Futurism – Of Black Swans and Other Futures

As a person who wrote about the world to come I found becoming a corporate strategist a good fit. Having devoured science fiction since I was old enough to read and comprehend that the words did not portray the world as it is, but as it could be. I spend every spare moment contemplating what may be coming.

As I honed my craft and built friendships among other writers it became clear that speculative fiction is like research and development. Pure research is taking primal forces and exploring conceptual alternatives to see what you get. Applied research is when you have narrowed down the concepts to the few that seem to have promise. This latter phase of development attempts to achieve real results and deliver something new into the world.

Future Fiction is like applied research. We look at the promising concepts for the future whose antecedents surround us. Events have logical outcomes, unless a black swan is lurking to throw the world into a different trajectory. Future Fiction seeks to understand both – the logical outcomes we may experience, and the black swan futures like the one we are now living. A world fundamentally changed by a singular event. Every person on our planet is living a different life than they likely expected based on the reality of the last millennium. Since another pandemic transformed a world preoccupied by war and realignment.

Future Fiction serves as an illustration of what could be, what may be and what we should prepare for. It populates a possible world for us to visit where the concepts become tangible in ways strategists and planners seldom experience. This added dimensionality is the true value of our genre.