Industry News

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) has announced David Langford is the recipient of the Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award for distinguished contributions to the science fiction and fantasy community.

The Solstice Award, created in 2008 and given at the discretion of the SFWA president with the majority approval of the Board of Directors, is for individuals, living or dead, who have had significant contributions to the community …Read More

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Celebrating David Langford, SFWA’s Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award Recipient for the 61st Annual Nebula Awards

San Francisco, CA – March 31, 2026

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association is pleased to announce that the Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award will be presented this year to David Langford at the 61st Annual SFWA Nebula Awards® ceremony on June 6, 2026.

The Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award is bestowed by SFWA upon a person who has made significant contributions to the community sustaining science fiction, fantasy, and related genres. The award was created in 2008, with Wilhelm named as one of the three original recipients, and it was renamed in her honor in 2016. Our latest recipient joins a storied list of winners, including Greg Bear, Ben Bova, Octavia Butler, Neil Clarke, Gardner Dozois, Joanna Russ, Stanley Schmidt, Nisi Shawl, Arley Sorg, and Sheila Williams, among many others.

How does one do justice to the work of a science-fiction creator whose wide-ranging pursuits, publications, and accolades include the long-standing and ongoing curation of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (SFE) itself?

As SFWA President Kate Ristau notes, “With his work on The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Langford has not only built, supported, and challenged the field of SFF; he has literally helped to define it. His decades of work have made science fiction a richer and more inclusive field. We are more than happy to present him with the Solstice Award in recognition of his career filled with positive, focused, and uplifting contributions.”

A Pillar of Service to Community

Those decades of service to our genre have taken many forms, all necessary for a thriving ecosystem in SFF publishing. Published authors of science fiction and fantasy are made possible by avid readers, equally avid commentators, fans dedicated to the cultivation of spaces to share and discuss great work, historians and archivists marking down events in genre of note, non-fiction writers offering supplement and story-seed to all our fantastic prose, editors sharpening one and the same, and publishers painstakingly building homes for all of the above.

Langford has been all of these, and more. He has handily merited his record-holding 29 Hugo wins out of 55 nominations, among a wealth of other honors in genre. Nor has his service to our ever-expanding community reached an end; along with SFE, Langford continues to sustain Ansible, a UK newszine covering SFF events and happenstance.

Langford’s dedication isn’t just known through titles, either, but also in his tonal range. Here is a commentator who would make readers laugh on one genre outing, then inspire serious reflection with the next. For decades, Langford’s editorial work took care where care was needed with the living history of our medium. His fan-community work brought joy where joy was needed in SFF, too.

“I am delighted to celebrate David Langford as the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Association 2026 Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award recipient,” says SFWA Executive Director Isis Asare. “His witty sense of humor and encylopedic knowledge of speculative literature has fostered an international discourse on science fiction. The measure of Langford’s impact cannot be overstated.”

The Celebration Continues

Please join SFWA in celebrating the achievements of David Langford, and all our other special guests and Nebula finalists, this June 3-7 at our 61st Annual Nebula Awards Conference in Chicago, Illinois. Conference prices for in-person tickets rise May 1, and Banquet tickets for the acclaimed Nebula Awards Ceremony on June 6 are in limited supply.

Be part of our ongoing history, in a genre that dedicated community-builders like David Langford have curated for us for so long, and so well.

The post 2026 Solstice Award appeared first on SFWA - The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association.

The six-title shortlist for the 2026 International Booker Prize has been announced, with works of genre interest includingThe Director by Daniel Kehlmann, tr. Ross Benjamin (Summit US; riverrun UK) [amazon / bookshop] andThe Witch by Marie NDiaye, tr. Jordan Stump (Vintage US; Charco UK) [amazon / bookshop].

The £50,000 prize celebrates the best works of long-form fiction or collections of short stories translated into English and published in the UK …Read More

by Ben Nadler

Read by Maggie Ayala

Although Abraham Lincoln’s life was cut short by a pro-Confederate terrorist in 1865, he has found continuing afterlives as a speculative fiction character trope. Over the past century, this figure has appeared in works by a range of writers, including Vachel Lindsay, George Saunders, Philip K. Dick, Rod Serling, and Tony Wolk.

Each of these works contains a different Abraham Lincoln. They are not the same character. Still, these Lincolns share a common origin, as each of their authors has found a way to use speculative fiction conceits to build their own Lincoln from historical record. What’s more, these conceits offer ways to displace Lincoln from history and bring him into contact with different times and realities. These encounters provide readers and writers of speculative fiction with new understandings of the past, present, and future of this country.  

Abraham Lincoln, 1863. Photo from the Smithsonian Institution from United States, via Wikimedia Commons Why Lincoln?

It is not incidental that Lincoln, of all US historical figures, has taken on this role. “The Great Emancipator” has long functioned as a liberatory figure in American culture. Historian Nina Silber notes that during the Great Depression, Lincoln “offered an imaginative repository” for hopeful responses to the era’s crises. He has filled a similar function for authors in the intervening decades. 

Exploring how different writers have deployed Lincoln in their fictional narratives provides an understanding of Lincoln’s enduring cultural role. At the same time, comparing uses of this character trope by very different authors also provides insight into methods available to speculative fiction writers when working with the past. In these Lincoln examples, we see how the genre devices of hauntings, robotics, and time travel can all be used to access history. 

To and From the Cemetery

In his 1914 poem “Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight,” Vachel Lindsay writes: “Here at midnight, in our little town / A mourning figure walks, and will not rest.” The long-dead president, unable to sleep in his tomb, walks into downtown Springfield, Illinois. The current unfolding of World War I troubles him: “It breaks his heart that kings must murder still.”

A century later, the prominent slipstream writer George Saunders uses a similar conceit in his award-winning 2017 novel Lincoln in the Bardo. Saunders’s Lincoln leaves the White House in 1862 to enter a Georgetown cemetery inhabited by ghosts. The most recent arrival is Lincoln’s 11-year-old son Willie, killed by typhoid. The grieving president visits Willie’s crypt, holding him one last time. The ghosts observe the president throughout the night. Ultimately, the spirit of a formerly-enslaved man inhabits Lincoln’s body.

President Lincoln and Family Circle. Photo from Popular Graphic Arts, via Wikimedia Commons.

A key problem that a fiction writer working with a well-known historical figure has to address is how to build an original character from historical records. Saunders has two solutions. In the cemetery chapters, the ghosts perceive Lincoln without preconceptions, such as when one observes: “An exceedingly tall and unkempt fellow was making his way toward us through the darkness.” In other chapters, however, Saunders leans into the textual record, montaging historical quotes (actual and fictive). For example, one chapter is constructed entirely of negative statements made about Lincoln by his contemporaries. This move plays with the tension between the historical Lincoln, the myth of Lincoln, and Saunders’s own character of Lincoln.

Your Next Stop: The Twilight Zone!

Saunders’s fiction is indebted to the uncanniness of the original Twilight Zone TV series. Bardo, in particular, recalls the 1961 episode “The Passerby”, which depicts Northern and Southern soldiers trudging home at war’s end. The protagonist is a Confederate who comes to realize—in a classic Twilight Zone twist!—that he and everyone else on the road were killed in the war. Eventually, Lincoln himself rides down the road and tells a resistant Confederate widow, “I’m dead too. I guess you might say I’m the last casualty of the Civil War.” The conflict can finally be laid to rest.

Lincoln’s Tomb, Springfield, Illinois (approximately 1879). Photo from Toledo-Lucas County Public Library, via Wikimedia Commons.

