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Applied African SF: Volume 1
Category: articles
Zoefuturism in creative practice: responses
Introduction by Yen Ooi and Stephen Oram
When we started thinking about the call for articles last year, we wanted to approach it in a Zoefuturistic manner – by giving space and creating opportunities for the issue(s) and articles to ‘become.’ As a new topic, we were very aware that this is a process of exploration and discovery, more than a call to enforce and curate what we think Zoefuturism is. It needed to be reflective and malleable.
In this article, we will look at three of these creative reflections of Zoefuturism through different lenses:
- Compost Futures by the London Science Fiction Research Community Co-Directorate
- Station to Station by Goblin Futures
- “Narrative Structures and Zoefuturism” by Christopher Morrison
While all three pieces explore very different topics and perspectives, they are all reflections of Zoefuturism through practitioners’ creative action, and they form a Zoefuturistic response, as reactions to the introduction of Zoefuturism, playing with the ideas of our futures through relationality and constant becomings.
Compost Futures by the London Science Fiction Research Community (LSFRC). This creative-critical submission, in the form of a full zine, was made by the co-directorate of the LSFRC to explore questions around the relationships between humans with the other-than-human through the idea of “compost,” inspired by Zoefuturism. Follow the link to read and explore the articles and artworks, and to learn how co-authoring a zine with nature turned out.
Station to Station by Goblin Futures (https://goblin-futures.itch.io/station-to-station).
*Fishpunk is something we made up, not a pre-existing genre. In other words, Station to Station is fishpunk, and anything else people want to consider fishpunk they can, just as long as it is Approved By Fish.
**Weirdhope is a term coined by COPY/PASTE CO-OP, which they describe as a form of eco-punk that is stylistically and thematically opposed to grimdark. For more, you can check out their game ECO MOFOS!! or the webpage for the Weird Hope Engines exhibition that ran in the Bonington Gallery in 2025.
Narrative Structures and Zoefuturism
By Christopher Morrison
In the West[1] there is one story structure primarily taught to readers and practitioners alike. The Aristotelean 3-Act Structure/The Hero’s Journey. I’m well aware that’s two structures, but they are so inter-linked now as to be extensions of one another. And, most importantly, they share a core philosophical purpose. That purpose: re-enforce Heroic Individualism. The Protagonist must be the one to solve the problem. They, and only THEY. Some assistance is rendered along the way, but in the climax, it is them and them alone (usually smashing) their way to the end. And that end as a teleological conclusion forgives (or ignores) all things that came before.
Anything else is considered a “subversion of” or “breaking the rules”. But, as Matthew Salsess asks, “Who writes those rules?” (Salesses, Matthew. Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping. New York: Catapult, 2021.) It is the dominant culture in the West. Patriarchal, white supremacist[2], heteronormative. Those values that hold up a human being… all at once illustrating the protagonist as special and the norm. The story’s purpose is to make them a static, fixed Hero.
So, if this structure serves to support the Culture of Being in the West, what structures could support a culture of Becoming from Asian Cultures not shackled to the mast of Individualism?[3] What structures could a writer creating in a Zoefuturist context rely on to illustrate Human Becoming and relieve their woes about what comes next in their story?
Taking a cue from the absolute basic root of Dr. Ames’ work and the language he is immersed in, let’s look at ShengSheng (生生) – Procreativity. This word Dr. Ames presents as a crucial part of the early Cosmology of Confucian thought[4] and gives us a perfect jumping-off point:
Repetition.
We all understand one of the crushing features of humanity is the repetition of life. Buddhism tackles this issue with the simple mantra: “Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.” The road to human becoming must run directly through repetition just as the word and pictogram in Chinese suggests in its very form.
However, the West abhors repetition[5] (except in cases of utter personal sacrifice to the destruction of oneself[6]) and worships at the feet of novelty.
New or perish! You are only as good as your last ____!
Yet repetition itself holds true meaning-making. True becoming. But in Western storytelling it’s relegated to a “callback” or some “comment” on one form or another and not the core engine to drive story and meaning.
Let’s explore a few structures where repetition is the heart and engine of its purpose.
Spirals: first brought to my attention through the work of Jane Alison.[7] Humans are pattern recognition machines, therefore to create a literary or dramatic spiral one repeats meaning by bringing back a panoply of artistic resources. Place, character(s), theme(s), color, etc. Most powerful in the resource kit is repeating events in your story. What one may lose in novelty one gains in grounding your audience – their pattern recognition (and their simple act of becoming themselves – living life) brings the repetition to awareness and, if done well, the question – Why? Why repeat this now? Here? Or the repetition simply becomes the Breath of the narrative. Inhaling on return – exhaling on leaving – or vice versa. It is a structure that is close to life itself.
