Who Writes the Future: All Tomorrow’s Futures at King’s College London

By Zoe Mantas

The panel, left to right: Claire Steves, Elizabeth Black, Christine Aicardi, Benjamin Greenaway, Stephen Oram

What could the future look like? What do we want it to look like? ‘All Tomorrow’s Futures: scientists meet sci-fi writers to invent possible futures’ hosted by the King’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence attempts, if not to answer, then to explore how we might try.

Bringing together creatives and experts, All Tomorrow’s Futures is a project in foresight, attempting to provide plausible (or at least thought-provoking) narratives for how technologies may change our society. What makes it different from other projects is its methodology tying experts and creators together from the very start of the process to bounce ideas off each other and bring in research and creative resources. The panel was chaired by Dr. Christine Aicardi, senior research fellow in science and technology studies (STS) from King’s College London, and included editors and writers Benjamin Greenaway and Stephen Oram, with contributions from Dr. Elizabeth Black and Professor Claire Steves, and the discussions focused more on the process and intent of the project rather than the content of the book which contained resulting stories.

So, what is foresighting? Let’s start with what it isn’t: a definitive prediction. Foresighting isn’t about saying what will happen. It’s about saying what could happen. More importantly than that, it is about the skill of asking important questions and developing ideas to support future possibilities. Interestingly, the panellists emphasized the importance of participatory foresight, bringing in perspectives beyond the usual ‘experts’. The panellists emphasized the importance of asking who is envisioning these futures in the status quo right now and the need to actively include those in society who feel, in the main quite rightly, that they do not have agency in the decisions being made that will affect their futures.This also goes beyond the UK, for example, the future is African – it is the youngest continent, yet our global future imaginaries in the field of science fiction and beyond are not yet shaped in a way representative of people who will live in those futures.

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Mary Branscombe reviews All Tomorrow’s Futures: Fictions that Disrupt

Explore where technology might take us and what that might mean for how we live with this anthology that brings together experts and writers.

It’s easy to view fiction as merely entertainment and escapism (both important in their own right), but stories – especially science and speculative fiction (SFF) – are also wonderful tools for exploring and learning, imagining possibilities and seeing how they might work. It is serious play and playful thinking.

It’s almost a tenet of SFF that technology is secondary to the story. While SFF writers tend to explore ideas and the stories those ideas generate, their technology may be plausible but there’s no requirement for it to be. There are, however, countless movies and TV shows where an interesting premise is undermined by technology that absolutely doesn’t work. Futurists and researchers explore possibilities and trends, making predictions that are intended as realistic extrapolations of real or expected technology, with none of the Hollywood handwaving and convenient MacGuffins, but while fictional case studies illustrating predictions are so common that you’ll find them in IKEA’s latest research about homes and living, they rarely have the kind of characters, plot and drama that makes for compelling fiction.

What if you could combine the two, with experts and authors collaborating to write about possible futures in ways that are not just plausible but creative, with equally strong stories and technical chops? Like Cybersalon’s previous anthology, 22 Ideas About the Future, All Tomorrow’s Futures is predicated on (mostly) plausible technology and the impacts such technological developments might have on justice, energy, digital money, health and education.

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22 Ideas About the Future

Reviewed by James Woudhuysen

22 Ideas about the future, edited by Benjamin Greenaway and Stephen Oram (Cybersalon Press: 2022)

On Sky Arts, over some months, they’ve been playing Alfred Hitchcock Presents. This was a schlocky but nevertheless highly entertaining series of spooky psychodramas, each just 25 minutes long, interrupted by its sponsors, Bristol Myers. Running from 1955 till at least 1957, the films featured stars such as Ralph Meeker, Charles Bronson, Thelma Ritter and the unimpeachable Claude Rains. Hitchcock would appear comically – from inside a space helmet, or at the centre of an enormous spider’s web – in a short spoof before the plot; also, in a splenetic, dour diatribe at the back end.

Perhaps numbered after the 22 in the year 2022, this collection of very short sci-fi stories has the same scary, translucent tone to it as those old Hitchcock shorts. While Hitch directed other directors to capture the southern, sinister and sardonic brightness he later gave us with Psycho, editors Benjamin Greenaway and Stephen Oram have wrung something similar from their contributors here. These are forecasts of the future in fictional form. Not all are successful, but some are fun.

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