By Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn
Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University
At the Center for Science and the Imagination (CSI) at Arizona State University, we’ve edited and published more than a dozen collections of speculative fiction, along with various and sundry series and one-off narrative projects, since our founding in 2012. Although the first we’ve heard of zoetology or zoefuturism is in connection with this special issue ofVector, we’ve found it to be a helpful lens for reframing some of the stories we’ve had the good luck to work on, and for considering what has made some of these projects tick. It turns out that, perhaps, we’ve often been encouraging writers to approach the intersection of science, technology, and society in ways that could be described as zoefuturistic. This aesthetic’s focus on relationality, on complexity and emergence, and on the entanglement of the processes that give rise to life and living have helped us see the provocations and challenges we’ve issued to authors in new ways. Through the lens of zoefuturism, the project of inviting people to imagine hopeful futures—and practicing this relationship of hope to the future ourselves—is really an exercise in cultivating a different matrix of relationships that give our actions new meaning and consequence.
Roger Ames’s account of zoetology presents a contrast with what he defines as a “substance ontology” that dominates the Western philosophical tradition—it’s evident in Plato and much of Aristotle, with earlier roots in works like Parmenides’s The Way of Truth. In this ontology, existence is a matter of “being per se” (Ames 2023, 87) and reality is composed of discrete entities that embody immutable essences. If things have unique or particular attributes, those are layered onto the essential identity of an entity as “properties that are borne” (Ames 2023, 87). Ames describes this in terms of an “ontological intuition” that any individual thing—a household object, animal (human or otherwise), feature of the landscape, or celestial body—comprises “a closed, exclusive boundary and the strict identity necessary for it to be this, and not that” (Ames 2023, 88).
Drawing on the Book of Changes—but also unearthing strands in Western philosophy, from Dewey to Whitehead, and using a linguistic construction from Ancient Greek—Ames describes zoetology as a “process worldview” that captures the Chinese “shengshenglun” (蛺蛺紶), or “art of living” (Ames 2023, 90). This approach to life and the cosmos trades the Western tradition’s “beings” for “becomings,” insisting that “everything is constituted by its particular relations with everything else” (Ames 2023, 90). In a zoetological view, flux is a constant, and we exist enmeshed in “unbounded natural, social, and cultural ecologies” (Ames 2023, 90). We’re always being constituted and reconstituted by these ever-shifting relationships—with other people, with our natural and built environments, with social forces—and our thoughts and actions are reciprocally contributing to the perpetual reconstitution of those environments and systems. Zoetology also represents an anticipatory view, in the spirit of Dewey’s perspective on imagination or reflexivity in second-order cybernetics: we are all continuously changing and reaching towards the present moment and the future.
With zoefuturism, the shape of the future is determined neither by a transformation in “what it means to be human,” which was never static or knowable in the first place, nor by the introduction of a technological novum (à la Suvin, 1972) that redefines identity, or social forms, or the operations of the natural world. Rather, the futures we envision are shaped by open-ended, labile assemblages of relations, in fluid ecologies—by vast webs of connectedness, causality, shared responsibility, and care. It’s a sensibility that lends itself to tolerance for uncertainty, to embracing mutuality, and to appreciating complex systems and emergent behaviors. To invoke a precept from Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, “God is Change.”
The CSI Approach
Many of CSI’s books take the form of collections of speculative fiction short stories, presented alongside essays and artwork. The books frequently address a challenge at the nexus of technology and society: we’ve published on models for climate action rooted in local community realities; on possibilities for human activity in space, with particular attention to off-world economies; on how a transition to solar energy could reshape politics, governance, and culture; on devising ways to manage nuclear waste that are respectful of the people and lands that host storage facilities; and more. Some of these books have been funded by private philanthropies, or created in partnership with nongovernmental organizations with expertise in a particular field; others are supported by grants from U.S. government agencies, including NASA, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and the Department of Energy; we’ve funded the occasional small fiction project ourselves.
All of these projects involve a synchronous collaborative component, which usually takes the form of an in-person workshop wherein contributors work in small groups to co-create visions of the future in response to prompts, provocations, and creative constraints designed by our team, usually in consultation with one or more co-editors with expertise in a related area. In these small groups, we intentionally bring together people from different backgrounds, with diverse perspectives on and experiences with a topic: in Cities of Light, a book exploring the transition to clean renewable energy sources, one small group included a professional speculative fiction author, an energy-systems researcher with a background in electrical engineering, a painter, a geographer who works on transportation and mobility issues, an artist who works mainly in public art and architecture, and an engineer who specializes in the design of batteries. In a few cases, this collaborative work has been done virtually, and sometimes in a more distributed fashion—for instance, a series of shorter virtual working sessions that unfold over the course of several months, rather than a multi-day in-person convening.