While not a Zoefuturist film, let’s look at Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, dir. In the Mood for Love. Block 2 Pictures, 2000). A love story where its lovers are not allowed to consummate their love… or even say the word to each other. They are married to others while falling in love with each other. It is primarily a Spiral of place. Hallway, stairway, alleyway. All intermediate places – not defined. Not of themselves, but conduits to other locations. Perfect locations for a relationship that isn’t formed – isn’t one or the other. The characters are also suspended; neither really married nor free; not in love, but in love. Repetitions of their own conditions. The continuous use of smoke as a repeated image in the film is powerful. Sure, it looks damn cool, but it’s neither solid nor liquid. Neither here nor there… just slowly looping around itself and evaporating. Repeating. Spiraling.
Next, we’ll look at ‘nested’ structure.
Mainly known from the 1001 Arabian Nights and the film Rashomon. Nested stories are stories-within-stories without being anthology or connected episodic in nature. Story layers. Characters may re-appear, settings may re-appear[8] but what certainly repeats is theme and/or a central question or as Henry Lien likes to point out: culture[9].
Again, here’s a structure that reflects life’s journey. We are stories-within-stories. We hold our story, our family’s story, we are minor or major characters in everyone’s stories that surround us. And other’s stories can affect us directly or indirectly if we appear in them or not. As Dr. Ames points out through Zoetological philosophy we are “…interdependent human ‘becomings’ rather than discreet human beings… [through a relational understanding].[10]”
Nested structure allows writers to sift through the depth of our humanity all in one frame. The flow of this structure is the essence of interconnected ‘becoming’. Again, like life, the more we lift the lid and interact with the depths and layers underneath the more meaning and interconnectedness we experience.
In conclusion, ‘spiral’ and ‘nested’ narrative structures are available to writers of every form and genre, but are especially powerful in a Zoetological and/or Zoefuturist context. They allow for a direct reflection into the bones of the work and to elevate stories from a single individualist journey into the wider world-view of human becomings. By leaving behind the strictures of Western storytelling obsessions we can imagine and enact a more interconnected future.
[1] Excluding Indigenous cultures.
[2] Colonial, at best.
[3] This is where I’ll ask you to forgive me. I’m a practitioner and not a scholar, perhaps others have done this work – I look forward to hearing about them if so… Henry Lien’s work comes to mind.
[4] Ames, R. T. (2025). Living Chinese Philosophy: Zoetology as First Philosophy (p. 8). State University of New York Press.
[5] To the point: In an early screenwriting class the “wisdom” of never repeating a location was handed down to me. (This was the working philosophy of a high-powered producer and their thoughts on scriptwriting.)
[6] Puritan work ethic for example. Or (especially for women) the carer role taken to its extreme… it is lauded and pitied and ridiculed all at once.
[7] Alison, J. (2019). Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative (p. 143). Catapult.
[8] Or remain the same as with Rashomon.
[9] Lien, H. (2025). Spring, summer, asteroid, bird: The art of Eastern storytelling (1st ed.). W. W. Norton & Company.
[10] Ames, R. T. (2025). Living Chinese Philosophy: Zoetology as First Philosophy (p. 8). State University of New York Press.
Dreams of Arcadia: Zoefuturism and the Re-Enchantment of the Deep Self
By Kiti McGlashan
As meaning-seeking beings, we live in alternating cycles of embracing or fearing the natural world. Literature offers a good framework for observing this ancient and ongoing ‘battle’ for the human spirit between the manifestation of our reverence and stewardship of nature and our fear of something that could so easily kill us. As industrialisation moved us further away from nature, and humans started living almost completely dis-attached from the natural world, we saw a resurgence of the need to find belonging in the greater order. The last two hundred years have presented a shift in our attitudes towards our surroundings and an influx of philosophies and literature that try to reconnect humans with nature.
Environmentalism has clearly entered the focus of modern worries, but it often presents shortsighted forms that ignore the bigger picture. By focusing on the more immediate and visible concerns, environmental campaigns often prioritise narrow objectives while overlooking the negative structural downside of some of the green politics (e.g. “green colonialism). The climate crisis and the development of the Anthropocene as a theoretical background for our concerns are lacking in a holistic outlook of reality and often showcase similar dangers as our previous attitudes towards the natural world. While there is a rising concern about the land, it is through an anthropocentric point of view. As long as we keep seeing ourselves as separate to the non-human lifeworld, we will live incomplete existences, and our solutions will be forever lacking. What is needed is “a futurism of connectedness, engagement, and relationality, a futurism of ‘life-becomings’” (Ooi, n.d.). And this reflection on the need for interconnectedness has recently been championed by new subgenres of science fiction.
