Young people coming of age after the millennium are inheriting a world in the midst of violent transformation. Their reality looks increasingly different from earlier generations’, and so demands new forms of political consciousness and new visions of what a just future means. In literary studies, scholars are noting that our ecological and economic emergencies even resist realist narration. Instead, new speculative stories are needed to imagine unfolding global shifts. This project examines the emergence of these new, non-realist forms in work by young authors from across the global south, those postcolonial regions of the world that are most affected by climate and financial crises. It analyses speculative genres as modes of “crisis management”, which help to make sense of planetary emergencies, but also to critique the systems that cause them. In this way, the project explores how speculative texts reflect a generational shift in political outlook, which, in postcolonial contexts, is also a shift away from earlier understandings of oppression and resistance. To examine how this change informs literary imaginaries, the project draws on decolonial theory, which argues that the global inequality of crisis confirms the ongoing reality of colonial power. The project reads speculative texts as confronting this reality, and explores their decolonial potential: the extent to which their non-realist forms imaginatively critique and reconstruct a broken, unequal world.