
and 213 to the Constitution, every American is fully equal,
meaning that no one is stupider, uglier, weaker, or slower
than anyone else. The Handicapper General and a team of
agents ensure that the laws of equality are enforced.
One April, fourteen-year-old Harrison Bergeron is taken
away from his parents, George and Hazel, by the government.
George and Hazel aren’t fully aware of the tragedy. Hazel’s
lack of awareness is due to average intelligence. In 2081,
those who possess average intelligence are unable to think for
extended stretches of time. George can’t comprehend the
tragedy because the law requires him to wear a radio twenty-
four hours a day. The government broadcasts noise over
these radios to interrupt the thoughts of intelligent people
like George.
Hazel and George are watching ballerinas dance on TV.
Hazel has been crying, but she can’t remember why. She
remarks on the prettiness of the dance. For a few moments,
George reflects on the dancers, who are weighed down to
counteract their gracefulness and masked to counteract their
good looks. They have been handicapped so that TV viewers
won’t feel bad about their own appearance. Because of their
handicaps, the dancers aren’t very good. A noise interrupts
George’s thought. Two of the dancers onscreen hear the
noise, too; apparently, they are smart and must wear radios
as well.
Hazel says she would enjoy hearing the noises that the
handicappers dream up. George seems skeptical. If she were
Handicapper General, Hazel says, she would create a chime
noise to use on Sundays, which she thinks would produce a
religious effect. The narrator explains that Hazel strongly
resembles Diana Moon Glampers, Handicapper General.
Hazel says she would be a good Handicapper General,
because she knows what normalcy is. Before being
interrupted by another noise, George thinks of his son,
Harrison.
Hazel thinks George looks exhausted and urges him to lie
down and rest his “handicap bag,” forty-seven pounds of
weight placed in a bag and locked around George’s neck. He
says he hardly notices the weight anymore. Hazel suggests
taking a few of the weights out of the bag, but he says if
everyone broke the law, society would return to its old
competitive ways. Hazel says she would hate that. A noise
interrupts the conversation, and George can’t remember what
they were talking about.
On TV, an announcer with a speech impediment attempts
to read a bulletin. He can’t overcome his impediment, so he
hands the bulletin to a ballerina to read. Hazel commends
him for working with his God-given abilities and says he
should get a raise simply for trying so hard. The ballerina
begins reading in her natural, beautiful voice, then apologizes
and switches to a growly voice that won’t make anyone
jealous. The bulletin says that Harrison has escaped from
prison.
A photo of Harrison appears on the screen. He is wearing
the handicaps meant to counteract his strength, intelligence,
and good looks. The photo shows that he is seven feet tall
and covered in 300 pounds of metal. He is wearing huge
earphones, rather than a small radio, and big glasses meant
to blind him and give him headaches. He is also wearing a
red rubber nose and black caps over his teeth. His eyebrows
are shaved

After a rumbling noise, the photo on the Bergerons’ TV

screen is replaced with an image of Harrison himself, who
has stormed the studio. He says that he is the emperor, the
greatest ruler in history, and that everyone must obey him.
Then he rips off all of his handicaps. He looks like a god. He
says that the first woman braves enough to stand up will be
his empress. A ballerina rises to her feet. Harrison removes
her handicaps and mask, revealing a beautiful woman.
He orders the musicians to play, saying he will make them
royalty if they do their best. Unhappy with their initial
attempt, Harrison conducts, waving a couple of musicians in
the air like batons, and sings. They try again and do better.
After listening to the music, Harrison and his empress dance.
Defying gravity, they move through the air, flying thirty feet
upward to the ceiling, which they kiss. Then, still in the air,
they kiss each other.
Diana Moon Glampers comes into the studio and kills
 Harrison and the empress with a shotgun. Training the gun
on the musicians, she orders them to put their handicaps on.
The Bergerons’ screen goes dark. George, who has left the
room to get a beer, returns and asks Hazel why she has been
crying. She says something sad had happened on TV, but she
can’t remember exactly what. He urges her not to remember
sad things. A noise sounds in George’s head, and Hazel says
it sounded like a doozy. He says she can say that again, and
she repeats that it sounded like a doozy.
Source: https://www.sparknotes.com/short-
stories/harrison-bergeron/section1/