Storytelling has always been a mirror to the soul of humanity. It focuses the collective emotions and concerns in a metaphorical and philosophical format that offers more than simple escapism. Up until now, science fiction in particular has offered the best platform where the concerns of our present and future are laid out in the format of cautionary tales of how our environmental damage leads to post-apocalyptic scenarios. There are countless examples of stories focused on ecological collapse such as The First and Last Men by Olaf Stapledon that explores humanity’s eventual extinction, the dystopian future of Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky where humanity is almost extinct and earth ravaged by radiation, The Road by Cormac McCarthy that is set in a post-apocalyptic setting following a cataclysmic event, the grimdark world of the Warhammer 40K universe where after the AI wars mankind is plummeted into a dark universe of chaos and death. These are just some examples out of a very vast body of literature which express the climate anxiety our society feels.
Continue reading “Dreams of Arcadia: Zoefuturism and the Re-Enchantment of the Deep Self “Zoefuturism as CoFuturism: Revisiting the genre argument
Dr. Patrick Anthony Barbosa Brock
CoFutures
What do we do when we talk about Zoefuturism? This essay argues that Zoefuturism and CoFuturisms are not merely aesthetic or speculative categories, but infrastructural practices of collective world-making. I propose a framework for understanding how these movements intervene in social imaginaries through genre formation, manifestos, and boundary-making practices, while also examining their material implications for the communities and infrastructures from which they emerge. To that end, I draw on my previous theorization of the role genre mechanics play in the formation of collectivities.
Although they are envisioned here as operationally connected, speculative fiction, CoFuturisms, and Zoefuturism should not be treated as interchangeable categories. Speculative fiction is a broad narrative mode oriented toward hypothetical worlds, alternative temporalities, and estrangement from consensus reality. CoFuturisms, by contrast, designate culturally situated interventions that mobilize speculative methods to contest dominant imaginaries and produce alternative social horizons. Zoefuturism differs from both in that its central organizing principle is relationality itself: an ontological emphasis on “interconnected becoming” across human, nonhuman, ecological, and material forms of life. Where speculative fiction often asks what futures might exist, and CoFuturisms ask who gets to imagine and inhabit those futures, Zoefuturism asks how forms of life become entangled in the production of futurity.
CoFuturisms as a conceptual umbrella emerged with the publication of the Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms and its survey of speculative works from the world’s periphery, many of which blur the boundaries between art and activism. Like the imaginaries from which they emerge, CoFuturisms are collective constructions shaped by forces operating at both macro and micro levels. As digital media theorist, poet, and software designer Jason Edward Lewis writes, they “create a field of ‘future facts,’ a fully realized reality that exists somewhere down the timeline, waiting for us to catch up to it” (11). More broadly, CoFuturisms often emerge through science fiction (SF) and speculative practices, commonly appropriating their methods, to critique dominant imaginaries and intervene micropolitically in the present. As science fiction scholar Taryne Jade Taylor observes, “CoFuturisms is a movement that is found both within science fiction and fantasy and also reaches past the boundaries of speculative fiction” (2023).
In conversation with the editors of this special issue, I was provided with the following conceptualization of Zoefuturism: “Zoefuturism as a genre is founded upon the understanding that all things are relational—where descriptors, characteristics, or even a sense of ‘being’ depend upon everything around them—and that everything is constantly becoming, much like our DNA. As such, Zoefuturism is not political.”
I interpret Zoefuturism as an attempt to articulate a relational understanding of the world that moves beyond binary frameworks by foregrounding becoming, interdependence, and ecological entanglement. Unlike many futurisms organized around identity, technological acceleration, or emancipatory struggle, Zoefuturism situates relationality itself as the condition of futurity. Its emphasis falls less on representing marginalized futures than on rethinking the ontological assumptions through which futures are imagined in the first place. Yet Zoefuturism cannot escape political implications simply by rejecting explicit political identification. Like CoFuturisms, it shapes how reality is narratively and institutionally organized through language, cultural production, archives, and the social imaginaries that orient collective life. Its politics emerge less through ideological declaration than through interventions into the conceptual and affective infrastructures governing how relations between life forms are understood.