In the rest of this essay, we’ll discuss two stories that have been created through this process, then published by CSI. Applying a zoefuturistic perspective to each story has sensitized us to new ways of thinking along with the narrative, emphasizing elements of relationality and an open-ended, processural approach to meaning, power, and identity. We’ll conclude by stepping back to consider how the method through which these stories are created might help to account for some of their zoetological traits.
Entanglement
As CSI was founded in 2012, we embarked upon our first major book project: a collaboration with 17 top science fiction authors to explore hopeful, technically grounded visions of the future. Inspired by ideas formulated by author Neal Stephenson in the wake of his 2011 World Policy Journal article “Innovation Starvation,” the stories in what became the 2014 anthology Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future were intended to center technology-aided visions of the near future that engineers, scientists, and others could take up and act upon within a single professional lifetime: approximately 50 years from graduation to retirement.
Working in close consultation with scientists and engineers across a variety of fields, from learning science and structural engineering to biology, astronomy, ecology, and architecture, the science fiction authors envisioned futures shaped by great feats of engineering and thrilling acts of human ingenuity. Several stories in the volume, though, focused more on triumphs of human coordination and collaboration than on gadgets or earth-shattering insights. Upon reevaluation, Vandana Singh’s “Entanglement” seems characteristically zoefuturistic in its emphasis on a porous, shifting, contingent global network as the driver for change. Its cast of characters find themselves in states of crisis and transition, and Singh masterfully captures moments of articulation between different registers of meaning: the fleeting connections among these geographically distant humans; the abstract, protean, terribly present specter of climate change; and an array of nonhuman ecologies, natural phenomena, and life forms that inhabit the planet together.
The story links together a small group of strangers strewn across the world: an Inuit scientist working to combat methane emissions in the Arctic, a recently widowed Texan homemaker who stumbles into anti-fracking activism, an environmental scientist who crosses paths with an anonymous Banksy-esque muralist in the Amazonian city of Manaus, a young Dalit man struggling with brutal caste politics in a village in western India, and a technologist from Shanghai who journeys to a remote monastery, where he meets a solitary monk living in the ruins of an avalanche caused by a melting glacier. All of these characters are in an unsettled state: discouraged by the anomie of an industrial world hurtling itself heedlessly toward destruction, set adrift from their families and communities, coping with grief and loss, grappling with prejudice and structural violence. They’re linked by an experimental network of devices that connect people serendipitously to one another when they’re feeling lonely, or abandoned, or in extremis; the connections last only a moment, and are patchy and buggy, but each character in the story experiences some kind of transformation as a result of this transitory intervention.
“Entanglement” is obsessed with networks, network effects, and the emergent properties of complex systems. Irene, the Arctic scientist, is creating a collective of self-organizing robots called “brollys” to identify and prevent methane leaks and melting sea ice, and is beginning to realize that the bots are becoming surprisingly sophisticated. In the Amazon and Texas vignettes, small political acts catalyze nascent local movements for climate action; a possibly numinous connection with a deceased relative may contribute to Irene being saved by a beluga whale when she nearly drowns in icy water; Dr. Ismail, a Nigerian computer science professor who inspires Yuan, the Shanghai-born inventor of the serendipity-connection devices, lectures about the dangers of knowledge silos and the need for transdisciplinary thinking about complex world systems.
Intrinsically tied to this network theme is the notion of the “butterfly effect,” from the famous observation by mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz; the story features both a butterfly, in the form of a drawing passed clandestinely from the street artist to the environmental scientist in Manaus, and a tornado in the western Indian village. In a gesture towards zoefuturistic open-endedness, Singh begins the story with a set of ellipses, “…flapping its wings…,” and ends with a rhymed phrase enclosed in ellipses, “…a butterfly…,” demonstrating that all of these hyperlocal and seemingly individual actions are linked in a global system. Describing zoetology, Ames calls this “holography—literally, the whole as it is implicated in each thing… [a] way of understanding things that begins from the notion that everything is constituted by its particular relations with everything else” (2023, 90).
Everything in Singh’s story is entangled: these strangers, by Yuan’s networked devices, but also the entire biosphere, which can be pushed towards healing or collapse by a repertoire of small actions whose effects radiate out. “Entanglement” blossoms in a zoefuturistic reading: we can see clearly that people and climate phenomena alike are not discrete beings but, as in the Book of Changes, “events” that are happening, in complex dynamic relation, always poised for transformation.
