Analysing the Gap in Comparative Studies of African Science Fiction and Global Speculative Fiction

African speculative fiction, including Afrofuturism, African magical realism, and science fiction from across the continent, represents a rapidly growing literary phenomenon whose relationship to global speculative fiction traditions has been studied in international scholarship but is severely underrepresented in Nigerian academic comparative literary research. This study analysed the research gap in comparative studies of African speculative fiction, with particular attention to Nigerian speculative fiction by Nnedi Okofor, Tlotlo Tsamaase, Dilman Dila, and others, in relation to the global speculative fiction tradition. A systematic scoping review was conducted, searching eight databases for comparative studies of African speculative fiction from 2015 to 2024, supplemented by grey literature from Nigerian literary journals and the Ake Book Festival archives. Eighty-one eligible publications were identified. Results showed that Afrofuturism as a concept is referenced in 68.5 percent of publications but rarely subjected to rigorous comparative analysis with specific non-African speculative traditions. Nigerian speculative fiction appears in only 24.7 percent of comparative studies of African speculative fiction, despite the disproportionate international profile of Nigerian speculative writers. Female Nigerian speculative authors including Okofor are more represented than male counterparts. The relationship between speculative fiction and oral traditional cosmologies as a comparative literary question is addressed in only 11.1 percent of publications. The study identifies seven research gaps and proposes three original comparative frameworks for studying Nigerian speculative fiction in relation to Octavia Butler's Africanist speculative tradition and Chinese science fiction.