These interventions occur through genre itself. Genres are not merely aesthetic containers but social formations circulating among texts, communities, markets, and institutions. Because genres organize recognition, expectation, and participation, they function as technologies of collective becoming. Speculative fiction provides many of the formal tools that make such interventions narratively intelligible, while CoFuturisms mobilize those tools toward situated cultural and political projects. Zoefuturism, in turn, redirects speculative practice toward relational ontologies that destabilize distinctions between nature and culture, subject and environment, and human and nonhuman life.
Continue reading “Zoefuturism as CoFuturism: Revisiting the genre argument”Rehabilitating Eva Hauserová’s Biopunk
By Cyril Simsa
Eva Hauserová promoting her non-fiction title Na koštěti se dá i lítat [Broomsticks can also be used for flying], 1995
Of the many contemporary subgenres of sf that can claim they originated as a reaction to the cyberpunk revolution of the 1980s, one of the oldest is certainly “biopunk”, especially if one counts the mini-genre of “ribofunk” – shouted into existence by the American writer Paul Di Filippo (1954-) in 1990, and just as quickly extinguished – as a legitimate precursor (Di Filippo 1990). Probably only “steampunk”, coined by K.W. Jeter (1950-) in 1987, is older (Nicholls and Langford 2025).
“Biopunk”, as it is used today, refers to a subgenre of sf that adopts many of the stylistic and narrative tropes of cyberpunk – a focus on stories built around an ensemble cast of petty criminals, (gene) hackers and chancers, urban subcultures, and a “revolt into style” (if the reader will pardon the throwback to the cultural criticism of an earlier era) (Melly 1970) – while sourcing its McGuffins from biotechnology, rather than cybernetics. In this contemporary sense, biopunk has its origins in the American genre writing of the 1990s, with the first documented use (from two different, and almost certainly unconnected sources) in 1992, and the subsequent attempt to identify precursors in earlier genre history.1
Di Filippo takes this as far back as H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896); of more recent antecedents, Greg Bear’s Blood Music (1985) and Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix (1985) are frequently cited (Di Filippo 1990; Schmeink 2014b, 32). From these American genre roots, biopunk has spread around the world and into other media, film and TV in particular. The hit TV show, Orphan Black (2013-2017), with its saga of a shadowy organisation trying to direct the future of human evolution through gene hacking and the complications that arise when some of its human clones escape, would be a good example. All of which makes a neat teleological narrative of exactly the kind that, in theory, every self-respecting punk of whatever persuasion is supposed to abhor; and none of which quite holds together when examined in a broader framework.
Because there is a catch – of course, there is – and in a European context, this neat timeline is disrupted by the Czech writer Eva Hauserová (1954-2023), also known as Eva Hauser, who in 1988 independently came up with a literary intervention she called “biopunk,” and her coinage pre-dates the American one. This sits uncomfortably with the official chronicle, making her something later critics have had to explain away, though there are also those who have simply ignored her. (For the former, see Schmeink, who will be discussed below; for the latter, a simple Google search will reveal any number of biopunk, or biopunk-adjacent websites that have no idea of Eva’s existence.)
Thrutopia with Manda Scott and Denise Baden
Aware of other sub-genres that might sit alongside, overlap or appear to be similar to Zoefuturism, we welcomed contributions about them, to help shape our understanding of Zoefuturism relationally.
Below, Manda Scott and Denise Baden set out strong cases for Thrutopia.
This is interesting from a zoefuturist perspective because Thrutopia is about change and the journey; imagining positive futures and the practicalities of getting there has to be a good approach.
However, Zoefuturism does not presuppose an end point or a goal, more that there is a distinct need to fundamentally alter our world-view, of how we interact and fit in with the world in the broadest sense. It also does not delve in binarisms like positivity/negativity inasmuch as binaries are composites of a holistic purview of life.
We need healthy relationships between all of ‘life’ and ‘non-life’ in the now, acknowledging the diversities while engaging in the nuanced relationships that encompass nature, technology, and more. We need to understand that change is constant and how we live is what affects the possible futures that it is becoming.
Read more: Thrutopia with Manda Scott and Denise BadenWe hope that celebrating other sub-genres while encouraging a Zoefuturist approach to reading and writing them will make them more impactful.
Yen Ooi and Stephen Oram (guest-editors, Zoefuturism)
Thrutopian Road Maps
An essay by Manda Scott (August 2025)
“At times, a single fluctuation … may become so powerful … that it shatters the preexisting organization. At this revolutionary moment … it is inherently impossible to determine in advance which direction change will take: whether the system will disintegrate into ‘chaos’ or leap to a new, more differentiated, higher level of ‘order.’” – Alvin Toffler
If we who write can craft clear routes from a recognisable present, mapping towards a future that engages people at the limbic level, we can help tip the balance to a future where a critical mass of us begins to yearn for the outcomes offered, and change will happen.