Take Three
Almost ten years after the publication of Hieroglyph,in the spring of 2023, CSI brought together classical musicians, arts leaders, and music educators with speculative fiction authors and a few others with expertise from further afield—civil engineering, public health, and learning science—to consider the future of an institution that is drenched in symbolism and laden with historical baggage: the symphony orchestra. From the legacy of the Western European Enlightenment to cultural elitism, from rarefied aesthetic experiences to the primacy of a calcified canon, these institutions carry incredible cultural weight, and are often positioned by orchestra professionals, donors, and political figures as purveyors of a rich, unassailable, and largely unchanging tradition of artistic excellence, exacting rigor, and spiritual nourishment. But orchestras are facing existential challenges of relevance, representation, and sustainability. We can readily imagine orchestras riven: they find themselves increasingly ill-suited to the needs, tastes, and values of the communities in which they are situated, but any deviation from the status quo can feel like a negation, a compromise, or a dereliction of their duty to protect and promulgate their values. In this gathering, we collectively imagined these institutions reshaped as vibrant spaces for building community, as models for learning and human coordination, and as providers of resources to aid in health, resilience, and social cohesion.
Each of our four working groups considered the future of the orchestra through a different thematic lens, designed to bring into focus different social functions and roles that a future orchestra might play in connection with the communities that host and sustain it. Sound Systems, the resulting book, is accordingly divided into four sections:Orchestra as Game, Orchestra as Public Good, Orchestra as Network, and Orchestra as Infrastructure. In response to the final lens, Karen Lord’s short story “Take Three” provokes us to radically reframe our expectations of orchestras and classical music by projecting into the far future, placing orchestras in a moment where humans are new entrants in a larger interplanetary community with other intelligent life forms.
In “Take Three,” music provides the foundation—an infrastructure—for interspecies communication in a world where humans interact regularly with extraterrestrials. The Shining Ones communicate with humans (and presumably other species throughout the cosmos) using the Official Speech, a musically complex and demanding universal language. In this future, orchestras as we know them are well-nigh extinct, but we do see two very different infrastructures in which music is deployed. One is the House of Music, an increasingly outmoded haven for tranquil, elevated aesthetic experiences for a dwindling clientele of aesthetes, where classical music is paired with haute cuisine and artful, soothing décor. The other is the Earth Ethnomusicology Project, one of a number of hybrid endeavors wherein humans collaborate with the Shining Ones. This boundary-breaking program researches, performs, archives, and mashes up all kinds of musics, classical and otherwise, in settings virtual and physical, indoor and outdoor, on Earth and off-world. As Sara, a student and adherent of the project, explains: “Our locations are real and virtual, permanent and ephemeral. Part historical museum, part educational center. Recording, performing, teaching, learning, creating the new, reviving the old. We are working to develop our own approved vernacular, equal in dignity and complexity to the Official Speech of the Shining Ones.”
Pierre, our main character, is an accomplished cellist from a storied musical family, but after the collapse of the traditional ecosystem of orchestras, he finds himself running a House of Music, aging past his musical prime and fading into obscurity. He hasn’t been discovered by a sponsor and invited to join the Shining Ones and learn the Official Speech, which has become “the common language of law, diplomacy, and trade,” but he’s also wary and resentful of the hegemony of the Shining Ones and wishes ardently to turn back the clock and claim his rightful place in a vaunted symphony orchestra. Pierre is a finicky type, a perfectionist and a bit of a prig, intolerant of momentary failings and creative licenses taken by his fellow players. When Sara visits his House of Music, she reveals that she and one of the Shining Ones had observed Pierre playing in a quartet years earlier; his inflexibility and exacting standards of artistic precision made him seem ill-suited to study the Official Speech or help to develop an Earthly corollary to it. As she shares, “The music of the Official Speech is not a recitation. It’s a conversation.”
So far, so zoefuturistic, right? Through this encounter between Pierre and Sara, author Karen Lord pits slavish devotion to a narrowly defined, stagnant, inherently elitist definition of excellence against something more fluid and relational. We don’t get to see much of the Shining Ones in the story, and whenever Pierre looks at one of them, they exude a painfully brilliant light that makes them celestial, but also murky and aloof. So, it’s left to the reader to speculate about what kind of interplanetary community humans have joined, or been induced to join. But galactic power relations aside, we’re encouraged to imagine the Official Speech as offering harmony, connection, cohesion, as opposed to a traditional classical music paradigm built on hierarchy and a sharp division between speakers (players) and listeners. The Earth Ethnomusicology Project model that Sara describes to Pierre blends the intensive skill development and human coordination of the classical ensemble with sounds, practices, and vibes from a broad array of Earth’s musical cultures: “modern panyards with professional steel orchestras performing, teaching, and passing on their distinctive legacies. … New schools dedicated solely to percussion, building on centuries-old traditions of multiple cultures. Choirs of vocal and bodily instruments—tapping feet, clapping hands, hooting and trilling and clicks and whispers.”
