Absurdist Futures: Experiments in Literary Form
David J. Staley highlights his own work in continuing the conversation on Affective Foresight and absurdity in this guest blog.
Two years ago I was listening to an NPR program featuring a panel of science fiction writers. “If you aren’t writing about the future of climate change,” the panelists agreed, if you weren’t writing cli-fi, “you are not really writing science fiction.” The only driver-- the only driver--of the future is the deteriorating and chaotic climate. All other drivers pale into insignificance. Even before I listened to that program, I wondered if it was defensible for any futurist to consider, let alone publish, a future determined by trends other than climate change. Is writing about the future of artificial intelligence or biotechnology or the “demographic cliff” a distraction from the only “real” story?
When I wrote Anticipatory Biographies: Personal Histories of the Future, two of the individual scenarios were explicitly set in a world with chaotic weather; at least one other had climate change as an important background feature. But most of the future biographies dealt with other themes, other drivers of the future.
The idea behind Anticipatory Biographies was to rethink how we write future scenarios. Scenarios are very often descriptions of the macro view of a society and its economy; I wanted to write from the vantage point of the individual, how an individual would experience and live the future. Anticipatory Biographies is the kind of design fiction imagined by Anne Burdick, a style of writing that combines “design’s focus on human-made settings and stuff with literary fiction’s focus on inner lives.” When writing the book, I had not been introduced to the concept of affective foresight. Now I see that what I am writing in Anticipatory Biographies are emotional futures, subjective futures, affective futures.
I feel we need to amend the statement from the science fiction writers, especially in light of what’s been happening in American society and politics over the last 10 years: If you aren’t writing absurdist futures, you really aren’t thinking clearly about the future. Five years ago--even three years ago--if I would have stood in front of an audience and said “In the future, paramilitary forces will attack American cities and kill American citizens and the resistance will come from people dressed in inflatable frog costumes,” I would have been laughed off the stage as an unserious person.
Joseph Voros has called these “preposterous futures,” those that from the perspective of the present appear impossible or implausible or just ridiculous. I might add that preposterous futures are exercises that make the unimaginable imaginable. Jim Dator’s Second Law of the Future, of course, states that “any useful idea about the future should appear ridiculous.”
In the 1970s, the science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem--who had previously written noir-ish, bleak, existential novels--started writing exuberant, surreal and preposterous stories. I often thought they must have appealed to young hippies tripping out on LSD. One story was called “Trurl’s Electronic Bard,” which told the story of an engineer who builds a machine to write poetry. After many refinements, the Electronic Bard produces poems so brilliant that human poets become obsolete. Outraged writers rebel against the energy-hungry machine, which proves impossible to stop. Banished from public favor, Trurl swears never again to mechanize artistic inspiration. One could easily conclude that this story, which must have appeared preposterous to audiences in the 1970s, anticipated the arrival of Large Language Models today. Lem demonstrates that the ridiculous, the preposterous might be the most clear-eyed and prescient form of foresight.
I never fully appreciated Kurt Vonnegut until I read Cat’s Cradle. Vonnegut’s satirical and preposterous novels have proven more prophetic than many scientifically-grounded scenario forecasts. As much of the Western world slides deeper and deeper into illiberalism and autocracy, I have found insight and even comfort from Vaclav Havel, writing from within a Communist dictatorship, writing the only safe and officially-tolerated form of social protest: absurdist theater.
Absurdism may be the only legitimate response to our absurdist politics and our absurd society. Absurdism might be the only useful way to think about the future.
I did not set off to write absurdist futures when I launched One-Sentence Futures a year and a half ago, but I find more and more of my ideas are of the absurdist, preposterous variety:
As with Anticipatory Biographies, I’ve been experimenting with the form of the scenario, that we could write scenarios in novel and creative and innovative ways. I had recently been introduced to Felix Feneon’s Novels in Three Lines. The anarchist Feneon worked to support himself as a journalist. He wrote scores of human-interest reports in short three-line sentences:
Shied, of Dunkirk, fired three times at his wife. Since he
missed every shot, he decided to aim at his mother-in-law,
and connected.
Napoleon Gallieni, a stonecutter, broke his neck falling
down the stairs. He may have been pushed. In any case
he was taken to the morgue.
He had bet he could drink 15 absinthes in succession
while eating a kilo of beef. After the ninth, Theophile
Papin, of Ivry, collapsed.
Louis Lamarre had neither job nor home, but he did
possess a few coins. At a grocery in Saint-Denis he bought
a liter of kerosene and drank it.
At census time, the mayor of Montirat, Tarn, nudged the
figures upward. His eagerness to govern a multitude cost
him his job.
I was delighted by the form these stories took, and intrigued by the creative constraint three-line novels introduced to the writer. I asked myself, What would it mean to write future scenarios in a single sentence?
In 2009, shortly after the introduction of Twitter and microblogging, G. Pascal Zachary wrote:
In the years ahead, I imagine that the writing of sentences might be the subject of entire courses…Indeed, sentences could well become the primary unit of literary commerce, trumping both books and articles. “Best-selling sentences” may become a common phrase…
Given reduced attention spans and the fact that many young people today find it difficult to concentrate long enough to read long-form prose, I wonder if the sentence is the literary form of the moment. That the only form a scenario can take is the “future sentence.” Is that too absurd a notion?
David J. Staley, Ph.D is a writer, designer, futurist, historiographer, presenter, educator, advisor, public intellectual, and has been described as both an “eclectic academic” and a “polymath.” He is an Associate Professor in the departments of History and Design at The Ohio State University. He is the author of several books, including:
Anticipatory Biographies: Personal Histories of the Future,
Alternative Universities: Speculative Design for Innovation in Higher Education,
Knowledge Towns: Colleges and Universities as Talent Magnets
Visionary Histories, a collection of his essays about the future.
He is the host of the “Voices of Excellence“ podcast, and president of Columbus Futurists, a local think tank. In 2022 he was awarded “Best Freelance Writer” by the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists for his “Next“ futures column with Columbus Underground.
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