This is the explicit foundation of the Thrutopian genre: offering route maps—of which there are, self-evidently, an almost infinite number—towards a future we would be proud to leave to the generations that will follow us.
If we can imagine forward seven generations and look into the eyes of a young person living in the world for which we have laid the foundations, if they feel safe, confident, fully connected to all parts of themselves, each other and the Web of Life, then we’re on the road to the emergent edge of inter-becoming from which an entirely new system can potentially arise.
As writers, we can gather the building blocks that are already emerging and make of them stepping stones across the river. Stretching the metaphor to breaking point, the narratives we thereby shape must at least offer a glimpse of a reason to cross (motivation), the means to make the crossing (agency), the route to take (direction) and the freedom to take it (empowerment).
This is the heart of behavioural change: MADE:
Motivation: with all my heart, I yearn for a future I can glimpse but not yet embrace;
Agency: I have the tools to take the first steps towards this future;
Direction: I know the routes away from my present state that will lead me towards the future I yearn for;
Empowerment: I am free of constraint in the present moment enabling me to take the steps and wield the tools in ways that will be effective.
Each of these belongs squarely in the realms of creative imagination. I am not pretending that crafting these is easy; it’s not. One of the many reasons there are so many dystopias and so few genuine Thrutopias is that it’s mind-bendingly hard to find peaceful routes to an equitable world in which humanity flourishes in concert with – even in service to – Life.
But it isn’t impossible and frankly, if the hardest thing we have to do in the next decade is get our heads around the thinking that already exists at the emergent edge of possibility, then we will be supremely lucky.
And this is the single most important point. If you take nothing else away, please believe me that there are people already working at the emergent edge of wide boundary systems thinking, of food and farming systems (we have to abandon industrial agriculture as a matter of urgency), of biomimicry, doughnut/ecological/degrowth economics, distributed governance systems, regenerative use of AI, urban and rural planning based on fully regenerative principles…
Every one of these is actively being pursued, it’s just that our legacy media runs with the old style mindset of ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ and they’re not up to speed (yet) with the idea that the existing system is disintegrating and a new one is already emerging from the ashes.
This is part of the Thrutopian narrative shift of which we are an integral part: building routes through, from a recognisable present towards a future we’d all be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.
Writing a future we’d like to see, the thrutopian approach.
By Denise Baden (April 2026)
Science fiction often envisions not just technological innovations but societal ones. For example, Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed imagines an anarchic/communist society that is broadly utopian in its ideals and has distinctly different arrangements and values surrounding ownership. However, there are few novels that show the process by which we might get from where we are now to such a future. Kevin Kelly coined the term ‘protopia,’ which describes the process of improvement over time. Rupert Read similarly talks about ‘thrutopia’: how we get from where we are now to where we’d like to be, i.e. a flourishing, sustainable society. The idea was so powerful that bestselling author Manda Scott set up a Thrutopia masterclass for writers: “writing our way to a future we’d be proud to leave to the coming generations.” She moved from writing historical fiction to a novel set in the near future, Any Human Power, which adopts the thrutopian approach.
In this article I discuss some of the books published by Habitat Press, an indie publisher with a niche interest in stories that showcase thrutopian or protopian pathways. There are numerous ‘cli-fi’ stories that present dystopian visions of what will happen if we don’t act. These can be unexpectedly problematic, as research has highlighted the dangers of trying to ‘scare people green.’ Dystopian stories run the risk of fear-driven counterproductive responses, such as the blaming of marginalised groups or buying up all the toilet rolls. There are also numerous eco-fiction stories that persuade us to love nature and plant trees but get us no nearer to understanding what the really effective solutions are and, even more importantly, how we might get there from where we are today. This is a gap that I haven’t seen any fiction (other than Ministry for the Future) fulfil.
Steve Willis, a climate engineer and author (Fairhaven, Defying Futility) has allowed me to share his diagram of films, books etc., which plots dystopian/utopian visions of the future against plausibility. It’s clear that there’s little that is both positive and plausible.
Habitat Press has published several books that write into this space. Many emerged from the Green Stories project which I founded with the goal of embedding climate solutions into mainstream fiction. It has run 21 competitions since 2018, resulting in numerous publications. One of these is the anthology of 24 stories: No More Fairy Tales: Stories to Save Our Planet, where we teamed experienced writers with climate experts to come up with stories that had solutions at their heart.
