Eleven Tips for Using SciFi in Futures Work

What nobody tells you about narrative in foresight projects: how to write it

There’s a lot of interest in using science fiction in foresight work. It’s certainly possible to do it, but there are many pitfalls, even (or especially!) for a professional SF writer such as myself. Most people doing foresight work aren’t fiction writers; fiction writers, on the other hand, can get lost in the minutia of crafting an entertaining tale and forget to emphasize the foresight ideas it’s supposed to communicate. Here’s a short list of tips for anyone determined to try it.

First of all, know that a lot has been written about using science fiction in foresight. Just glancing at my library, I see Brian David Johnson’s Science Fiction Prototyping, Leah Zaidi’s extensive work on worldbuilding such as her paper “Worldbuilding in Science Fiction, Foresight, and Design,” the book Discursive Design by Bruce M. Tharp and Stephanie M. Tharp, and The Manual of Design Fiction by Julian Bleecker et al. There are more every day. Make sure you’ve reviewed the literature so you don’t make rooky mistakes or reinvent the wheel.

Once you’ve done this, you’ll find you will find you have questions that the literature does not answer; for instance:

1. How will my choice of setting and character affect the story’s ability to convey the key ideas of a scenario?

2. What kind of plot is appropriate to a story whose intent is to direct the reader’s attention to a particular set of ideas?

3. What, counts as relevant in a foresight-directed story, and what is a distraction? In other words, how does a “foresight fiction” differ from plain old science fiction?

Let’s set about answering these questions.

Tips and Tricks

1. Your literature review will show that there are a lot of different approaches to foresight fiction. It finds itself in a multi-way tug-of-war between proponents who see it within their own frame. A given piece of SF could be presented as a design fiction, discursive design, or speculative design. Science fictions could just be a fancy kind of scenario. I strongly recommend that you resist subsuming foresight fiction under some specific category; narrative predates all design and foresight theory by thousands of years. It’s probably best to think of narrative as a versatile approach to organizing and communicating information in general, and avoid trying to conform to somebody’s theory of how it works.

2. The literature will also show you that the topic of how to actually write stories is assumed to lie outside foresight theory. Practitioners believe a description of the storytelling process isn’t part of the foresight ambit; or else they assume that “everybody knows” how to write a story and the hard work is done when the foresight analysis is completed. However, you actually do need some storytelling chops to do this work. You’ll have to look elsewhere for to acquire those.
   

3. You do have an instinctive knowledge of how to tell stories. We all do. This can get you in trouble. Your tacit understanding of narrative is likely to include the priorities passionately argued for by Virginia Woolf, namely that literature must first and foremost be ‘about’ the evolution of the human spirit and not about the material world. Your problem is that elements that may make for good literature in another context are not appropriate in a foresight fiction. In futures work we generally use narrative to communicate some particular point (but not always; see #3). In that case, story elements that do not directly contribute to making that point may derail that purpose. So take to heart this idea: in foresight fiction, the story exists to serve the ideas, whereas in ‘standard’ literature the ideas serve the story.

4. There are several ways you can use science fiction in foresight. They are very different and you need to know which one fits your needs. You can use it:

   1. In a comparative analysis. You do this when you select a set of films about robots and AI, such as HER, I Robot, A.I., and Metropolis, and compare their themes or projections about the future. This process can be useful for uncovering the ‘default future’ that creates common social expectations about technologies and societal change.

   2. For windtunneling ideas. The technique here was dubbed Science Fiction Prototyping by Brian David Johnson. In his 2011 book of the same title, he defines a science fiction prototype as “a short story, movie or comic based specifically on a science fact for the purpose of exploring the implications, effects and ramifications of that science or technology.”

   3. As a design practice. Stuart Candy is the guy who introduced me to Nordic Larp, and he’s a strong proponent of building actual “things from the future;” actual objects that people can interact with. This is design fiction in its non-literary form, but it’s as SciFi as a movie or a video game—just another medium. The “Courier Commons” that I did with Tomorrow Lab is another great example.

   4. As a reporting mechanism. I’ve done most of my foresight work in this niche. Science fiction is often used at the end of a foresight project to dramatize—and summarize—the project’s findings. This can be critical to communicating with stakeholders, because foresight work can generate mountains of reports, which few of the affected people will have the time to wade through. You can combine many ideas into a single character, scene, or setting, however; narrative of this kind is a sort of compactor, squashing large amounts of textual data into a series of “aha!” moments in an enjoyable format. I suspect a lot of this work will be supplanted by training Large Language Models on the foresight inputs and outputs in the future, but we’re not there yet and LLMs lack the imagination that a professional writer can use to integrate diverse, complex ideas in story format.

5. By their nature stories are more memorable than reports; they speak directly to very basic cognitive structures in the brain, and storytelling has evolved over thousands of years to support memory, particularly social memory. This means that a story is a mnemonic device. Due to this power, stories will stand out in any deliverable that otherwise consists of facts and figures. You can think of stories as containers for elements that you most desire to be remembered. A story can serve as the recognizable brand for a specific message; and this begins to answer the question of when and where we should employ fictional narratives in foresight.