Commentary/Can science fiction reimagine the future of global development?

“Stories are powerful things: they create our reality as much as they explain it. The futures we envision, be they positive or futures of collapse, make us much more likely to respond to events in the world in a way that helps create that future.”
–Alex Evans, The Myth Gap: What happens when evidence and arguments aren’t enough?

Humans use stories as important teaching and survival tools. Our imaginations are key to social, cultural, and technological development and have contributed to the challenges we face today. But our capacity to imagine can also help us find our way through these challenges.

As storytellers, we use fiction to imagine the past, as well as the future. Science fiction (or sci-fi) and speculative fiction are one way to imagine alternative futures that I think hold promise for development. Science fiction conjures Aliens (which I watched as a child, hiding behind my parents’ couch – totally worth the nightmares for weeks afterwards), or passionate Star Wars fans wearing costumes at comic-book conventions.

Yet we credit Star Trek for today’s technological dreams come true, such as tablet computers and devices that translate language as it is spoken, and the fantastical dream of limitless resources. We also cite Star Trek for illustrating a relatively progressive racial and gender-equal future on our television screens.

It may not be such a stretch to connect sci-fi to better development for our future here on Earth. Sci-fi and the broader genre of speculative fiction can let us dream, and it can also point out absurdities and highlight things that we take for granted in contemporary society. To head towards different, perhaps even better, futures, we have to be able to imagine what those futures might look, sound, smell, and feel like, and what the impacts and implications of different types of change might be. This is where science fiction enters the scene.

Rime of the last fisherman: For the last human rumoured to be fishing on Earth, what if there is nothing left to catch? Courtesy of Simon Stålenhag.

From space opera to handmaids’ tales

Sci-fi has moved beyond its “pulp fiction” origins. From trips to Mars and beyond, this genre has become an increasingly sophisticated vehicle for critiquing our present-day societies.

For example, the new television series based on The Handmaid’s Tale, the 1985 novel by Margaret Atwood, is garnering critical acclaim and a dedicated following for its chilling portrayal of a future world that seems to resonate with American politics today. The UK’s Black Mirror looks at the Internet and the ways we often uncritically accept technology into our lives with eyes askance. You may not have seen these series, but maybe you have thought about what might happen if we embedded computers in our brains, or if a global environmental disaster left humans unable to procreate.

As one of those fans who has read more sci-fi than any other genre, I initially failed to see the connection to development. And yet, as I began to apply science fiction to the future of the Earth’s ocean in my PhD research, I became excited by the possibilities.

My personal “aha” moment happened when participating in a workshop for “envisioning Good Anthropocenes” in South Africa. The Anthropocene, which means “the age of mankind”, is a proposed geological period in which humans are the dominant global force shaping the Earth. How is that not science fiction come true? Will our human-influenced world look like one of the dystopian futures imagined in Blade Runner, the Mad Max movies, or even WALL-E? Or will we be able to find other pathways to follow in our future development?

Development is a serious and important endeavour that impacts many people’s lives, and as such, seemingly leaves no apparent room for fiction of any kind. Policymakers, practitioners, change-makers, all are bombarded from all sides with conflicting expectations and constantly evolving challenges: certainty must come from measuring and monitoring.

Incredibly rigorous science and its toolbox of methods and practices that provide “certainty”, however, are limited if we can never extrapolate and experiment with what they mean for the possible future. Call them predictions from models or scenarios – they are fiction until they become real. And before they become real, we have the chance to play with them to see if they are what we want.

Le Voyage dans la Lune

Frances Bell of Salford University’s Business School describes classic works of science fiction by Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula K. Le Guin, and others as “applied fictions”: their books and short stories provoked discussions and dialogues about the future and technological evolution, about robots, the future of gender in society, and other speculative topics.¹ 1. Bell, F., Fletcher, G., Greenhill, A., Griffiths, M., McLean, R., 2013. “Science fiction prototyping: Visionary technology narratives between futures.” Futures 50:5–14. DOI: 10.1016/j.futures.2013.04.004 See all references Science fiction, and for that matter, any speculative fictional narrative set in the future, can be considered a way to explore what could be: a scenario.