Stories range from technical solutions relating to carbon dioxide removal projects to more systemic aspects such as switching from GDP to a well-being index, sharing economy, personal carbon allowances, giving citizen assemblies legislative power – all of which would allow for a more sustainable long-term mindset conducive to directing investment towards sustainable technologies, practices, and decisions.
This anthology uses fiction as a testing ground to explore the more radical transformative ideas necessary for a truly sustainable society: ideas that are hard for politicians to talk about for fear of misunderstanding as they can’t easily fit into a soundbite. For example, an essential step is to upgrade our democracy to a form that allows us to think beyond short-term electoral cycles so that we can make more sustainable decisions. Citizens’ Assemblies are a positive step here.
One story from this anthology was adapted as a play called ‘Murder in the Citizens’ Jury.’ It’s a fun whodunit, set in a citizens’ assembly, where eight participants meet to deliberate upon climate solutions—and then there’s a murder!
Caption: flyer for theatre production by amateur theatre group, The Maskers.
The play also has an interactive element. A voting app and pullout voting and comment sheet in the programmes allows the audience to share their views on their favourite policies, so they feel like they are part of the citizen’s jury themselves. You can see a brief video of the first production by a local amateur theatre group here. The play is available to purchase from LazyBee, but if you approach me directly, I’m happy to allow amateur and student theatre groups to stage it royalty free.
The play is also available as a novella and audio book, ‘The Assassin’ of 16,000 words:
Eight people in a citizen’s jury, discussing the most important challenge in the history of humanity – how to save ourselves from the looming climate crisis. Exciting new solutions are proposed, each with their own champions and detractors. What they decide will affect us all. But they all have their own issues to deal with, and one of them has a hidden agenda. Who is the assassin and who are they there to kill?
Such storytelling is a great way to showcase new ideas. Usually in business or government, one would use a stakeholder analysis to see who is benefitted/harmed by any policy and how. These can be dry, and it’s hard to engage with the impacts emotionally as the groups affected seem distant. This story allows stakeholders to become characters and as such we identify with them and their needs more easily. We can then view any climate policy from the perspective of a variety of people, all of whom have a unique relationship to the proposal.
The Assassin also acts as a story within a story in a full-length novel The Philosopher and the Assassin. It’s rather different – think campus novel meets moral philosophy meets whodunnit.
There’s no more important job than educator, and no subject as necessary as moral philosophy. The trick is getting the students to turn up. So, when the Dean proposes the controversial concept of education entertainment, Professor Iris Tate goes all in with a moral philosophy course based on a whodunnit that all assume is hypothetical – a murder in a citizens’ assembly on climate. A variety of characters provide an entertaining source of ethical dilemmas, but what the students don’t know is that the ultimate dilemma is very real, and their conclusions will have far-reaching consequences.
An adaptation for TV won the Writing Climate Pitchfest, 2024. The book lays out in fiction format a roadmap to a sustainable future. It focuses on social science innovations in democratic, economic, financial, and social institutions.
No More Fairy Tales: Stories to Save Our Planet features three short stories that explore the idea of giving the ocean a nation status. One is about the seed of the idea; another is set when the Ocean as Nation has begun and is facing its first challenge, and the final story is set decades in the future outlining what the new Ocean Nation looks like and how it has progressed. It was expanded into a properly thrutopian full-length novel, Fairhaven, written by engineer Steve Willis and writer Jan Lee.
Visco won the 2020 Green Stories novel competition. The story imagines a giant music festival which allows free access to those who need care and their carers too. What emerges is a care-based mini-society. Those who attend love it so much, no one wants to go home when the music stops. So they don’t! This novel adopts the ‘protopian’ approach of imagining a quite plausible scenario whereby a mini community develops in stages. The characters face and overcome various challenges. David Fell brings to this novel all the knowledge he has gained in his years working as a sustainability consultant, using the novel to showcase alternative approaches such as the sharing economy and how a society based on care might work in practice.
Fiction, and science fiction in particular, is a great way to reach audiences beyond the environmental echo chamber, but to finish, I’ll talk about my next book, which is non-fiction but with a twist! It’s tentatively called A Jigsaw to Save the World. The twist – you guessed it – is that I plan to make it available also as a jigsaw.
I like the idea of a jigsaw as on the front cover is a picture which you are trying to get to. I read many books that do an excellent job of pinpointing the many problems society faces, and it’s usually not until the final chapter that any attempt is made at suggesting possible solutions. The news and pundits far and wide are keen to point out the problems we face. But it’s rare we take time to imagine what it might all look like if we did things better.