1. What political system was depicted in Kurt Vonnegaut’s story?

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2. The futuristic American society of “Harrison Bergeron” operates on

communist principles, supporting the idea that wealth and power should be
distributed equally and class hierarchies should not exist. Reveal your thoughts
by discussing your stand to this kind of principle?
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3. How will you describe the characters of the story? Cite instances that
concretize your character description.
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Getting Better

Think about your abilities and talents. If you were one of the
citizens in this story, what would you have been asked to wear a
handicap for? What abilities and talents would you be asked to hide and
inhibit? How would you feel about it?

Write a short reflection essay that conveys how you would feel if
you had been in that kind of society and subjected to the same
restrictions as people like Harrison.

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Gaining Mastery

Read the plot overview of Divergent and answer the questions that follow:

Divergent

Divergent is set in the future, in a dystopian version of Chicago that has

been divided into five factions: Abnegation, Candor, Amity, Dauntless, and
Erudite. The protagonist and narrator is a sixteen-year-old girl from
Abnegation named Beatrice Prior.
The novel opens with Beatrice’s mother cutting her hair. Beatrice is
worried about the next day’s aptitude test, which is administered to all
sixteen-year-olds and will tell her which of the factions she is best suited for.
After the test, she will attend the Choosing Ceremony, where she must decide
whether to stay in her family’s faction or leave it behind.
Beatrice is sure that her brother Caleb will stay in Abnegation, which
values selflessness and humility above all else, but she is conflicted. She has a
strong desire to join Dauntless, the faction whose members value bravery.
Trying to ignore her feelings, she goes in for her aptitude test, which is
administered by a Dauntless woman named Tori. Tori injects Beatrice with a
serum that initiates a series of simulations to which Beatrice must respond.
After the test is over, Tori leaves the room looking concerned. When she
returns, she tells Beatrice she is suited for multiple factions, meaning she’s
what’s known as Divergent. Tori warns her not to tell anyone, and Beatrice
returns home wondering what her results mean. At dinner that night, she
tries to hide her conflicted feelings from her parents and brother.
The following day, all the families of sixteen-year-olds attend the Choosing
Ceremony. Beatrice’s entire family is shocked when Caleb picks Erudite. After
some hesitation, Beatrice chooses Dauntless. She leaves the building and
jumps onto a train with the other initiates, where she meets Christina and
Will, who will become her good friends. When they arrive at the Dauntless
compound, a boy named Peter insults her. She responds by being the first
person to jump into the Pit, Dauntless’s headquarters seven stories below.
After a boy named Four helps her up, she introduces herself as Tris. The
initiates proceed to the dining hall and Tris meets Eric, the ruthless head
trainer of initiates. The next day, Eric tells the trainees that initiation consists
of a three-stage ranking process. Those who rank high enough will become
members, while the rest will become factionless. Tris vows to succeed and
performs well on the first day of stage one, which involves shooting guns at
targets. That night, Christina outfits Tris with flattering clothes and makeup,
and she gets three birds tattooed on her collarbone to represent her family.
Next, the initiates must fight each other in an arena and try to knock each
other unconscious. When Christina concedes to her opponent, Eric forces her
to hang over a chasm in the Pit for five minutes as punishment. The following
day, Tris finds that Peter has spray painted the word “Stiff” all over her bed.
He also beats her in that day’s fight, sending her to the infirmary. She begins
having doubts about her place in her new faction, and her worries intensify
during a field trip to the compound wall to learn about Dauntless jobs. Late
that night, Eric and Four take the initiates to Navy Pier, an abandoned park in
the city, to play capture the flag. As Tris and Four climb a Ferris wheel so they
can see where the other team is hiding, Tris realizes she’s starting to like him.
She leads their team to victory, impressing Four and angering Eric. The
following day, Tris’s friend Al performs badly during a knife-throwing exercise,
and Eric orders him to stand in front of the target while others throw knives at
him. Tris offers to take Al’s place, and Four throws knives around her head,
nicking her ear.
Peter and his friends Molly and Drew continue to torment Tris. After they
steal her towel and mock her naked body, she takes revenge by beating Molly
up during their assigned fight. Tris finds comfort in her mother’s presence on
Visiting Day, but the reunion is marred when Will’s sister accuses Tris’s
former faction of hoarding food and goods. Taking Tris aside, her mother asks