“The Passerby” aired as the Civil Rights Movement was gaining ground. Host and scriptwriter Rod Serling comments on the 20th-century end of segregation through his 19th-century characters, just as Lindsay comments on the violence of WWI through his wandering Lincoln. Because Serling’s Lincoln is a ghost who now exists outside mortal time, he can speak to audiences in different eras.

Mechanical Statesmen

Not all speculative depictions of the Abe Lincoln character rely on the supernatural. In Philip K. Dick’s 1972 novel We Can Build You (originally serialized in Amazing Stories as A. Lincoln, Simulacrum), Lincoln and his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, are recreated as androids by an electronic piano company. This connects to Dick’s use of androids in other works, notably Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968), as well as to the real-world Lincoln robot Disney debuted at the 1964 World’s Fair.

Edwin M. Stanton. Secretary of War (between circa 1860 and circa 1865). Photo by Mathew Benjamin Brady, via Wikimedia Commons.

Dick’s near-future novel touches on issues such as housing justice, corporate power, and lunar colonization, but its primary subject is mental illness (particularly schizophrenia). This concern is embodied in the robotic Lincoln, who exhibits the president’s notorious “melancholy.” “Lincoln was this way,” argues one of the android’s engineers. “He had periods of brooding.” Like Saunders’s, Dick’s depiction of historical figures draws directly on historical record: The androids are programmed with punch-tapes of real sources, such as Carl Sandburg’s exhaustive Lincoln biography.

Fourscore and Seven Years into the Future

Rather than androids, Tony Wolk’s 2004 Abraham Lincoln: A Novel Life (the first in a trilogy), uses another established sci-fi mechanism to bring Lincoln into the 20th century: time-travel. Wolk is not as well-known as Dick, but he has his own role in sci-fi history, such as co-teaching workshops with Ursula K. Le Guin.

At the beginning of Wolk’s novel, Lincoln finds himself transported in the middle of the night from 1865 Washington, D.C. to 1955 suburban Chicago. “Suddenly,” Wolk writes, “there he was, on Howard Street, reeling, as if he were perched on the edge of a cliff, peering over.” As in many time-travel novels, such as Octavia Butler’s Kindred, the temporal leap isn’t fully explained, but the reader follows along for the journey.

The time-travel allows Lincoln to experience a few last moments of reprieve before his assassination. It also allows him to perceive Cold War America. Early on, he tries to wrap his mind around the atomic bomb by comparing it to a Civil War battle: “He was picturing the disaster with the Petersburg mine, but now above ground and engulfing a whole city, a Philadelphia, a Boston.” 

To the Ages

As we enter new eras of American political and social life, the Lincoln trope will no doubt continue to be deployed by authors trying to make sense of our conditions. We will have to see what new Lincolns are brought to life in the decades to come. When the historical Lincoln was assassinated, Stanton famously stated, “Now he belongs to the ages.” Through his role in speculative fiction, he truly does.

Explore more articles from Writing from History

Ben Nadler is a writer working between New York City and the Philadelphia area, where he teaches English at Widener University. He is the author of The Sea Beach Line: A Novel and Punk in NYC’s Lower East Side 1981–1991. His next novel, Prairie Ashes, is forthcoming from American Buffalo Books. More at bennadler.com.

The post A. Lincoln, Simulacrum: Approaches to Reanimating the Great Emancipator appeared first on SFWA - The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association.

The judges for the Crawford Award, which honors an author's first work of fantasy in book form, are soliciting books published in the year 2026. What qualifies as a book is flexible, including novels, novellas, poetry collections, short fiction, graphic novels, works in translation, or other work at the discretion of the judges. The Crawford Award will be given at the 2027 International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts …Read More

The Aldiss Award, anannual award to acknowledge endeavours in literature and gaming, specifically around world building, in the science fiction & fantasy genre,'' has announced its 2026 longlist for worldbuilding in speculative fiction.

• Firstborn of the Sun, Marvellous Michael Anson (Michael Joseph)
• Dark Diamond, Neal Asher (Pyr)
• A Song Of Legends Lost, M.H. Ayinde (Orbit; Saga)
• The Second Death of Locke, V.L. Bovalino (Forever)
• Children of Fallen Gods, Carissa …Read More

Reviewed by Chukwunonso Ezeiyoke

Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures edited by Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn has 23 chapters with a preface, introduction, and afterword. The book started its life as a part of The Climate Action Almanac. “The book grew out of the Climate Imagination Fellowship, started at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination in 2021” (2026:ix). In its preface, the book announces that it foregrounds hopeful stories about climate imagination. The dominant climate narrative, it argues, is full of doom stories, which leave people feeling ‘hopeless, helpless, and disillusioned’ (Eschrich and Finn 2025: ix).  This stand echoes Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism:Is There No Alternative?(2014). For Fisher, fear and cynicism do not inspire bold thinking; they form a bedrock of conformity and conservatism that hampers action and change. For Fisher, hopefulness changes the situation from one in which nothing can happen to one that allows for the actualisation of possibilities. Fisher’s stand can be traced to a theorist such as Fredric Jameson (2005), and further back, to Thomas More, the first known utopian novelist.  

However, the word ‘utopia’ was hardly mentioned in the introduction or the preface framing Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Future, and it appears sparingly throughout the collection.  This may be intended or unintended. However, there could be a good reason why the book was framed this way.  Utopia has a bad reputation. An early criticism of it could be seen from Karl Marx in Manifesto of the Communist Party published in 1848. Marx accuses utopia of lacking materialism. More recently, Karl Popper (1945) links the concept of utopia to totalitarianism. As Julien Kloeg notes, ‘Utopianism’s bad reputation is partly due to its association with the attempt to realize communism in the Soviet’ as such it is considered ‘politically dangerous’ (2016: 451). Current criticism on Utopia is such that were directed to hopeful climate narrative such as carbon removal technology. Matt Simon (2023:online) argues that “carbon removal might even encourage the continued burning of fossil fuels, if countries can say they’re sucking carbon out of the atmosphere to offset their emissions” they could end up burning more fossil fuels instead of looking for clean energy. This, in turn, sustains the capitalist structure that privileges fossil fuel consumption. Perhaps these criticisms have led the collection to shy away from exploring the book’s connection to utopian unconsciousness, even though the book draws heavily from this tradition. Unconscious here “consists of those repressed impulses, desires, drives, wishes… that the conscious mind does not care to acknowledge” (Mark Bould 2021:15). Utopian unconsciousness is defined here as those hidden utopian ideological impulses of a text. 

Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures is a mixed bag of memoirs, interviews, scholarly articles, and fiction. This disparity in the creative expressions employed by the authors in the book, luckily, does not result in a disjointed book. I think there is something symbolic about it, reflected in both the form and the content of the collection, namely: that the book champions diversity. Diversity in its form allows it to incorporate different styles of artistic expression under the umbrella of a single edited volume. This, in a way, is a stand it takes outside the totalitarian accusation levelled against the utopian unconscious in which plurality of forms, ambitions and aspirations is suppressed under the so-called singularity of purpose termed the ‘common good.’ A character in “City of Choice” by Gu Shi, translated by Ken Liu, a story within this anthology being reviewed here shares this sentiment thus ‘Should I really go forward? All choices come with costs. If the cost is the lives of those who are powerless, is it right to sacrifice them in the name of some greater “good”? (113). “City of Choice” is a type of story you read and reread, and it makes you angry and happy and angry again because life is messy and every decision comes with a cost, including the decision to freedom.  

