Turning Foresight Findings into Fiction

A summary of my Masters degree project

In 2011 I was awarded a Master of Design degree in Strategic Foresight and Innovation by OCAD University. I was part of the first cohort to emerge from the program, and one of two science fiction writers in that group (the other being Madeline Ashby, whose sharp and witty Glass Houses is a must-read).

Being a writer already, I’d been called upon on numerous occasions to take the results of foresight studies and turn them into “vignettes,” “scenario fictions,” or “dramatizations.” Usually, these would be very short—200 or 300-word snapshots of a future—and appear as introductions to longer, more technical descriptions of the results of a study. Sometimes they would be stand-alone works and longer. On several occasions, I was asked to write novella-length work based on major government projects. (Two of these, Crisis in Zefra and Crisis in Urlia, are free to download.)

I was hired because I had preexisting skills. Clearly, there was a demand for this kind of work, but the pool of published authors with experience writing design fiction and using foresight methodologies was small.

But what if the people doing the studies could write the vignettes? Not all of us have an author inside struggling to escape. Also, each story creates its own internal context that constrains all stylistic and structural decisions that go into building it; therefore, no general procedure can be defined that reliably generates a good narrative. Only long experience working with such constraints can make someone an author. Despite this, certain aspects of fiction writing can be codified, and dramatizing scenarios doesn’t require the same set of skills you’d need to craft a novel. It is perfectly possible for an “amateur” writer to craft an entertaining and useful design fiction—provided it’s not too long or complicated.

So we actually can define some procedures for building certain kinds of design fiction. I restricted my Masters project to short narratives that support a body of findings or activities such as workshop exercises. I didn’t write about other approaches to using fiction to support foresight, notably science fiction prototyping, in which the story is the project. Many of the ideas I wanted to write about were relevant to science fiction prototyping, but SF prototyping is an exploratory technique. I wanted to look at fiction as a way of reporting pre-existing findings.

What I consistently found when reviewing existing or in-progress works of foresight fiction was that people trained only in expository writing tended to commit two kinds of errors when trying to convey their ideas as fiction:

• They fail to include all the ideas they want to communicate or distort some in trying to fit them into the narrative;

• They let the story get away from them. The reader is entertained by the piece, but absorbs details of character, plot, or description that have nothing to do with the ideas the author wants to convey.

How a storyteller restricts their subject matter to a pre-existing set of ideas and findings and prevents it being derailed by the many pitfalls of literary writing, is a non-trivial problem. For my Masters project, I proposed a technique designed to get around these issues. The technique uses the ancient “art of memory” to structure the narrative as a mnemonic device—a vehicle for making your ideas memorable.

How might we translate existing foresight findings into a fictional narrative in such a way that the reader learns the findings from it, while not introducing new concepts or irrelevant literary details that might confuse or divert attention from those findings?

Stories as Mnemonics

In his book Michael Ondaatje: Word, Image, Imagination, Leslie Mundwiler suggests that Michael Ondaatje’s poetry and novels are constructed as classical mnemonic devices. The traditional Art of Memory (AofM) has for centuries enabled ordinary people to memorize astonishingly large bodies of work and random lists (think phone books) without any supporting technology. The AofM is a very old craft and far beyond the scope of this article; if you want a solid introduction, the best I know of is Frances Yates’ The Art of Memory.

For our purposes, it’s sufficient to understand that if you want to remember something, you can do so by imagining a locus (a setting) and placing in it one or more striking, bizarre, even repellant images that will remind you of your subject. This is how the classic “memory palace” works—you picture a building in your mind, and add rooms and wings as needed where you place weird and literally unforgettable scenes. These scenes can serve to remind you of places, people, transactions including accounting details, and even long lists of names or numbers. It’s a technique proven over many centuries by, for instance, illiterate traveling merchants who needed to remember many financial and personal details from people and places scattered across space and time.

What does this have to do with writing, or foresight? Well, as Mundwiler shows in the case of Ondaatje, it’s possible to craft a work of literature as a set of loci and deploy mnemonic images in it. Arguably, this is how narrative works at a deep level, but when deployed as a conscious strategy, you get works such as The English Patient. In such stories, the prose, settings and incidents roll along ‘normally’—that is, in workmanlike prose—until key moments when the language suddenly lifts off poetically, and you’re gobsmacked by a turn of phrase or image so beautiful that you’re likely to never forget it. The Shipping News is written this way, as are many works of Samuel R. Delany (see his short story “Dog in a Fisherman’s Net” in Driftglass for a perfect example). In such writing, most of the prose is ‘transparent’ in the classic sense of being deliberately unmemorable in itself; it merely supports the narrative. The author uses it to set up key moments where the language suddenly explodes. Such an irruption of poetry could be just a single word, or a sentence or paragraph (Delany’s Trouble on Triton ends with an extraordinary page-long sentence).

As an aside, note that this is different from the kind of literary turning that James Joyce uses in the all-important phrase “she asked me was I going to Araby,” in his short story “Araby.” In that case, the reader is not supposed to consciously notice how this one turn of phrase completely changes the narrative. It’s a psychological rather than a poetic device. —But this is just a clarification for the purists.

Two important things to realize about this technique:

1. It’s incredibly powerful.

2. You don’t have to be a Nobel Prize-winning author to use it. You just have to know about it and deploy it deliberately.

I designed a method for doing this.