Description
Fluid Futures is about how science fiction imagines an open future. Science fiction does notclaim to predict what will actually happen in times to come. But it offers pictures of potentialdevelopments; it narrates the unfolding of possibilities for change that are already implicit, orincipient, in the present moment. As Rod Serling said, science fiction is “the improbable madepossible.”
The book starts by looking at three tools that are commonly used in science fiction to addressfuturity: extrapolation, speculation, and fabulation. It goes on to consider concrete examplesof how science fiction texts employ these tools to illustrate ways in which the future might bedifferent from – but not entirely discontinuous with – the present-day conditions with which weare familiar. Fluid Futures insists upon the aboutness of science fiction, as it depicts situationsand ideas that are at once possible and difficult to grasp. The book then explores how thegenre embraces fictionality and narrative, reconceives time, and projects images of possibleworlds. The point of the book is not to give a theory of science fiction. Instead, it emphasizesthe ways that science fiction texts themselves propose theories, leading readers toreconceive concepts that we have taken for granted.
