Interview by Paul Raven of Worldbuilding Agency

Paul knows the questions to ask! This is a great interview that highlights my core project. If you want to know what I'm aiming at with Unapocalyptic, read this.

I've followed maverick thinker and critic Paul Graham Raven for years. We recently sat down to talk about how I integrate (or fail to integrate) my science fiction and foresight personas. This fantastic interview touches on nearly everything I want to do with this newsletter and my work in general.

Paul is one of those impossible-to-categorize thinkers. Definitely a man after my own heart. For example, take his Instant Archetypes card deck, a Tarot deck reimagined as a foresight tool, with cards such as The Consumer rather than The Fool. The deck is an ideational aid, designed to help you think about the future.

In addition to his design and speaking work, Paul also runs Worldbuilding.Agency, which he says is not a newsletter, but “the research journal of Magrathea Futures AB, a boutique critical and creative foresight consultancy.” Paul’s never afraid to challenge me, but our projects run in parallel in cool and surprising ways. Please check out his work.

Here are some excerpts from our discussion to get you interested in clicking the link above:

The Newsletter Project

One thing I've done with this platform is to lay down a theoretical argument that would be of more interest to people doing foresight, perhaps, by asking the question of what would a twenty-first century science fiction look like? A science fiction whose ideas only came from the twenty-first century, and not the twentieth or nineteenth century. And I am systematically laying out a set of foundations, I guess you'd call them, for worldbuilding that is based only on twenty-first century ideas.

Twenty-First-Century Science Fiction

[Critic] John Clute was right that the received science fiction of my youth was really about the limitless possibilities of the future, whereas the science fiction that it was possible to write immediately after the turn of the century was necessarily pessimistic. The future was a blank for us for quite a long time, and the only model that we had was this positive and positivistic vision.

…I don't know exactly what the sea change has been, but I think it is true that we are starting to be able to make a break with that positivistic gung-ho vision of the future, and say that there is not only one alternative to that, which as John Clute would put it would be death! It's just that we needed a little time to marshal our imaginations to see what the other real possibilities were, and the genres we call solarpunk and hopepunk are examples of our first stab at that—books like Ruthanna Emrys's A Half Built Garden.

Limitations of Worldbuilding

You write something down and then it speaks back to you and says, no, actually that won't work, because when you put the characters in the situation, when you bring together a whole set of different technologies or ideas that each individually seem sound and watch them bounce off each other, suddenly, you discover that certain things just don't work, that certain futures don't make any sense. On the flip side of that, often you get synergies between different technologies that result in entirely new visions of what could happen in the future—like a synergy between renewable energy, precision fermentation, and the electrification of transport, these things play off against each other. 

Where Science Fiction and Foresight Converge

There's two ways to approach [optimism] if you're a science fiction writer. One is to jump over [our present crisis] by a couple thousand years, and just say that it was solved; the other is to wrestle directly with the moment that we're in, and with the very near future, and to write fiction that you know is going to be obsolete by the time that it is published. And very few people have the courage to do that—because we are all trying to push the boundaries and stay one step ahead. But I think we have to stop doing that; we have to start writing works that we know will not be able to keep up, because we don't want to be ten years ahead of the curve at this point, we want to be six months ahead of the curve—because we have to actually make decisions and make changes in the real world right now, and for that we have to be fully engaged with the world as it is now.

There’s a lot more. Rereading what I said, I’m realizing that there’s a way to frame the project of a twenty-first-century science fiction, and I say it in the interview but not explicitly. It’s this:

To do the work necessary this century, we must abandon the “view from nowhere” and the Heinleinian vision of the future as a stage on which a superempowered humanity acts. Instead, from now on every imagined future involves two actors, who play off against each other: humanity, and our environment. The protagonist of a truly twenty-first-century SF is no longer just us; it is these two forces coevolving.

I’ll explore these ideas in more detail in upcoming posts. For now, please read the whole interview. Paul is a provocative thinker and an expert interviewer.

—K

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