about her rankings and tells her to convince Caleb to research the simulation
serum. The conversation makes Tris realize her mother must have come from
Dauntless. Back in the dorm, Al puts his arm around Tris, but she rebuffs
him. Later that evening, the rankings show that Tris in sixth place and Peter
in second. That night, Edward, who placed first, gets stabbed in the eye,
presumably by a jealous Peter. Tris is happy for a distraction the next day,
when she gets invited to zip line off the top of the Hancock building with the
Dauntless-born initiates.
In the second stage of initiation, the initiates are injected with a serum that
induces a fear simulation. After Tris’s first simulation, Four informs her she
was able to escape the test much faster than anyone else. Still, she is stressed
about the tests and angry at Peter, who’s been distributing Erudite reports
accusing Abnegation of corruption. After another trip to the tattoo parlor, she
flirts with a drunken Four. During her next simulation, she escapes the
hallucination by manipulating it, leading Four to realize she’s Divergent. He
warns her not to share her status with anyone. She again talks with Tori, who
tells Tris that Dauntless leaders killed her brother when they learned he was
Divergent.
Because she’s able to manipulate the simulations, Tris ranks first after
stage two, leading Peter to threaten her. One night, as she gets a drink of
water in the hallway, she hears Eric talking with an unknown woman about
Divergent rebels. Suddenly, she’s attacked from behind and taken to the
chasm by Peter, Drew, and Al. One of the boys gropes her chest, and Peter
nearly drops her over the edge before Four rescues her. As she recovers in
Four’s private room, he advises Tris to feign weakness to stay safe, and they
grow closer.
The next day, Tris refuses to accept Al’s apologies, and he commits suicide
a few hours later by jumping into the chasm. At his funeral, Eric calls him
brave, making Tris angry. She vents loudly about Dauntless’s warped
priorities to Four, who warns her that she’s being watched. Frustrated and
confused, she blows off steam with her friends by throwing stacks of Erudite
reports into the chasm.
During stage three, the initiates are forced to confront all their worst fears
in a simulation, but this time everyone knows the scenarios are made up, not
just Tris. Tris follows Four up to the fear simulation room, where he
sometimes goes to practice facing his phobias. He invites Tris into his
simulation, and she learns he has only four fears. One of them is his father
Marcus, who is Tris’s father’s colleague. After Tris helps Four through each
scenario, he asks her to call him by his real name, Tobias, and they kiss.
The following day, Tobias ignores Tris in public, upsetting her. The initiates
must go through a sample fear scenario, and Tris panics during hers, causing
Tobias to rebuke her. She slaps him and leaves the Dauntless compound to
see her brother Caleb in Erudite. When she finds him, he expresses loyalty to
Erudite, angering her. She tells him their mother wants him to research the
simulation serum, and then is taken by two men to see Jeanine, the Erudite
leader. Jeanine asks probing questions about Tris’s test results, and Tris lies
hide her Divergence. Back at Dauntless, when Eric threatens her with
punishment for leaving, she and Tobias pretend she was sulking because
Tobias rejected her. That night, Tobias takes Tris into the city and shows her
that Erudite’s lights are on, a major rule violation. He has discovered that
Erudite is planning a war against Abnegation, though he’s not sure how
Dauntless is involved.
For the final test, each trainee goes through their fear simulation in front of
a panel of judges, with the other initiates watching on screens. During Tris’s
simulation, she realizes she needs to feel a sense of control in order to escape.
Her creative thinking helps her manage her fears of crows, drowning, burning
 at the stake, kidnapping, and sex. Lastly, instead of following orders to shoot
everyone in her family, she offers to sacrifice her own life. Afterward, Eric
congratulates her on passing the test and informs her that all Dauntless
members must be fitted with a tracking device. Though she’s suspicious, she
allows him to inject her with the tracking serum. Back in Tobias’s room, Tris
expresses her worries about sex, and she and Tobias agree they’re not ready
for it. They go to the banquet, where Tris learns she’s placed first in the
rankings. As she and Tobias kiss, she suddenly realizes the Erudite must be
planning to use the tracking devices to control the Dauntless.
Tris doesn’t have time to share her realization with Tobias, and in the
middle of the night, she awakens to find everyone leaving the dorm in a
trance. Since she’s Divergent, the serum hasn’t worked on her, but she follows
the group onto a train. There, she discovers Tobias is also awake, meaning
he’s Divergent too. When they arrive at Abnegation, the Dauntless begin
shooting everyone in sight. After she stops Eric from killing Tobias, Tris gets
shot in the shoulder. She and Tobias are taken to Jeanine, who explains her
plot to take over the government. She injects Tobias with a serum that makes
him attack Tris. He’s sent away, while Tris is knocked unconscious.