Rob Hopkins, in his book From What Is to What If, believes that when we take the time to immerse ourselves fully in imagining what kind of future we’d like to see, this creates a longing for it to happen. This in turn can galvanise action to make that dream come true. In his podcast From What Is to What Next, he asked guests to step into a virtual time machine, and to imagine themselves to be several years into the future and that we’ve done everything right and turned our society round. He then asked them to visualise what they see and hear around them. It’s a surprisingly powerful exercise when you do it yourself. Rob is right; it creates a yearning in the heart, a longing that almost makes you cry.
I do a lot of talks and workshops and often use this exercise myself. It’s remarkable that, in my experience, whatever the audience, the society people hunger for is always the same. First is always more nature. A close second is a sense of community, after that it’s more varied, but local food is often part of the picture, being outdoors more, less traffic. Public transport that is cheap, convenient and goes where you want, whenever you want. A more equal society, clean air and water. Access to health care and to feel hope for the future, or our children’s future. This is the picture on the front of the jigsaw. In every chapter, I will remind the reader of the society we are aiming towards.
Another reason I like the jigsaw metaphor is that we can see what pieces we may be part of in our own lives. It’s not just about building castles in the air for fun. The stakes are too high for that. We must work out how we get to our desired society. No one person or element can do it by themselves. We need every part of society to be working together to create this new picture. Whether we be in education, business, politics, members of our community, artists, journalists, or just as employees or voters with a voice, you can see where you fit in. At the end of every chapter, if you like what it’s proposing, I will suggest how you can make a difference.
I have an idea of the many pieces that will make up the jigsaw, and am working on the corners. The criteria for a policy to be a corner piece is that without that, all the other wonderful ideas or policies would not be as effective. Contenders for the corner pieces include citizens assemblies as our current democracy is constitutionally incapable of prioritising existential threats such as climate change over short-term issues. Another might be personal carbon allowances/tradeable energy quotas – also known as personal carbon trading. This would transform the decisions that are made by consumers and by businesses by incentivising us to choose low-carbon alternatives. Business purpose justifies a corner but it’s tricky. The current legal form of corporations makes it impossible for even well-meaning CEOs to prioritise societal welfare when it conflicts with profit maximisation for shareholders. What if all businesses were Benefit Corporations/social enterprises where their aim was sufficient profit to supply necessary goods and services rather than profit maximisation? What would happen to markets and pensions? It’s easy to imagine distant futures but the process of getting there without triggering collapse is harder. Yet the alternative could be human extinction. I’m running events to get people together to puzzle out these sticky problems. Details are available here.
While I’m writing the book I’m releasing abridged chapters as a fortnightly LinkedIn newsletter. Each edition focuses on one piece of the puzzle. Subscribe for free to feedback on the ideas and share your view on what the corner pieces should be. I’d love to know your thoughts!
Towards Kindred Futures
By Ana Sun
Ever wonder why we tend to refer to the future in its singular form in everyday speech? Why ‘the future’, and not simply ‘futures’? Considering that we can probably agree that a myriad of futures is possible before one of them falls into the present, this seems to be a mundane but overlooked mystery.
In Futurevision: scenarios for the world in 2040, Richard Watson and Oliver Freeman observed [1]:
There is a problem with most books about the future – and indeed, there is a fatal flaw with almost all of our thinking about what will happen next. This is because of a simple point. The fact is, there is no single future, regardless of our deepest desire that it be so, and there is no heavenly salvation in sight.
As someone who often explores progressive, positive futures within the context of climate change and social justice through science fiction, in particular Solarpunk [2], I’m intrigued: does the common view of a singular future mean we are more likely to believe that climate collapse is inevitable? Do we therefore find it difficult to imagine – and enact – alternatives? Have we inadvertently accepted a destiny described by cyberpunk, a future rocket-boosted by uncaring technology, systems of oppression and power concentrated in the hands of a few? In Zoefuturistic terms, have we simply accepted the ‘being’ and forfeited the ‘becoming’?
There’s some evidence that language can influence how we perceive time and our relationship with the future… or, rather, futures [3]. Our bodies are limited in conscious capacity, our brains constrained by how our memories are formed [4] [5] [6].
Unlike futurists and futurologists, thinking about the long-term future in its simultaneous multiplicities, especially when it comes to a complex issue such as climate change, is not something that most of us are able to conceptualise easily [7]. Sure, we may deal well enough with the immediate future, such as considering different possible routes we might take between two locations, or how we might fill the hours between morning and night on a given day. Beyond a certain timeframe, the future can resemble a different place; this afternoon, tonight, or tomorrow can easily seem like disembodied worlds beyond our reach [27]. And yet, the next second appears on the near horizon in the shadow of the following minute, then the hour thereafter – all rapidly pouring into the now, one liquid moment flowing into the next.