Literature in general, Jan Oliver Schwarz of Aarhus University School of Business wrote, “can be perceived as providing a reservoir of futures. By creating scenarios in the minds of the readers, literature creates possible different worlds, or different perspectives and images on and of the future.” Fiction, Schwarz continued, gets inside human behaviour and humans’ inner worlds in ways other fields cannot, whether sociology, history, and even psychiatry. Literature makes “forbidden” or “unavailable” experience come alive.² 2. Schwarz, J. O., 2014. “The ‘Narrative Turn’ in developing foresight: Assessing how cultural products can assist organisations in detecting trends.” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 90:510–513. DOI: 10.1016/j.techfore.2014.02.024 See all references

In the context of looking to the future, a scenario can be described as “a coherent, internally consistent and plausible description of a potential future trajectory of a system”.³ 3. Oteros-Rozas, E., Martín-López, B., Daw, T., Bohensky, E. L., Butler, J., Hill, R., Martin-Ortega, J., Quinlan, A., Ravera, F., Ruiz-Mallén, I., Thyresson, M., Mistry, J., Palomo, I., Peterson, G. D., Plieninger, T., Waylen, K. A., Beach, D., Bohnet, I. C., Hamann, M., Hanspach, J., Hubacek, K., Lavorel, S., Vilardy, S., 2015. “Participatory scenario planning in place-based social-ecological research: insights and experiences from 23 case studies.” Ecology and Society 20(4):32. DOI: 10.5751/ES-07985-200432 See all references Building scenarios can be an important tool for proactively thinking about and acting in a way that anticipates things to come.

Literature “can be perceived as providing a reservoir of futures.”

Jan Oliver Schwarz

Scenarios can help individuals, communities, corporations, and nations to develop a capacity for dealing with the unknown and unpredictable, or the unlikely but possible. Military and corporate strategists have long used scenarios in planning processes. Royal Dutch Shell used a “scenarios approach” in the 1970s, to help the company steer away from and avoid the worst of the oil crisis.⁴ 4. Schwartz, P., 1996. The Art of the Long View: Planning for the future in an uncertain world. John Wiley & Sons: Chichester, West Sussex. See all references War games are a type of scenario, and in 2016, US military planners began running war games incorporating different climate change scenarios, while focusing on “geopolitical and socioeconomic instability” linked to extreme weather patterns.⁵ 5. US Department of Defense, 2016. DoD Directive 4715.21: Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience. http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/corres/pdf/471521p.pdf Download PDF See all references Governments increasingly use them as a tool to support policymaking in the field of natural resource management.^6-7 6. Evans, L. S., Hicks, C. C., Fidelman, P., Tobin, R. C., Perry, A. L., 2013. “Future scenarios as a research tool: investigating climate change impacts, adaptation options and outcomes for the Great Barrier Reef, Australia.” Human Ecology: An Interdisciplinary Journal 41:841–857. DOI: 10.1007/s10745-013-9601-0 7. Peterson, G. D., Cumming, G. S., Carpenter, S. R., 2003. “Scenario planning: a tool for conservation in an uncertain world.” Conservation Biology 17(2):358–366. DOI: 10.1046/j.1523-1739.2003.01491.x See all references And the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem services (IPBES) is increasingly adopting a scenarios approach.³ 3. Oteros-Rozas, E., Martín-López, B., Daw, T., Bohensky, E. L., Butler, J., Hill, R., Martin-Ortega, J., Quinlan, A., Ravera, F., Ruiz-Mallén, I., Thyresson, M., Mistry, J., Palomo, I., Peterson, G. D., Plieninger, T., Waylen, K. A., Beach, D., Bohnet, I. C., Hamann, M., Hanspach, J., Hubacek, K., Lavorel, S., Vilardy, S., 2015. “Participatory scenario planning in place-based social-ecological research: insights and experiences from 23 case studies.” Ecology and Society 20(4):32. DOI: 10.5751/ES-07985-200432 See all references

When it comes to climate change, the Paris Agreement’s recently agreed targets to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions rely on estimated future trajectories, given different pathways for carbon emissions. Created by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), these may be the best-known examples for natural systems scenarios.

