Yen Ooi: When I first came across Professor Roger Ames’s lecture on Zoetology, I felt a surge of relief alongside excitement, as finally, there was language to explain my “rationality” – the foundational thought-structure that I had grown up with. This applied easily onto science fiction, since it is literature that is grounded in “rational science,” allowing me to understand and explore why “rationality” in speculative fiction can differ so much from culture to culture, subgenre to subgenre. 

As I discovered Zoetology alongside a depth of other theories (like convergence culture, participation revolution, techno-Orientalism, tabula plena, neo-colonialism, post-colonialism, polymedia, and more), and amidst all the distressing news in the world today (of wars, the climate crisis, the AI bubble, etc.), while my life kept “becoming” (through motherhood, researching and practising Zen, and lots of writing!), everything came together to become Zoefuturism in an organic discovery. Zoefuturism isn’t a new idea inasmuch as zoetology is what Ames calls “a new name for an old way of thinking.”

Stephen Oram: Talking with Yen over coffee about her theories behind Zoefuturism, the phrase she coined, was more than an insight into a new way of approaching science fiction, it chimed beautifully with some of my own thinking.

My cultural background is not one of eastern religions or philosophy, quite the opposite. However, since my teenage years I’ve been sceptical of absolutes, developing a keenness for seeing life as directional. By that I mean keeping an eye on whether things are going in the right direction towards a “notion” rather than setting absolute goals or end-points. More recently, I’ve been actively attempting to hold knowledge and ideology lightly, passionately but with the understanding that both will change and develop. This focus on change is reflected in a lot of my writing.

Continue reading “Zoefuturism: Yen Ooi and Stephen Oram, in conversation” →