Perhaps there are deeper reasons for why we struggle with notions of futures in our everyday lives, and that’s worth examining.
Continue reading “Towards Kindred Futures”Zoefuturism in the Online World: Cultivating our own Digital Gardens
By Suzie Gray
As digital spaces increasingly mediate the way in which we interact with ourselves and each other, I argue that this dynamic flow of human becoming within digital spaces crystallises as events or spectacles. Attention quickly shifts from one topic or individual to the next; quickly observed, reacted to, and circulated. Content creators are encouraged to perform in a way that perpetuates this cycle with appeals to emotion and rapidly following trends. This is by design, enabled by practices of the online attention economy.
In this article, I’d like to highlight an alternative way of engaging in online spaces as a Zoefuturist practice: the act of creating and maintaining Digital Gardens. These online environments are sites that eschew homogeneity of design or corporate branding, showcasing the personal touches of their creators. Visitors are allowed to carve their own paths (within reason) through these lightly curated spaces that share knowledge and information.
Digital gardening is an act rather than a platform. Examples of these include repositories made on Obsidian, Quartz 4, and sites made on Neocities. The latter can be seen as a nod to website creators on Geocities during the early 2000s; as some might call a different time before the monetisation of online platforms. So how did we get here?
Continue reading “Zoefuturism in the Online World: Cultivating our own Digital Gardens”A very British genealogy of zoefuturism
By Christine Aicardi
Vector’s call to explore zoefuturism was the first time I heard of the word. But the editors’ framing of this newly coined variety of futurism spoke to me. Reading it through the prism of (feminist) scholarly literature in Science and Technology Studies (STS), it brought to mind the theorizing of ethics in more-than-human worlds, and its emphasis on the living relationalities of care across human and nonhuman agencies (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017); it brought to mind multispecies assemblages and their lifeways entanglements (Lowenhaupt Tsing, 2015); it brought to mind the Chthulucene, proposed by Donna Haraway as more apt than the Anthropocene at describing current times, when human and nonhuman are more than ever inextricably entangled in living and dying together (Haraway, 2016).
But what caught me was a recommendation in the “Further explorations…” section of Vector’s call – the short story “Euglena” by Jane Norris (Norris, 2024). I had read “Euglena” and remembered it as a moving homage to the second generation of British cybernetics through one of its main figures, Stafford Beer. The monologuing slime mould narrating the story (we don’t know at the start that they are a slime mould) explain that their “first connection was with Stafford Beer”, that they loved his brain, and that they were born as a pond computer around 1960 (265-67). This, for me, raised intriguing questions about the possible relations between zoefuturism and cybernetics.
Beer (1926-2002), born in Putney, London, is best remembered for his contributions to operational research, management cybernetics (a field he launched in the 1950s) and (exceedingly) complex systems thinking (Rosenhead, 2006). A historical landmark was Project Cybersyn (1971-73), an experiment in socialist cybernetics in Allende’s Chile, which was framed by Beer’s writings on management cybernetics and to which he actively participated (Medina, 2006). Less known are Beer’s highly imaginative forays into biological computing in the 1950s and 1960s, on his own and in collaboration with Gordon Pask, another important British cybernetician of the second generation.
From the mid-1950s, Beer started looking far and wide for natural systems that could be used in the construction of cybernetic machines (Pickering, 2010: 231-34). He investigated with young children (his own, probably), successfully using positive and negative feedback to train them in solving simultaneous equations without teaching them the maths. He reported on thought experiments aimed at enticing various kinds of animals to “play this game” using adequate “reward function[s]”: mice, using cheese; rats and pigeons (already studied for their learning abilities); bees, ants, termites, which “have all been systematically considered as components of self-organizing systems” (Beer, 1962, cited in Pickering (2010): 232). But it was with simple pond life that he most experimented: colonies of a freshwater crustacean (Daphnia) and… of Euglena, a genus of microscopic unicellular flagellate algae, of which some species live in freshwater and some in saltwater. Eventually, for over a year he tried to enrol an entire pond ecosystem, in a large tank which contents “were randomly sampled from ponds in Derbyshire and Surrey” (Beer, 1962, cited in Pickering (2010): 234).
Continue reading “A very British genealogy of zoefuturism”Revisiting Collaborative Imagination through a Zoefuturistic Lens
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.
Continue reading “Revisiting Collaborative Imagination through a Zoefuturistic Lens”
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