Reading the IPCC’s business-as-usual scenario is far from an engaging narrative. What would this future actually be like for those of us who might have to live in it? Analytical tools and techniques combined with dry descriptions almost always win out in scientific scenarios, at the expense of storytelling, metaphors, and creativity that can evoke the readers’ imagination.

Rising tide: The underwater Tarawa Station transit hub connects submarine residence domes and public spaces, serving the small island states that banded together as sea levels rose. Courtesy of Simon Stålenhag.

Predicting the future ocean?

While conducting my PhD research, I was part of the Nereus Program, an interdisciplinary research project that brought together scientists from all over the world to “predict the future ocean”. Participating in that project led me to ask some questions that fell into the abyss between what we can confidently say with the best marine science – what we can “predict” – and imaginative but entirely speculative thinking about oceans completely detached from the science. Where was the bridge between known and unknown, and how could we connect what we knew to what that means for humanity and other species?

I found science-fiction prototyping to be a way to begin to bridge that gap and think about the possible futures of fisheries and the oceans. The approach offered a way to structure creative thinking about the future oceans, while accounting for some of the dynamics of systems that we study in sustainability science. Sustainability and resilience research explores fast change, slow change, cascading effects, uncertainty, and surprise.

Perhaps not surprisingly, science-fiction prototyping came out of Silicon Valley, the ultimate location for sci-fi futurists. Brian David Johnson was the first “futurist” for Intel Corporation, and he wanted Intel engineers to think about the human implications of the technology they might develop. Now the futurist in residence at the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University (ASU), Johnson first developed formal methods of science-fiction prototyping for Intel engineers to envisage what the future would be like with their innovations in it.⁸ 8. Johnson, B. D., 2011. Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the future with science fiction. Morgan & Claypool, San Rafael. 190 pp. DOI: 10.2200/S00336ED1V01Y201102CSL003 See all references One explicit consideration they must make is whether that future was one in which they – and we humans as a whole – would want to live.

My coauthors and I applied that method to creating scientifically rigorous narrative scenarios of the future ocean, mixing elements of utopia and dystopia together. The result? Four possible scenarios, blending the good and bad, for fisheries and food. These narratives, all set around 2070, imagine Astrid Amundsen, the Norwegian Seafood CEO who successfully privatised global food security. They give us a peek at the journals of Alejandro Balmaceda, reportedly the world’s last marine fisherman. In “Rising Tide”, an article about Tarawa Station tells how small island states banded together to survive and thrive, despite several metres of sea-level rise. And we hear from Professor Michelle Ching, descended from a great pirate queen, about how to bring the oceans back from the brink of collapse.

Our scenarios address the contested reality of what counts as a desirable future and for whom. Scenarios can be used to keep track of what sort of future is emerging, and give inspiration for how we might steer towards a future that is more equitable and socially and ecologically desirable. The archetypical characters in our scenarios are experiencing both desirable and undesirable existences. Likewise, in the real world, desirability is relative.

This method could be applied to opening creative space around rethinking development globally. Science-fiction prototyping can help illuminate the kinds of baked-in assumptions and presumptions of normality that infuse policy that is supposed to be “value-neutral”, “objective”, and “quantitative”.

Bringing the ocean back from the brink: humans and robots maintain healthy ecosystems and well-managed fisheries, in a scenario where humans have figured out how to restore coral reef ecosystems and clean the seas with the help of “ecologically literate technology”. Courtesy of Simon Stålenhag.

