New Genre Wednesdays: Speculative Superstructure

The basic rules of this genre are: no economic facts about the real world can be changed, and all cultural facts should be changed as wildly as possible.

For instance, you could think of ways for the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of an elite could be regularly justified without invoking market efficiency, incentives to individual productivity and technological progress, rewards due to talent and hard work, or the prospect of trickle-down prosperity.

So it tacitly adopts a kind of determinist "base-superstructure" model in which the superstructure supervenes upon, but is otherwise causally isolated from, the base.

As it is above all a principle of worldbuilding, this genre may coexist fairly easily with others.

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Elsewhere: Jonathan McCalmont's headcanon of Twentieth Century SF.