It is not only the style of the book that is diverse; the contributors come from different localities of the globe: “China to Wales, Germany to Nigeria, Sri Lanka to Mexico, Malaysia, India, the United States, and more” (Eschrich and Finn 2025:ix) to articulate different climate challenges of what is being done, what could be done, and the potential ‘becomings’ of climatic futures. A lot of the climatic ‘becomings’ shared by a good number of the authors in the collection are akin to what Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay and Jade Taylor call ‘co-futurism.’ Taylor defines it as a future that is interconnected and overlaps, also recognising “ethnic specific and regional specific futurisms” (2024: 1). Taylor’s definition is not specific to climate futurism; the collection, which focuses on climate, is part of futurism in general.  

The content of this book follows a similar pattern as its writers explore what an inclusive future means, starting with the first story in the collection, “Three-World Cantata” by Vandana Singh. The story explores this theme and shows that futurism should not become mere progressivism, but should include both human and nonhuman elements and be led by ordinary citizens rather than corporations. The character Chingari (the story doesn’t mention their gender) and their team creates IntMRI, which allows them to take a person’s consciousness into a preexisting climatic scenario with the intention of convincing the person to adopt positive attitudes that will lead to climatic justice. Their initial targets are people in power who can influence climate policy. Manny, the CEO of UltraCorp, holds such power and is pimped into the project. Manny is exposed to different climate situations, including the importance of human interconnection with nonhumans such as elephants. Manny prefers managing the system rather than pursuing structural change.  So, what Chingari realises is that in a world charged by personal interest, to know what is good does not necessarily equate to doing what is right. Plato suggested otherwise in The Republic where he equates knowing good to doing good. However, sustainable change, Chingari discovered, starts with the collaboration of ordinary people: ‘If you looked closely at the time axis by yourself, it remained a long, thin line stretching from past through present and into the future— nothing changed. But look at it, engage with it along with other people, other beings, and you would see it thicken, acquire structure’ (Singh 2026:34). It is through community collaboration that real change emerges.

“Death is Not an Ornament” by Hannah Onoguwe echoes a similar sentiment and shows such societal change when there is a collaboration between human and nonhuman. In my book, “Nigerian Speculative Fiction: Evolution,” I argue that recurring theme in Nigerian speculative fiction is the entanglement between human and nonhuman “which it draws from the indigenous Nigerian cosmology of co-existence between human and nonhuman in a symbiotic relationship” (2025:17). The protagonist in Onoguwe’s story is a hybrid of human and nonhuman who fights to eradicate dependence on the petro-economy by teaming with nonhuman whose inhabitant is the ocean. 

In “Robots & Insects & Languages & Other Living Things” by Libia Brenda, Brenda projects this interconnection to also include machines, through the process of language. The mediator here is the IA, known as mycorrhizae, whose encoding and decoding of various means of communication between humans and other nonhumans breaks down the barrier between humans and nonhumans. Once this is accomplished, the wall between nature and culture, is broken.

In “Mina’s Dream” by Vandana Singh, activism takes a different shape, not the usual workaday protest of placard carrying (Fisher, 2014, will argue that the capitalist system has already contained this method) but from the tiny ray of hope of the ethics of the protagonist Mina. Mina’s tenderness to her garden mirrors the tenderness of her heart to her community as the protagonist says “Remember that we are entangled, all of us, with each other and other life- forms (86).” It is that love that transforms not just her community’s ecology but also spreads into a political act, which is to say that what spurred political activism here is a change in the value system.  

  

In “Climate Action Dialogue: From Liner to Fractal”, a discussion among Nigel Topping, Farhana Yamin, and Ed Finn, among other things, carries on this discourse on ethical and societal values. It is this changing of value systems that Yamin argues is the key to unlocking a better climatic future: “I’m very excited about this shift to working at the level of values, whereas before we were just trying to tinker with a policy here, or a program there, or a bit of funding here, a few fiscal reforms here and there…. Changing values allows us to see things moving differently, and to reshape our relationships (235).” It is this stand of orientation transformation that Anna Pigott takes in “Flights of Fancy” by arguing that if over-tourism is scaled down, places like Corfu currently frequented by tourists, an activity that destroys its bioforms, will have a better, more diverse ecosystem. 

Where it can be argued that value/attitude change originates from the oil companies who pushed the concept of carbon footprint, attempting to shift the conversation about infrastructure and systems into the scale of travel, gardens, and personal actions, the diversity in the views in the anthology, gives room to varied perspectives towards climate action. For instance, in the dialogue between Kim Stanley Robinson, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, and Ed Finn, Kim Stanley Robinson, argues ‘that nation- states could force international finance to give up some of their ill- gotten or artificially gotten gains to pay for [climate] justice itself” (2026:300). Here, Robinson is foregrounding system change and not just individual attitudinal change.

Chinelo Onwualu shares a similar sentiment about the importance of value change in her essay, “The Case for Reckless Climate Optimism”. In a world marred with discrimination and racism, hope for the future is possible due to the value of openness and interconnectedness adopted by the younger generation born during the pandemic. Onwualu is optimistic that this new value adopted by the generation will lead to a better future because “working with hope is very different from working with fear. One leads upward, opening us up to innovations and experimentation (41).”

 It is this hopeful attitude shared by Claire Armitstead in “The Robin, The Wolves, and The Library” as she waits for Robin to appear in her garden during a summer whose heat led to the decline of the species. 

Pippa Goldschmidt feels a similar optimism with the city of Berlin in “A Walk in Berlin”. A city with a dark history of fascism, colonialism, and genocide, the community emerged from this “physical and moral abyss (203).” It is this resilience that gives hope.

In the “Introduction”,  Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich argue for a hopeful future but add that in the collection, the hopeful futures imagined are “inspired by practical, everyday writing about climate—weather forecasts, almanacs, rainfall indexes— to try to create a user’s guide to the real world, rather than a magic eight ball revealing all of the answers” (xv). Utility is foregrounded here to counter the fantasy argument levelled against utopian unconsciousness, as utopia is “thought to be a mere fantasy” (Kloeg 2016:451) which is why Immanuel Wallerstein calls utopian unconsciousness as, “breeders of illusions and therefore, inevitably, of disillusions” (quoted in Lancaster, 2000:109) This collection exposes the weakness in such a stand. For instance, in “Climate Action Dialogue: Becoming Better Humans”, a conversation between  Kim Stanley Robinson, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, and Ed Finn, Robinson suggests practical ways to mitigate the climate crisis, such as the: 

notion of slowing down the melting and sliding of the glaciers in Antarctica to preserve sea level, which is being pursued by glaciologists. It’s a minor expense compared to what we’ve been talking about so far, really a matter of just a few billion a year to drill through those glaciers and suck the water out from underneath them. You would need a navy like the US Navy. You would need people repurposed from the oil industry to aid the glacial slowdown project. It’s exactly the same expertise, and even the same equipment (294). 

Here, Robinson gives a scalable solution to mitigate the climate crisis. Similarly, in a different location, the essay by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, “The Unwalkable City” provides practical guides in which Sri Lankan architecture could be improved for climate sustainability. All these points show that the utopia in this collection aims for one whose foundation is built on an actionable framework.

While I found this book both informative and entertaining, the only weakness I see is its framing, which makes it look ahistorical by failing to situate itself explicitly in the utopian tradition, and tends to present itself as if it had emerged without precedent. Perhaps it is from the capitalist unconscious which currently governs the academic environment, where research is constantly forced to model itself in the language of newness. Capitalism seeks expansion and imbues an unconsciousness of seeking something new in perpetuity: new market, new brand, new technology (a company like Apple tweaks its phone every other year to announce its newness). To be relevant in a capitalist political economy, the notion of newness that signals its expansion is repetitive.  This criticism, notwithstanding, the book broadens my horizon about climate futures and it is a worthwhile read. 

Selected References

Bould, M. (2021). The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture. London: Verso.

