The following paper focuses on the potential of speculative fiction that exploits genre hybridity as a device for exposing social, cultural and political shortcomings of our contemporary society. The study will concentrate on two short stories written by Anglophone authors Sophie Mackintosh and Julia Elliot, in order to explore the way the tales anticipate the threats and evils of pervasive utopian ideologies and practices. At the same time, the analysis will consider the way the authors re-negotiate the boundaries of the fantastic and dystopian genres, so as to foreground the dangers and terrors inherent in the excesses and deviations proper of fundamentalist practices and extreme politics forged by utopian agendas within the 21 st century. For this purpose, the study will draw on Brian McHale’s (1987) Postmodernist Fiction, in order to illustrate how subversive narrative strategies of plot and character deploy the overlapping of genre boundaries within the short story, so as to account for new, disruptive landscapes. In addition, the study reveals the relation between genre and gender in the way the story’s nightmarish scenarios and haunted futures question issues of female power and agency, as well exploring new configurations of gender roles and practices. In this sense, the analysis will be conducted through a close reading of the stories and complemented with a theoretical background that draws on the concepts and conventions of dystopian fiction provided by authors such as, Keith Booker and Erika Gottlieb. In addition, the paper will examine the prevalence and relevance of Tzvetan Todorov’s theory of the Fantastic genre in the way its tenets illustrate the stories’ female ontologies simultaneously expose and interrogate their radical and subversive realities.