The art of sci-fi scenarios

Science-fiction prototyping is not the sole property of the “Freaks and Geeks” in Silicon Valley. A related and deeply inspiring development has been the rise of the Afrofuturism movement. Emerging from critical theory, the movement combines art, speculative fiction, political advocacy, identity politics, diverse non-Western cultural forms, fantasy and magical realism with an emancipatory purpose, opening up space to imagine radically different possibility spaces. Afrofuturism is about new ways of thinking and feeling free from entrenched narratives and Western-centric ideologies and forms of expression.

One story charting Afrofuturism traces its genesis back to a 1993 essay by Mark Dery, “Black to the Future”.⁹ 9. Dery, M., 1993. “Black to the Future: Afro-Futurism 1.0,” in Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction’s Newest New Wave Trajectory, ed. Marleen Barr. Ohio State University Press. See all references Dery interviewed several of the best-read science-fiction novelists of the decade – including Octavia E. Butler, whose pioneering sci-fi works include the time-travelling novel Kindred, published in 1979, and who was one of the first black women sci-fi writers.

Afrofuturism partly inspired the “Anthropocene Visioning Workshop”, which I attended in relation to my research. Convened by the Centre for Complex Systems in Transition in Stellenbosch, South Africa, artists, writers, change-makers, policymakers, practitioners, and scientists worked together to envisage radical, speculative futures for southern Africa. We grounded our work in a set of “Seeds of the Good Anthropocene”: existing ideas, projects, and initiatives that together could grow and transform into many diverse, sustainable futures.

This workshop did not follow the often boring and static scenario-creation process I associate with the IPCC, but instead allowed for and even encouraged creativity. Anchoring the process to the Seeds opened up space for the participants to flex their imaginations around things like artificial intelligence, lab-grown meat, and “gastro-gardens”.¹⁰ 10. CST-GRAID, 2017. Report on the Anthropocene Visioning Workshop, 15-18 November 2016, Cape Town, South Africa. GRAID project workshop. Centre for Complex Systems in Transition, Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Download PDF See all references

In my group, we came up with the scenario “Softening the Age of Humans”. The future we imagined started here: “Many of us in the southern African community remember the day when the spark in the midst of crisis became Demos42, our collective superintelligence that connects and guides humanity.” Our future vision mixed artificial and human intelligence, old and new practices.

Oceans back from the brink? Courtesy of Simon Stålenhag.

Imagination is not simply “playing pretend”

The many different approaches to scenarios all make the argument that imagination matters for working towards fairer, more sustainable, and more beautiful futures. Imagining the future of development in a world with limited resources is not much different.

Rethinking development requires reimagining it in a way that connects science, policy, and practice with creativity, imagination, play, and speculation. The future is being created by the plans and actions of individuals, groups, and organisations in the present. The value of imaginative “fictional” approaches is not in the false promise of “predicting the future” – which is pretty much impossible, even for the best scientific model – but rather to engage with a set of plausible and complex futures. When certain trends in social and economic systems express themselves, individuals and institutions can read the signs, interpret them, and act. The act of imagining diverse futures can reveal unseen pathways, and can inspire human ingenuity, while also highlighting the limitations of human agency in a complex world.

This approach to scenarios can contribute to building anticipation and response capacities in development organisations and for those seeking to change the world for the better. And yet, so far, I cannot find any real-world examples. I think we have a great opportunity to experiment with science-fiction prototyping. Manjana Milkoreit of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and her colleagues at the ASU Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative recently started a project to follow how speculative fiction and climate fiction (“cli-fi”) might influence policy in the present.

How this kind of sci-fi scenario thinking will wrap itself into the future – whether for food systems, climate change, or the other big issues that face us and that are encapsulated in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), for example – remains to be seen. Next week, I will be bringing the future ocean scenarios to the UN meeting on SDG 14: “Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources.” The SDGs, in a way, are a call for imagination: how can we make them a reality? I would suggest sci-fi is one way to figure out what we want and what it might take to make such transformations happen.