When I was in high school, my English class read a famous short story called “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” written in 1890 by Ambrose Bierce. Its central character, Peyton Farquhar, is a slave-owning Southern planter. As the story opens, Peyton is about to be hanged by the Union Army for attempted sabotage. Soldiers tie a noose around his neck and throw him into a river. But the rope snaps, and Peyton swims to shore, ducks into the woods, and goes home to his wife. When he sees her, he feels joy but also a stabbing pain. It turns out that he’s only been imagining his escape—actually, his body has been falling from the bridge the whole time. At the end of the story, his neck breaks and he dies.

Probably because I was taught, incorrectly, that Bierce’s story was a humanist tale about the sadness of war, it never occurred to me that the story might be, in some sense, tasteless. Then I read a creepy short story called “Beyond the Flags,” by Kris Saknussemm, which appears in a new collection called “In the Shadow of the Towers: Speculative Fiction in a Post-9/11 World.” “Beyond the Flags” is “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” set during 9/11. Instead of a Southern plantation owner, the protagonist is a Patrick Bateman-esque banker named Peter Connors, who works in the Twin Towers. When the planes hit, he’s having sex with his mistress in Connecticut. His wife calls to find out if he’s O.K., and his ignorance of the events in Lower Manhattan reveals his deception. He jumps into his Maserati and speeds home to patch things up. When he gets there, his whole life, “from cheating at Yale to defrauding his clients,” flashes before his eyes, and he feels a sudden terror. The morning tryst with his mistress was just a fantasy. In fact, he died during in the attacks.

“In the Shadow of the Towers” marks the beginning of a transition in the legacy of 9/11. At first, a protective aura surrounds recent tragedies, preserving them from the injudicious meddling of pop culture. But it can’t be “too soon” forever; no event is permanently beyond the reach of the imagination. Typically, to start, only respectful, realistic stories make inroads. Then some border is crossed, and it becomes possible to make revenge Westerns about slavery (“Django Unchained”), tragicomedies about the Holocaust (“Life Is Beautiful”), and horror movies about Vietnam (“Jacob’s Ladder”). When it comes to the Iraq War and the War on Terror, we’re already crossing that border: “The Hurt Locker,” “Homeland,” and the completed but unreleased video game Six Days in Fallujah turn real life into entertainment. Eventually, we’ll get there with September 11th, too: there will be 9/11 video games and 9/11 romance novels. For now, we have the stories collected in this volume, which give us a preview of how September 11th might look through a “speculative” lens.

Some of the stories collected in “In the Shadow of the Towers” leave the reality of 9/11 mostly undisturbed. An elegant and beautiful ghost story called “There’s a Hole in the City” is set in the days after the attacks; Richard Bowes, its author, has lived in Manhattan for decades and evokes the autumn of 2001 with solemn specificity. The phantasmagorical twist is that 9/11 has summoned ghosts from past disasters. Walking around downtown on September 12th, perceptive New Yorkers glimpse victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire near Union Square; they see children from the General Slocum, a steamship that burned in 1904; later, a ghost from the drug- and AIDS-ravaged eighties appears. The story puts 9/11 in the context of New York’s long municipal history of death and grief, and literalizes the haunted feeling one has near Ground Zero. It’s easy to imagine it adapted into a “Sixth Sense”-like movie—it’s a little strange, but also comforting and familiar.

Most of the stories in the volume are not as comforting. Instead, they are intellectual sci-fi satire—the sort of thing you’d see on a 9/11 episode of “Black Mirror.” In “Beautiful Stuff,” by Susan Palwick, a George W. Bush-like President reanimates people who died on September 11th; he then stages a press conference during which the dead are supposed to endorse his wars in the Middle East (they refuse). K. Tempest Bradford’s “Until Forgiveness Comes” is written in the style of an NPR news report, and takes place in an alternate world that combines Ancient Egypt with Imperial Japan; it describes an annual religious ceremony in which crowds witness a reënactment of a terrorist attack similar to 9/11. (Douglas Lain, the collection’s editor, writes that the story “exposes the power and problems of repetition” after a collective trauma.) “The Goat Variations,” by Jeff VanderMeer, is told from the perspective of Bush but takes place in an alternate reality and envisions a different version of 9/11: in it, the American “heartland” has seceded from the rest of the country and declared a Christian-fundamentalist “jihad” on the coasts.

I enjoyed these stories, but found them too on the nose. They’re not, in the end, particularly “speculative”; they know exactly what they want to say. Only “Giliad,” by Gregory Feeley, struck me as genuinely weird. It follows a husband-and-wife team who are simultaneously raising a daughter, playing a video game about Ancient Sumer, working on a novel set there, and watching 9/11 unfold on television. The story is, among other things, an exploration of how September 11th might fit into the kind of large-scale history you’d read in an Ancient Civilizations textbook. It also suggests how, in the future, 9/11 might have its own unique mood and texture. Just as we associate the Second World War with valor and Vietnam with paranoia, perhaps we’ll come to associate September 11th with a feeling of resurgent ancientness, one that undermined faith in the permanence of the high-tech world. “Giliad” feels removed from the paths of thought that we’ve walked, over and over, for the past fourteen years.

Reading “In the Shadow of the Towers,” you wonder what this kind of speculative storytelling is for. What’s the point of remixing history? Why do we enjoy “Inglourious Basterds,” which imagines an alternative ending to the Second World War, or “JFK,” which Oliver Stone described as a “countermyth” to the Warren Commission’s story? In part—as Adam Gopnik has argued—these stories draw us in because history really is full of unknowable realities, strange connections, and unbelievable coincidences. And they’re also a way of responding to the weighty weightlessness of history. Momentous events shape our lives and yet could so easily have been otherwise; if there are a thousand ways in which 9/11 could have happened differently, why not imagine them?

But speculative stories aren’t just about the rearrangement of historical possibilities. Often, they draw their power from combining emotions and thoughts that we’d prefer not to combine. A story like “Beyond the Flags” unsettles, and even offends, because it identifies two common and incompatible thoughts: on the one hand, we are appalled by the horror and randomness of 9/11; on the other, we enjoy thinking of wealthy bankers as callow, narcissistic jerks. These two streams of thought are never supposed to cross. We all know that, factually and morally, Matt Taibbi’s famous description of Goldman Sachs in Rolling Stone—“a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity”—has nothing to do with the murder of thousands of innocent people on 9/11. We watch “Margin Call” and “The Wolf of Wall Street” with one part of the mind, and “World Trade Center” and “United 93” with another. All the same, even as the possibility of that connection is denied, it’s there, hovering in the mental atmosphere. Fiction, like a thunderstorm, precipitates it.