Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
You could imagine a scenario disrupting their production, something like that. Imagining "what would Saudi Arabia be like if it never had any oil" is speculative fiction transforming the character of Earth and life on it to the beginning.
Contrast this with selecting a political candidate, like the topic of this thread. That likely involves comparing different scenarios where the different candidates win. All of these scenarios will differ from the real world significantly, some extremely so; no matter who wins, and for many reasons that are relatively independent of who wins. Perhaps you could call the scenarios "speculative fiction" by these standards.