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In this article I wish to consider the outputs of the practice of futurology and/or futurism and their relation to science fiction texts. Rather than simply describe that relationship, it is my intention to outline an analytical framework through which they might be subjected to structural critique. It is beyond the scope of this article, however, to explore the practice of futurology in any detail; for my purposes here, 'futures outputs' are portrayals or representations of future situations, regardless of a) their medium (which might be text, photography, CGI, video, or a mixture of these and more) or b) the rhetorical purpose to which they are put. I have attempted elsewhere to address the arguments below specifically for futurological practitioners (see Raven and Elahi 2015); readers interested in a more detailed argument for the establishment of the meta-category 'narratives of futurity' (and its inclusion of both science fiction texts and futures outputs) may find it of value.
1. The Plurality of Futures
Our collective future is - or certainly should be - a matter of immediate concern. But 'The Future' is always-already encased in quotation marks: any future presented or perceived as a certainty is the ultimate fiction. Whenever you hear or read someone say 'in the future, we will - !', they are a fool or a charlatan, or possibly both.
The immanent future however - namely that future we will actually end up inhabiting, which is always-already coming into being, and which is implicit in and emergent from the present, which in turn is itself implicit in and emergent from the past (whose territory may or may not correlate to the map of history as currently drawn) - is not a fiction, nor a narrative, but a plastic possibility moulded continually by economics, politics and technoscientific production, among other forces. The immanent future is illegible, unknowable in all but the broadest sense. Prediction is not just bunk, it is wishful thinking.
So there is no 'The Future' - but narratives of futurity (hereafter referred to as futures, plural) are proliferating. This is in part because it is much easier to create and disseminate narratives than ever before (viz the internet's partial democratization of the means of semiotic (re)production and distribution), but also due...