Ezeiyoke, C. (2025). Nigerian Speculative Fiction: Evolution. London: Routledge

Fisher, F. (2014).  Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Hampshire: Zero Books. 

Jameson, F. (2005). Archaeologies of the future: The desire called utopia and other science fictions. London and New York: Verso.

Kloeg, J. (2016). ‘Utopianism and its discontents: A conceptual history’. Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 108(3). 451-468 

Marx, K. and F. Engels (2007). Manifesto of the Communist Party. New York: International Publishers Co.

Popper, K. R. (1945). The open society and its enemies. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 

Simon, M (2023). Why Deleting Carbon From the Atmosphere Is So Controversial. https://www.wired.com/story/why-deleting-carbon-from-the-atmosphere-is-so-controversial/

Taylor, T. J (2024). Introduction to Cofuturisms. The Routledge Handbook of Cofuturism. Edited by Taylor, T.J, Lavender III, I, Dillon, G.L and Chattopadhyay, B. London: Routledge 

Chukwunonso Ezeiyoke’s PhD is from Manchester Metropolitan University. His research focuses on the impact of postcolonial theory on the evolution of African SF. His recent publications include a monograph Nigerian Speculative Fiction: Evolution and a collection of his short stories, Haunted Grave and Other Stories.

Reviewed by Chukwunonso Ezeiyoke

Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures edited by Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn has 23 chapters with a preface, introduction, and afterword. The book started its life as a part of The Climate Action Almanac. “The book grew out of the Climate Imagination Fellowship, started at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination in 2021” (2026:ix). In its preface, the book announces that it foregrounds hopeful stories about climate imagination. The dominant climate narrative, it argues, is full of doom stories, which leave people feeling ‘hopeless, helpless, and disillusioned’ (Eschrich and Finn 2025: ix).  This stand echoes Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism:Is There No Alternative?(2014). For Fisher, fear and cynicism do not inspire bold thinking; they form a bedrock of conformity and conservatism that hampers action and change. For Fisher, hopefulness changes the situation from one in which nothing can happen to one that allows for the actualisation of possibilities. Fisher’s stand can be traced to a theorist such as Fredric Jameson (2005), and further back, to Thomas More, the first known utopian novelist.  

However, the word ‘utopia’ was hardly mentioned in the introduction or the preface framing Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Future, and it appears sparingly throughout the collection.  This may be intended or unintended. However, there could be a good reason why the book was framed this way.  Utopia has a bad reputation. An early criticism of it could be seen from Karl Marx in Manifesto of the Communist Party published in 1848. Marx accuses utopia of lacking materialism. More recently, Karl Popper (1945) links the concept of utopia to totalitarianism. As Julien Kloeg notes, ‘Utopianism’s bad reputation is partly due to its association with the attempt to realize communism in the Soviet’ as such it is considered ‘politically dangerous’ (2016: 451). Current criticism on Utopia is such that were directed to hopeful climate narrative such as carbon removal technology. Matt Simon (2023:online) argues that “carbon removal might even encourage the continued burning of fossil fuels, if countries can say they’re sucking carbon out of the atmosphere to offset their emissions” they could end up burning more fossil fuels instead of looking for clean energy. This, in turn, sustains the capitalist structure that privileges fossil fuel consumption. Perhaps these criticisms have led the collection to shy away from exploring the book’s connection to utopian unconsciousness, even though the book draws heavily from this tradition. Unconscious here “consists of those repressed impulses, desires, drives, wishes… that the conscious mind does not care to acknowledge” (Mark Bould 2021:15). Utopian unconsciousness is defined here as those hidden utopian ideological impulses of a text. 

Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures is a mixed bag of memoirs, interviews, scholarly articles, and fiction. This disparity in the creative expressions employed by the authors in the book, luckily, does not result in a disjointed book. I think there is something symbolic about it, reflected in both the form and the content of the collection, namely: that the book champions diversity. Diversity in its form allows it to incorporate different styles of artistic expression under the umbrella of a single edited volume. This, in a way, is a stand it takes outside the totalitarian accusation levelled against the utopian unconscious in which plurality of forms, ambitions and aspirations is suppressed under the so-called singularity of purpose termed the ‘common good.’ A character in “City of Choice” by Gu Shi, translated by Ken Liu, a story within this anthology being reviewed here shares this sentiment thus ‘Should I really go forward? All choices come with costs. If the cost is the lives of those who are powerless, is it right to sacrifice them in the name of some greater “good”? (113). “City of Choice” is a type of story you read and reread, and it makes you angry and happy and angry again because life is messy and every decision comes with a cost, including the decision to freedom.  

It is not only the style of the book that is diverse; the contributors come from different localities of the globe: “China to Wales, Germany to Nigeria, Sri Lanka to Mexico, Malaysia, India, the United States, and more” (Eschrich and Finn 2025:ix) to articulate different climate challenges of what is being done, what could be done, and the potential ‘becomings’ of climatic futures. A lot of the climatic ‘becomings’ shared by a good number of the authors in the collection are akin to what Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay and Jade Taylor call ‘co-futurism.’ Taylor defines it as a future that is interconnected and overlaps, also recognising “ethnic specific and regional specific futurisms” (2024: 1). Taylor’s definition is not specific to climate futurism; the collection, which focuses on climate, is part of futurism in general.  

The content of this book follows a similar pattern as its writers explore what an inclusive future means, starting with the first story in the collection, “Three-World Cantata” by Vandana Singh. The story explores this theme and shows that futurism should not become mere progressivism, but should include both human and nonhuman elements and be led by ordinary citizens rather than corporations. The character Chingari (the story doesn’t mention their gender) and their team creates IntMRI, which allows them to take a person’s consciousness into a preexisting climatic scenario with the intention of convincing the person to adopt positive attitudes that will lead to climatic justice. Their initial targets are people in power who can influence climate policy. Manny, the CEO of UltraCorp, holds such power and is pimped into the project. Manny is exposed to different climate situations, including the importance of human interconnection with nonhumans such as elephants. Manny prefers managing the system rather than pursuing structural change.  So, what Chingari realises is that in a world charged by personal interest, to know what is good does not necessarily equate to doing what is right. Plato suggested otherwise in The Republic where he equates knowing good to doing good. However, sustainable change, Chingari discovered, starts with the collaboration of ordinary people: ‘If you looked closely at the time axis by yourself, it remained a long, thin line stretching from past through present and into the future— nothing changed. But look at it, engage with it along with other people, other beings, and you would see it thicken, acquire structure’ (Singh 2026:34). It is through community collaboration that real change emerges.

“Death is Not an Ornament” by Hannah Onoguwe echoes a similar sentiment and shows such societal change when there is a collaboration between human and nonhuman. In my book, “Nigerian Speculative Fiction: Evolution,” I argue that recurring theme in Nigerian speculative fiction is the entanglement between human and nonhuman “which it draws from the indigenous Nigerian cosmology of co-existence between human and nonhuman in a symbiotic relationship” (2025:17). The protagonist in Onoguwe’s story is a hybrid of human and nonhuman who fights to eradicate dependence on the petro-economy by teaming with nonhuman whose inhabitant is the ocean. 

In “Robots & Insects & Languages & Other Living Things” by Libia Brenda, Brenda projects this interconnection to also include machines, through the process of language. The mediator here is the IA, known as mycorrhizae, whose encoding and decoding of various means of communication between humans and other nonhumans breaks down the barrier between humans and nonhumans. Once this is accomplished, the wall between nature and culture, is broken.