In a virtuosic turn, Lord encloses Pierre’s entire journey in a metatextual frame. Just before the story’s end, we learn that we have been reading through a rendition of Pierre Doit Choisir, an experimental symphonic piece that is a beloved artwork in this future of humans and Shining Ones, which Lord terms “the Extraterrestrial Age,” the successor to our current “Information Age.” We learn that Pierre is a fictional character, perhaps inspired by one of three historical Pierres, or perhaps a composite figure, or a purely metaphorical construct. Pierre Doit Choisir has three different endings, and the orchestra and conductor for each performance select which ending to play. In some renditions, the orchestra plays all three denouements, or has the audience vote; and “One version, adapted with permission from the creators by the Night Crew Collective, has three orchestras playing the three concluding movements at the same time in stormy yet harmonious cooperation.” There is a universally adhered-to norm that performances of Pierre Doit Choisir should not be recorded, meaning that “the question of what Pierre will choose to do remains in a state of suspended anticipation, never to be resolved until the hour of performance.”
None of the three paths available to Pierre work out perfectly. In the first, he briefly joins the Earth Ethnomusicology Project but cannot find his place in this nonhierarchical milieu. He returns to the House of Music, “growing more and more eccentric as he clings to unreliable memories of the idealized past when there were no Shining Ones, when his lineage and vocation made him more than ordinary.” In the second, he joins up and is subjected to myriad therapies and trainings to try to undo his performance style, which is perceived by his new collaborators as “over-rehearsed and lacking in sincerity.” He stays with the project but retreats to its periphery, where he works on perfecting the Vibrational Aesthetic, which was his vocation at the House of Music. In the third, he joins up and while he is ruffled by the lack of hierarchy (“frustrated that there are no higher rungs to rise to, no lower rungs to look down on”), and while he never quite overcomes the “taint of stiffness” in his playing, he is able to find some contentment, particularly in brief moments of fascination and joy that make “his blood beat faster under his cultured, crystalline shell.”
In “Take Three,” we see an approach that resonates with a zoefuturistic aesthetic on several levels: Pierre’s struggles to shift from a fixed, hierarchical, insular lifeway to one characterized by interchange, relationality, improvisation, and continual reinvention; the nebulous, adaptable model for creative exploration and interspecies thriving pursued by the Earth Ethnomusicology Project; the refusal of closure in Pierre Doit Choisir, which leaves the fate of Pierre, who stands in for humanity’s atavistic strains in this newly expansive interplanetary future, continually open for revision and interpretation. Likewise, Lord’s story itself slyly divulges and withholds information in a way that leaves much about Pierre and the fate of humanity unwritten. Do we prefer this future where music and language meld together? How much do we sympathize with Pierre? Are Sara and her cohorts shedding their humanity in joining the Shining Ones, and if they are, is that ultimately a good thing?
Zoefuturism and the Conditions of Literary Production
When we combed through the Center for Science and the Imagination archives with a zoefuturistic lens, we easily stacked up a dozen candidates, across several books and collections, before settling on “Entanglement” and “Take Three” to focus on here. This raises the question: Is there something about the way we’re producing these stories that’s inclining them towards a zoetological sensibility?
Though this is just speculation (and we’ll once again disclaim that zoefuturism is a new concept for us), we’d like to suggest that perhaps the collaborative, socially intensive methods by which CSI stories are produced might tend to generate more relational, open, polyvocal narratives. These stories, perhaps, key on process rather than closure, and on the dynamic interactions among a plurality of systems instead of discrete, bounded singularities.
The process of literary production is often mythologized as an act of heroic individual creativity—think Jack Kerouac perched in his fire lookout in the Cascade Mountains—but for most writers and most books, it involves intensive sociality as much as focused solitude. This might take any number of forms: authors visit physical locations, talk with informants on the ground in the places or communities about which they are writing, participate in writers’ groups, read works-in-progress at public events, attend virtual sessions on topics related to their work, join fellowships at universities, or work closely with editors or other advisors. This social process is often hidden, or absorbed into a text, only to be found on acknowledgements pages or in interviews with authors around a book’s publication; sometimes it’s entirely submerged, unspoken. And of course the texts themselves are always talking to one another, communicating through the intersections of language, style, homage, adaptation, and dialog.