Tris wakes up in a glass box filling slowly with water, just like in her
simulations. Before she can drown, her mother appears and saves Tris’s life.
Her mother is killed by Dauntless soldiers shortly afterward, and Tris kills Will
in the process of escaping. She finds her father and brother hiding with other
Abnegation members, including Marcus, Tobias’s father. They treat her
wound, then head toward the control room at Dauntless headquarters. Tris
leads her family into the Pit, where she finds Peter acting as a guard. Tris
forces Peter to lead them to the control room, and her father is killed in the
process of helping her. She finds Tobias, still under the influence of Jeanine’s
serum, manning the computer program. They struggle to get each other’s
weapons, and after she lets Tobias take her gun, she pleads with him to see
her. He comes out of his trance and stops the computer program. Taking the
hard drive with them, they reunite with Caleb and Marcus, then jump on a
train heading toward Amity headquarters. Tris notices that Marcus seems
interested in the hard drive and wonders what will happen next.

Source: https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/divergent/summary/

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary
work. Explain and situate these identified themes to the community where you
live?

a. The complexity of identity

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b. The relationship of selflessness and bravery
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c. The role of intimacy in adulthood
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 What I Need to Remember

Books can immerse a reader in a world that is entirely different than

their own with an exciting set of possibilities, new characters, and different
rules.
Sub-genres of Speculative Fiction
Most speculative fiction novels fall under at least one of the following genres.
Some may fall into multiple genres depending on the story structure:

Science fiction: stories with imagined technologies that don’t exist in

the real world, like time travel, aliens, and robots.

Sci-fi fantasy fiction: sci-fi stories inspired by mythology, folklore, and

fairy tales that combine imagined technologies with elements of magical
realism.

Supernatural fiction: sci-fi stories about secret knowledge or hidden

abilities including witchcraft, spiritualism, and psychic abilities.

Space opera fiction: a play on the term “soap opera,” sci-fi stories that
take place in outer space and center around conflict, romance, and adventure.

Urban fantasy fiction: fantasy stories that take place in an urban

setting in the real world but operate under magical rules.

Utopian fiction: stories about civilizations the authors deem to be

perfect, ideal societies.

Dystopian fiction: stories about societies deemed problematic within the

world of the novel, often satirizing government rules, poverty, and oppression.

Apocalyptic fiction: stories that take place before and during a huge
disaster that wipes out a significant portion of the world’s population. The
stories center around characters doing everything they can to stay alive—for
example, running from zombies or trying to avoid a deadly plague.

Post-apocalyptic fiction: stories that take place after an apocalyptic

event and focus on the survivors figuring out how to navigate their new
circumstances—for example, emerging after a global nuclear holocaust or
surviving a total breakdown of society.

Alternate history fiction: stories that focus on true historical events

but are written as if they unfolded with different outcomes.
Superhero fiction: stories about superheroes and how they use their
abilities to fight supervillains.

Writer : Leilani T. Senires, PhD

School : Senior High School in Digos City
Division : Digos City Division