In “Mina’s Dream” by Vandana Singh, activism takes a different shape, not the usual workaday protest of placard carrying (Fisher, 2014, will argue that the capitalist system has already contained this method) but from the tiny ray of hope of the ethics of the protagonist Mina. Mina’s tenderness to her garden mirrors the tenderness of her heart to her community as the protagonist says “Remember that we are entangled, all of us, with each other and other life- forms (86).” It is that love that transforms not just her community’s ecology but also spreads into a political act, which is to say that what spurred political activism here is a change in the value system.  

  

In “Climate Action Dialogue: From Liner to Fractal”, a discussion among Nigel Topping, Farhana Yamin, and Ed Finn, among other things, carries on this discourse on ethical and societal values. It is this changing of value systems that Yamin argues is the key to unlocking a better climatic future: “I’m very excited about this shift to working at the level of values, whereas before we were just trying to tinker with a policy here, or a program there, or a bit of funding here, a few fiscal reforms here and there…. Changing values allows us to see things moving differently, and to reshape our relationships (235).” It is this stand of orientation transformation that Anna Pigott takes in “Flights of Fancy” by arguing that if over-tourism is scaled down, places like Corfu currently frequented by tourists, an activity that destroys its bioforms, will have a better, more diverse ecosystem. 

Where it can be argued that value/attitude change originates from the oil companies who pushed the concept of carbon footprint, attempting to shift the conversation about infrastructure and systems into the scale of travel, gardens, and personal actions, the diversity in the views in the anthology, gives room to varied perspectives towards climate action. For instance, in the dialogue between Kim Stanley Robinson, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, and Ed Finn, Kim Stanley Robinson, argues ‘that nation- states could force international finance to give up some of their ill- gotten or artificially gotten gains to pay for [climate] justice itself” (2026:300). Here, Robinson is foregrounding system change and not just individual attitudinal change.

Chinelo Onwualu shares a similar sentiment about the importance of value change in her essay, “The Case for Reckless Climate Optimism”. In a world marred with discrimination and racism, hope for the future is possible due to the value of openness and interconnectedness adopted by the younger generation born during the pandemic. Onwualu is optimistic that this new value adopted by the generation will lead to a better future because “working with hope is very different from working with fear. One leads upward, opening us up to innovations and experimentation (41).”

 It is this hopeful attitude shared by Claire Armitstead in “The Robin, The Wolves, and The Library” as she waits for Robin to appear in her garden during a summer whose heat led to the decline of the species. 

Pippa Goldschmidt feels a similar optimism with the city of Berlin in “A Walk in Berlin”. A city with a dark history of fascism, colonialism, and genocide, the community emerged from this “physical and moral abyss (203).” It is this resilience that gives hope.

In the “Introduction”,  Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich argue for a hopeful future but add that in the collection, the hopeful futures imagined are “inspired by practical, everyday writing about climate—weather forecasts, almanacs, rainfall indexes— to try to create a user’s guide to the real world, rather than a magic eight ball revealing all of the answers” (xv). Utility is foregrounded here to counter the fantasy argument levelled against utopian unconsciousness, as utopia is “thought to be a mere fantasy” (Kloeg 2016:451) which is why Immanuel Wallerstein calls utopian unconsciousness as, “breeders of illusions and therefore, inevitably, of disillusions” (quoted in Lancaster, 2000:109) This collection exposes the weakness in such a stand. For instance, in “Climate Action Dialogue: Becoming Better Humans”, a conversation between  Kim Stanley Robinson, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, and Ed Finn, Robinson suggests practical ways to mitigate the climate crisis, such as the: 

notion of slowing down the melting and sliding of the glaciers in Antarctica to preserve sea level, which is being pursued by glaciologists. It’s a minor expense compared to what we’ve been talking about so far, really a matter of just a few billion a year to drill through those glaciers and suck the water out from underneath them. You would need a navy like the US Navy. You would need people repurposed from the oil industry to aid the glacial slowdown project. It’s exactly the same expertise, and even the same equipment (294). 

Here, Robinson gives a scalable solution to mitigate the climate crisis. Similarly, in a different location, the essay by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, “The Unwalkable City” provides practical guides in which Sri Lankan architecture could be improved for climate sustainability. All these points show that the utopia in this collection aims for one whose foundation is built on an actionable framework.

While I found this book both informative and entertaining, the only weakness I see is its framing, which makes it look ahistorical by failing to situate itself explicitly in the utopian tradition, and tends to present itself as if it had emerged without precedent. Perhaps it is from the capitalist unconscious which currently governs the academic environment, where research is constantly forced to model itself in the language of newness. Capitalism seeks expansion and imbues an unconsciousness of seeking something new in perpetuity: new market, new brand, new technology (a company like Apple tweaks its phone every other year to announce its newness). To be relevant in a capitalist political economy, the notion of newness that signals its expansion is repetitive.  This criticism, notwithstanding, the book broadens my horizon about climate futures and it is a worthwhile read. 

Selected References

Bould, M. (2021). The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture. London: Verso.

Ezeiyoke, C. (2025). Nigerian Speculative Fiction: Evolution. London: Routledge

Fisher, F. (2014).  Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Hampshire: Zero Books. 

Jameson, F. (2005). Archaeologies of the future: The desire called utopia and other science fictions. London and New York: Verso.

Kloeg, J. (2016). ‘Utopianism and its discontents: A conceptual history’. Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 108(3). 451-468 

Marx, K. and F. Engels (2007). Manifesto of the Communist Party. New York: International Publishers Co.

Popper, K. R. (1945). The open society and its enemies. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 

Simon, M (2023). Why Deleting Carbon From the Atmosphere Is So Controversial. https://www.wired.com/story/why-deleting-carbon-from-the-atmosphere-is-so-controversial/

Taylor, T. J (2024). Introduction to Cofuturisms. The Routledge Handbook of Cofuturism. Edited by Taylor, T.J, Lavender III, I, Dillon, G.L and Chattopadhyay, B. London: Routledge 

Chukwunonso Ezeiyoke’s PhD is from Manchester Metropolitan University. His research focuses on the impact of postcolonial theory on the evolution of African SF. His recent publications include a monograph Nigerian Speculative Fiction: Evolution and a collection of his short stories, Haunted Grave and Other Stories.

By Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn  Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University 

At the Center for Science and the Imagination (CSI) at Arizona State University, we’ve edited and published more than a dozen collections of speculative fiction, along with various and sundry series and one-off narrative projects, since our founding in 2012. Although the first we’ve heard of zoetology or zoefuturism is in connection with this special issue ofVector, we’ve found it to be a helpful lens for reframing some of the stories we’ve had the good luck to work on, and for considering what has made some of these projects tick. It turns out that, perhaps, we’ve often been encouraging writers to approach the intersection of science, technology, and society in ways that could be described as zoefuturistic. This aesthetic’s focus on relationality, on complexity and emergence, and on the entanglement of the processes that give rise to life and living have helped us see the provocations and challenges we’ve issued to authors in new ways. Through the lens of zoefuturism, the project of inviting people to imagine hopeful futures—and practicing this relationship of hope to the future ourselves—is really an exercise in cultivating a different matrix of relationships that give our actions new meaning and consequence.

Roger Ames’s account of zoetology presents a contrast with what he defines as a “substance ontology” that dominates the Western philosophical tradition—it’s evident in Plato and much of Aristotle, with earlier roots in works like Parmenides’s The Way of Truth. In this ontology, existence is a matter of “being per se” (Ames 2023, 87) and reality is composed of discrete entities that embody immutable essences. If things have unique or particular attributes, those are layered onto the essential identity of an entity as “properties that are borne” (Ames 2023, 87). Ames describes this in terms of an “ontological intuition” that any individual thing—a household object, animal (human or otherwise), feature of the landscape, or celestial body—comprises “a closed, exclusive boundary and the strict identity necessary for it to be this, and not that” (Ames 2023, 88). 