At CSI, we make the social process around the creation of a vision of the future, and a story that wends its way through that future, explicit. We foreground it in project descriptions, in editors’ introductions, in “About this Book” sections and author’s notes at the end of a story, in detailed “Credits” pages that describe each contributor’s precise role in a book. We write about the process in scholarly articles and, when we discuss our publications in popular media, the workshop that gives rise to the book is often given equal airtime as the content of the book itself. The book, and the short fiction in it, are artifacts of a process of collaborative imagination. They document a set of enthusiastic, complex, and searching conversations whose essence, with luck, is captured in some way in the stories, essays, art, and other materials that comprise the eventual book.
This social process doesn’t end in publication, either; in the case of Hieroglyph, for instance, we used the book’s launch to stand up dozens of conversations about the power of imagination and storytelling for helping us to come to grips with possible futures, and to deliberate about the roles that a wide variety of technologies could play in society. Those conversations spanned venues ranging from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to New America, a think tank in Washington, DC, to the headquarters of technology companies like Tumblr and Google, to the venerable civic events series Town Hall Seattle, to bookstores in New York, San Francisco, Toronto, Phoenix, and other cities, to the pages of the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Slate magazine, MIT Technology Review, and more. It was precisely the post-launch sociality around Hieroglyph that created the energy necessary for us to continue publishing stories created in this manner—conversations stemming from that book led to us establishing the Future Tense Fiction series (now published in Issues in Science and Technology, the house magazine of the National Academy of Sciences); to the book Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities, supported by a grant from NASA; and to smaller-scale endeavors like Us in Flux, a series of flash fiction stories published during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic that imagined futures shaped by community resilience and mutual aid.
This mode of literary production necessarily captures the flow and flux of an ongoing conversation. These stories are provisional, and they exist as dotted-line paths towards many possible futures, rather than a prediction or an endorsement of a particular route ahead. Fiction authors who work with us are inundated with ideas and angles from diverse perspectives, through the workshops and convenings that inaugurate these projects and throughout the process of consultation, editing, publishing, and post-publication conversation. An author might easily start a project with deep discussions with a half-dozen people—they might confer with a visual artist, an engineer or technologist, a historian or literary scholar, a policy wonk, and a graduate student just starting their career in a specific field. Each of these people imparts not just information, but a perspective, a stance, a set of priorities and values, moral and ethical concerns, anxieties and uncertainties. Collecting, filtering, and condensing all of this input and transforming it into a story can lead to narratives that are richly layered, engaging with many voices and different registers of reality, like Singh’s “Entanglement” and Lord’s “Take Three.” These stories reflect the complex social worlds that underpin their conception and production.
Now that we have access to zoefuturism and zoetology as lenses for thinking about and around our work, we’re excited to see what new ideas and possibilities they bring into focus. If we’ve been scattering zoetological seeds all along, what if we set our minds to intentionally planting and growing a garden of them? Zoefuturism taps into what science fiction stories can do best: helping us to dwell with the complexity that characterizes our experience of the universe, rather than trying to winnow it down into something flatter and more manageable. One of the persistent joys in our work at CSI has been to see the futures we cultivate blossom and take on vibrant new lives of their own.
Works Referenced
Ames, Roger T. 2023. “‘Zoetology’: A New Name for an Old Way of Thinking.” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 93: 81–98. doi.org/10.1017/S1358246123000012.
Butler, Octavia. 1993. Parable of the Sower. Four Walls Eight Windows.
Eschrich, Joey, and Clark A. Miller, eds. 2021. Cities of Light: A Collection of Solar Futures. Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University. csi.asu.edu/books/cities-of-light.
Finn, Ed, and Joey Eschrich, eds. 2017. Visions, Ventures, Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures. Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University. csi.asu.edu/books/vvev.
Lord, Karen. 2025. “Take Three.” In Sound Systems: The Future of the Orchestra, edited by Alex Laing, Joey Eschrich, and Ed Finn. Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University. csi.asu.edu/books/soundsystems.
Singh, Vandana. 2014. “Entanglement.” In Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer. William Morrow.
Stephenson, Neal. 2011. “Innovation Starvation.” World Policy Journal 28 (3): 11–16. doi.org/10.1177/0740277511425349.
Suvin, Darko. 1972. “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre.” College English 34 (3): 372–382. doi.org/10.2307/375141.
Joey Eschrich is the managing editor for the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University and assistant director of Future Tense, a partnership of ASU and New America. He has coedited a number of collections of fiction and nonfiction, most recently Climate Imagination (MIT Press, 2025).
Ed Finn is the founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, where he is an associate professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the GAME School and academic director of Future Tense, a partnership of ASU and New America.
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