All Mutual Aid is Speculative Fiction: Critical Fabulation and its Role in Achieving Abolition

Through the practice of critical fabulation, authors of speculative fiction can practice mutual aid with the goal of achieving abolition. Critical fabulation within speculative fiction allows authors to use their imagine to create worlds free of prisons, war, and capitalism. Both critical fabulation and speculative fiction, in practicing mutual aid, then become tools that work within the confines of and against the white supremacist, colonial archive, the prison industrial complex, and the non-profit industrial complex—those tools help authors and readers imagine a world of abolition. Through a literary analysis of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, this paper aims to find instances of mutual aid within those works of speculative fiction in order to prove that all mutual aid is speculative fiction. The combination of Adaylin’s personal experiences in practicing mutual aid and her literary analysis of works of speculative fiction then allows her to describe her process in applying both to write her own speculative fiction story.