Drawing on the Book of Changes—but also unearthing strands in Western philosophy, from Dewey to Whitehead, and using a linguistic construction from Ancient Greek—Ames describes zoetology as a “process worldview” that captures the Chinese “shengshenglun” (蛺蛺紶), or “art of living” (Ames 2023, 90). This approach to life and the cosmos trades the Western tradition’s “beings” for “becomings,” insisting that “everything is constituted by its particular relations with everything else” (Ames 2023, 90). In a zoetological view, flux is a constant, and we exist enmeshed in “unbounded natural, social, and cultural ecologies” (Ames 2023, 90). We’re always being constituted and reconstituted by these ever-shifting relationships—with other people, with our natural and built environments, with social forces—and our thoughts and actions are reciprocally contributing to the perpetual reconstitution of those environments and systems. Zoetology also represents an anticipatory view, in the spirit of Dewey’s perspective on imagination or reflexivity in second-order cybernetics: we are all continuously changing and reaching towards the present moment and the future.

With zoefuturism, the shape of the future is determined neither by a transformation in “what it means to be human,” which was never static or knowable in the first place, nor by the introduction of a technological novum (à la Suvin, 1972) that redefines identity, or social forms, or the operations of the natural world. Rather, the futures we envision are shaped by open-ended, labile assemblages of relations, in fluid ecologies—by vast webs of connectedness, causality, shared responsibility, and care. It’s a sensibility that lends itself to tolerance for uncertainty, to embracing mutuality, and to appreciating complex systems and emergent behaviors. To invoke a precept from Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, “God is Change.”

The CSI Approach

Many of CSI’s books take the form of collections of speculative fiction short stories, presented alongside essays and artwork. The books frequently address a challenge at the nexus of technology and society: we’ve published on models for climate action rooted in local community realities; on possibilities for human activity in space, with particular attention to off-world economies; on how a transition to solar energy could reshape politics, governance, and culture; on devising ways to manage nuclear waste that are respectful of the people and lands that host storage facilities; and more. Some of these books have been funded by private philanthropies, or created in partnership with nongovernmental organizations with expertise in a particular field; others are supported by grants from U.S. government agencies, including NASA, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and the Department of Energy; we’ve funded the occasional small fiction project ourselves. 

All of these projects involve a synchronous collaborative component, which usually takes the form of an in-person workshop wherein contributors work in small groups to co-create visions of the future in response to prompts, provocations, and creative constraints designed by our team, usually in consultation with one or more co-editors with expertise in a related area. In these small groups, we intentionally bring together people from different backgrounds, with diverse perspectives on and experiences with a topic: in Cities of Light, a book exploring the transition to clean renewable energy sources, one small group included a professional speculative fiction author, an energy-systems researcher with a background in electrical engineering, a painter, a geographer who works on transportation and mobility issues, an artist who works mainly in public art and architecture, and an engineer who specializes in the design of batteries. In a few cases, this collaborative work has been done virtually, and sometimes in a more distributed fashion—for instance, a series of shorter virtual working sessions that unfold over the course of several months, rather than a multi-day in-person convening. 

In the rest of this essay, we’ll discuss two stories that have been created through this process, then published by CSI. Applying a zoefuturistic perspective to each story has sensitized us to new ways of thinking along with the narrative, emphasizing elements of relationality and an open-ended, processural approach to meaning, power, and identity. We’ll conclude by stepping back to consider how the method through which these stories are created might help to account for some of their zoetological traits. 

Entanglement

As CSI was founded in 2012, we embarked upon our first major book project: a collaboration with 17 top science fiction authors to explore hopeful, technically grounded visions of the future. Inspired by ideas formulated by author Neal Stephenson in the wake of his 2011 World Policy Journal article “Innovation Starvation,” the stories in what became the 2014 anthology Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future were intended to center technology-aided visions of the near future that engineers, scientists, and others could take up and act upon within a single professional lifetime: approximately 50 years from graduation to retirement. 

https://csi.asu.edu/books/

Working in close consultation with scientists and engineers across a variety of fields, from learning science and structural engineering to biology, astronomy, ecology, and architecture, the science fiction authors envisioned futures shaped by great feats of engineering and thrilling acts of human ingenuity. Several stories in the volume, though, focused more on triumphs of human coordination and collaboration than on gadgets or earth-shattering insights. Upon reevaluation, Vandana Singh’s “Entanglement” seems characteristically zoefuturistic in its emphasis on a porous, shifting, contingent global network as the driver for change. Its cast of characters find themselves in states of crisis and transition, and Singh masterfully captures moments of articulation between different registers of meaning: the fleeting connections among these geographically distant humans; the abstract, protean, terribly present specter of climate change; and an array of nonhuman ecologies, natural phenomena, and life forms that inhabit the planet together. 

The story links together a small group of strangers strewn across the world: an Inuit scientist working to combat methane emissions in the Arctic, a recently widowed Texan homemaker who stumbles into anti-fracking activism, an environmental scientist who crosses paths with an anonymous Banksy-esque muralist in the Amazonian city of Manaus, a young Dalit man struggling with brutal caste politics in a village in western India, and a technologist from Shanghai who journeys to a remote monastery, where he meets a solitary monk living in the ruins of an avalanche caused by a melting glacier. All of these characters are in an unsettled state: discouraged by the anomie of an industrial world hurtling itself heedlessly toward destruction, set adrift from their families and communities, coping with grief and loss, grappling with prejudice and structural violence. They’re linked by an experimental network of devices that connect people serendipitously to one another when they’re feeling lonely, or abandoned, or in extremis; the connections last only a moment, and are patchy and buggy, but each character in the story experiences some kind of transformation as a result of this transitory intervention. 

“Entanglement” is obsessed with networks, network effects, and the emergent properties of complex systems. Irene, the Arctic scientist, is creating a collective of self-organizing robots called “brollys” to identify and prevent methane leaks and melting sea ice, and is beginning to realize that the bots are becoming surprisingly sophisticated. In the Amazon and Texas vignettes, small political acts catalyze nascent local movements for climate action; a possibly numinous connection with a deceased relative may contribute to Irene being saved by a beluga whale when she nearly drowns in icy water; Dr. Ismail, a Nigerian computer science professor who inspires Yuan, the Shanghai-born inventor of the serendipity-connection devices, lectures about the dangers of knowledge silos and the need for transdisciplinary thinking about complex world systems. 

Intrinsically tied to this network theme is the notion of the “butterfly effect,” from the famous observation by mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz; the story features both a butterfly, in the form of a drawing passed clandestinely from the street artist to the environmental scientist in Manaus, and a tornado in the western Indian village. In a gesture towards zoefuturistic open-endedness, Singh begins the story with a set of ellipses, “…flapping its wings…,” and ends with a rhymed phrase enclosed in ellipses, “…a butterfly…,” demonstrating that all of these hyperlocal and seemingly individual actions are linked in a global system. Describing zoetology, Ames calls this “holography—literally, the whole as it is implicated in each thing… [a] way of understanding things that begins from the notion that everything is constituted by its particular relations with everything else” (2023, 90). 

Everything in Singh’s story is entangled: these strangers, by Yuan’s networked devices, but also the entire biosphere, which can be pushed towards healing or collapse by a repertoire of small actions whose effects radiate out. “Entanglement” blossoms in a zoefuturistic reading: we can see clearly that people and climate phenomena alike are not discrete beings but, as in the Book of Changes, “events” that are happening, in complex dynamic relation, always poised for transformation.

Take Three

Almost ten years after the publication of Hieroglyph,in the spring of 2023, CSI brought together classical musicians, arts leaders, and music educators with speculative fiction authors and a few others with expertise from further afield—civil engineering, public health, and learning science—to consider the future of an institution that is drenched in symbolism and laden with historical baggage: the symphony orchestra. From the legacy of the Western European Enlightenment to cultural elitism, from rarefied aesthetic experiences to the primacy of a calcified canon, these institutions carry incredible cultural weight, and are often positioned by orchestra professionals, donors, and political figures as purveyors of a rich, unassailable, and largely unchanging tradition of artistic excellence, exacting rigor, and spiritual nourishment. But orchestras are facing existential challenges of relevance, representation, and sustainability. We can readily imagine orchestras riven: they find themselves increasingly ill-suited to the needs, tastes, and values of the communities in which they are situated, but any deviation from the status quo can feel like a negation, a compromise, or a dereliction of their duty to protect and promulgate their values. In this gathering, we collectively imagined these institutions reshaped as vibrant spaces for building community, as models for learning and human coordination, and as providers of resources to aid in health, resilience, and social cohesion. 

Each of our four working groups considered the future of the orchestra through a different thematic lens, designed to bring into focus different social functions and roles that a future orchestra might play in connection with the communities that host and sustain it. Sound Systems, the resulting book, is accordingly divided into four sections:Orchestra as Game, Orchestra as Public Good, Orchestra as Network, and Orchestra as Infrastructure. In response to the final lens, Karen Lord’s short story “Take Three” provokes us to radically reframe our expectations of orchestras and classical music by projecting into the far future, placing orchestras in a moment where humans are new entrants in a larger interplanetary community with other intelligent life forms.

In “Take Three,” music provides the foundation—an infrastructure—for interspecies communication in a world where humans interact regularly with extraterrestrials. The Shining Ones communicate with humans (and presumably other species throughout the cosmos) using the Official Speech, a musically complex and demanding universal language. In this future, orchestras as we know them are well-nigh extinct, but we do see two very different infrastructures in which music is deployed. One is the House of Music, an increasingly outmoded haven for tranquil, elevated aesthetic experiences for a dwindling clientele of aesthetes, where classical music is paired with haute cuisine and artful, soothing décor. The other is the Earth Ethnomusicology Project, one of a number of hybrid endeavors wherein humans collaborate with the Shining Ones. This boundary-breaking program researches, performs, archives, and mashes up all kinds of musics, classical and otherwise, in settings virtual and physical, indoor and outdoor, on Earth and off-world. As Sara, a student and adherent of the project, explains: “Our locations are real and virtual, permanent and ephemeral. Part historical museum, part educational center. Recording, performing, teaching, learning, creating the new, reviving the old. We are working to develop our own approved vernacular, equal in dignity and complexity to the Official Speech of the Shining Ones.” 

Pierre, our main character, is an accomplished cellist from a storied musical family, but after the collapse of the traditional ecosystem of orchestras, he finds himself running a House of Music, aging past his musical prime and fading into obscurity. He hasn’t been discovered by a sponsor and invited to join the Shining Ones and learn the Official Speech, which has become “the common language of law, diplomacy, and trade,” but he’s also wary and resentful of the hegemony of the Shining Ones and wishes ardently to turn back the clock and claim his rightful place in a vaunted symphony orchestra. Pierre is a finicky type, a perfectionist and a bit of a prig, intolerant of momentary failings and creative licenses taken by his fellow players. When Sara visits his House of Music, she reveals that she and one of the Shining Ones had observed Pierre playing in a quartet years earlier; his inflexibility and exacting standards of artistic precision made him seem ill-suited to study the Official Speech or help to develop an Earthly corollary to it. As she shares, “The music of the Official Speech is not a recitation. It’s a conversation.” 

So far, so zoefuturistic, right? Through this encounter between Pierre and Sara, author Karen Lord pits slavish devotion to a narrowly defined, stagnant, inherently elitist definition of excellence against something more fluid and relational. We don’t get to see much of the Shining Ones in the story, and whenever Pierre looks at one of them, they exude a painfully brilliant light that makes them celestial, but also murky and aloof. So, it’s left to the reader to speculate about what kind of interplanetary community humans have joined, or been induced to join. But galactic power relations aside, we’re encouraged to imagine the Official Speech as offering harmony, connection, cohesion, as opposed to a traditional classical music paradigm built on hierarchy and a sharp division between speakers (players) and listeners. The Earth Ethnomusicology Project model that Sara describes to Pierre blends the intensive skill development and human coordination of the classical ensemble with sounds, practices, and vibes from a broad array of Earth’s musical cultures: “modern panyards with professional steel orchestras performing, teaching, and passing on their distinctive legacies. … New schools dedicated solely to percussion, building on centuries-old traditions of multiple cultures. Choirs of vocal and bodily instruments—tapping feet, clapping hands, hooting and trilling and clicks and whispers.”

In a virtuosic turn, Lord encloses Pierre’s entire journey in a metatextual frame. Just before the story’s end, we learn that we have been reading through a rendition of Pierre Doit Choisir, an experimental symphonic piece that is a beloved artwork in this future of humans and Shining Ones, which Lord terms “the Extraterrestrial Age,” the successor to our current “Information Age.” We learn that Pierre is a fictional character, perhaps inspired by one of three historical Pierres, or perhaps a composite figure, or a purely metaphorical construct. Pierre Doit Choisir has three different endings, and the orchestra and conductor for each performance select which ending to play. In some renditions, the orchestra plays all three denouements, or has the audience vote; and “One version, adapted with permission from the creators by the Night Crew Collective, has three orchestras playing the three concluding movements at the same time in stormy yet harmonious cooperation.” There is a universally adhered-to norm that performances of Pierre Doit Choisir should not be recorded, meaning that “the question of what Pierre will choose to do remains in a state of suspended anticipation, never to be resolved until the hour of performance.”

None of the three paths available to Pierre work out perfectly. In the first, he briefly joins the Earth Ethnomusicology Project but cannot find his place in this nonhierarchical milieu. He returns to the House of Music, “growing more and more eccentric as he clings to unreliable memories of the idealized past when there were no Shining Ones, when his lineage and vocation made him more than ordinary.” In the second, he joins up and is subjected to myriad therapies and trainings to try to undo his performance style, which is perceived by his new collaborators as “over-rehearsed and lacking in sincerity.” He stays with the project but retreats to its periphery, where he works on perfecting the Vibrational Aesthetic, which was his vocation at the House of Music. In the third, he joins up and while he is ruffled by the lack of hierarchy (“frustrated that there are no higher rungs to rise to, no lower rungs to look down on”), and while he never quite overcomes the “taint of stiffness” in his playing, he is able to find some contentment, particularly in brief moments of fascination and joy that make “his blood beat faster under his cultured, crystalline shell.” 

In “Take Three,” we see an approach that resonates with a zoefuturistic aesthetic on several levels: Pierre’s struggles to shift from a fixed, hierarchical, insular lifeway to one characterized by interchange, relationality, improvisation, and continual reinvention; the nebulous, adaptable model for creative exploration and interspecies thriving pursued by the Earth Ethnomusicology Project; the refusal of closure in Pierre Doit Choisir, which leaves the fate of Pierre, who stands in for humanity’s atavistic strains in this newly expansive interplanetary future, continually open for revision and interpretation. Likewise, Lord’s story itself slyly divulges and withholds information in a way that leaves much about Pierre and the fate of humanity unwritten. Do we prefer this future where music and language meld together? How much do we sympathize with Pierre? Are Sara and her cohorts shedding their humanity in joining the Shining Ones, and if they are, is that ultimately a good thing? 

Zoefuturism and the Conditions of Literary Production

When we combed through the Center for Science and the Imagination archives with a zoefuturistic lens, we easily stacked up a dozen candidates, across several books and collections, before settling on “Entanglement” and “Take Three” to focus on here. This raises the question: Is there something about the way we’re producing these stories that’s inclining them towards a zoetological sensibility? 

Though this is just speculation (and we’ll once again disclaim that zoefuturism is a new concept for us), we’d like to suggest that perhaps the collaborative, socially intensive methods by which CSI stories are produced might tend to generate more relational, open, polyvocal narratives. These stories, perhaps, key on process rather than closure, and on the dynamic interactions among a plurality of systems instead of discrete, bounded singularities. 

The process of literary production is often mythologized as an act of heroic individual creativity—think Jack Kerouac perched in his fire lookout in the Cascade Mountains—but for most writers and most books, it involves intensive sociality as much as focused solitude. This might take any number of forms: authors visit physical locations, talk with informants on the ground in the places or communities about which they are writing, participate in writers’ groups, read works-in-progress at public events, attend virtual sessions on topics related to their work, join fellowships at universities, or work closely with editors or other advisors. This social process is often hidden, or absorbed into a text, only to be found on acknowledgements pages or in interviews with authors around a book’s publication; sometimes it’s entirely submerged, unspoken. And of course the texts themselves are always talking to one another, communicating through the intersections of language, style, homage, adaptation, and dialog.

At CSI, we make the social process around the creation of a vision of the future, and a story that wends its way through that future, explicit. We foreground it in project descriptions, in editors’ introductions, in “About this Book” sections and author’s notes at the end of a story, in detailed “Credits” pages that describe each contributor’s precise role in a book. We write about the process in scholarly articles and, when we discuss our publications in popular media, the workshop that gives rise to the book is often given equal airtime as the content of the book itself. The book, and the short fiction in it, are artifacts of a process of collaborative imagination. They document a set of enthusiastic, complex, and searching conversations whose essence, with luck, is captured in some way in the stories, essays, art, and other materials that comprise the eventual book. 

This social process doesn’t end in publication, either; in the case of Hieroglyph, for instance, we used the book’s launch to stand up dozens of conversations about the power of imagination and storytelling for helping us to come to grips with possible futures, and to deliberate about the roles that a wide variety of technologies could play in society. Those conversations spanned venues ranging from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to New America, a think tank in Washington, DC, to the headquarters of technology companies like Tumblr and Google, to the venerable civic events series Town Hall Seattle, to bookstores in New York, San Francisco, Toronto, Phoenix, and other cities, to the pages of the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Slate magazine, MIT Technology Review, and more. It was precisely the post-launch sociality around Hieroglyph that created the energy necessary for us to continue publishing stories created in this manner—conversations stemming from that book led to us establishing the Future Tense Fiction series (now published in Issues in Science and Technology, the house magazine of the National Academy of Sciences); to the book Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities, supported by a grant from NASA; and to smaller-scale endeavors like Us in Flux, a series of flash fiction stories published during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic that imagined futures shaped by community resilience and mutual aid. 

This mode of literary production necessarily captures the flow and flux of an ongoing conversation. These stories are provisional, and they exist as dotted-line paths towards many possible futures, rather than a prediction or an endorsement of a particular route ahead. Fiction authors who work with us are inundated with ideas and angles from diverse perspectives, through the workshops and convenings that inaugurate these projects and throughout the process of consultation, editing, publishing, and post-publication conversation. An author might easily start a project with deep discussions with a half-dozen people—they might confer with a visual artist, an engineer or technologist, a historian or literary scholar, a policy wonk, and a graduate student just starting their career in a specific field. Each of these people imparts not just information, but a perspective, a stance, a set of priorities and values, moral and ethical concerns, anxieties and uncertainties. Collecting, filtering, and condensing all of this input and transforming it into a story can lead to narratives that are richly layered, engaging with many voices and different registers of reality, like Singh’s “Entanglement” and Lord’s “Take Three.” These stories reflect the complex social worlds that underpin their conception and production. 

Now that we have access to zoefuturism and zoetology as lenses for thinking about and around our work, we’re excited to see what new ideas and possibilities they bring into focus. If we’ve been scattering zoetological seeds all along, what if we set our minds to intentionally planting and growing a garden of them? Zoefuturism taps into what science fiction stories can do best: helping us to dwell with the complexity that characterizes our experience of the universe, rather than trying to winnow it down into something flatter and more manageable. One of the persistent joys in our work at CSI has been to see the futures we cultivate blossom and take on vibrant new lives of their own. 

Works Referenced

Ames, Roger T. 2023. “‘Zoetology’: A New Name for an Old Way of Thinking.” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 93: 81–98. doi.org/10.1017/S1358246123000012. 

Butler, Octavia. 1993. Parable of the Sower. Four Walls Eight Windows.

Eschrich, Joey, and Clark A. Miller, eds. 2021. Cities of Light: A Collection of Solar Futures. Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University. csi.asu.edu/books/cities-of-light. 

Finn, Ed, and Joey Eschrich, eds. 2017. Visions, Ventures, Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures. Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University. csi.asu.edu/books/vvev.

Lord, Karen. 2025. “Take Three.” In Sound Systems: The Future of the Orchestra, edited by Alex Laing, Joey Eschrich, and Ed Finn. Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University. csi.asu.edu/books/soundsystems. 

Singh, Vandana. 2014. “Entanglement.” In Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer. William Morrow.

Stephenson, Neal. 2011. “Innovation Starvation.” World Policy Journal 28 (3): 11–16. doi.org/10.1177/0740277511425349.

Suvin, Darko. 1972. “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre.” College English 34 (3): 372–382. doi.org/10.2307/375141. 

Joey Eschrich is the managing editor for the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University and assistant director of Future Tense, a partnership of ASU and New America. He has coedited a number of collections of fiction and nonfiction, most recently Climate Imagination (MIT Press, 2025).  

Ed Finn is the founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, where he is an associate professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the GAME School and academic director of Future Tense, a partnership of ASU and New America.

By Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn  Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University 

At the Center for Science and the Imagination (CSI) at Arizona State University, we’ve edited and published more than a dozen collections of speculative fiction, along with various and sundry series and one-off narrative projects, since our founding in 2012. Although the first we’ve heard of zoetology or zoefuturism is in connection with this special issue ofVector, we’ve found it to be a helpful lens for reframing some of the stories we’ve had the good luck to work on, and for considering what has made some of these projects tick. It turns out that, perhaps, we’ve often been encouraging writers to approach the intersection of science, technology, and society in ways that could be described as zoefuturistic. This aesthetic’s focus on relationality, on complexity and emergence, and on the entanglement of the processes that give rise to life and living have helped us see the provocations and challenges we’ve issued to authors in new ways. Through the lens of zoefuturism, the project of inviting people to imagine hopeful futures—and practicing this relationship of hope to the future ourselves—is really an exercise in cultivating a different matrix of relationships that give our actions new meaning and consequence.

Roger Ames’s account of zoetology presents a contrast with what he defines as a “substance ontology” that dominates the Western philosophical tradition—it’s evident in Plato and much of Aristotle, with earlier roots in works like Parmenides’s The Way of Truth. In this ontology, existence is a matter of “being per se” (Ames 2023, 87) and reality is composed of discrete entities that embody immutable essences. If things have unique or particular attributes, those are layered onto the essential identity of an entity as “properties that are borne” (Ames 2023, 87). Ames describes this in terms of an “ontological intuition” that any individual thing—a household object, animal (human or otherwise), feature of the landscape, or celestial body—comprises “a closed, exclusive boundary and the strict identity necessary for it to be this, and not that” (Ames 2023, 88). 

Drawing on the Book of Changes—but also unearthing strands in Western philosophy, from Dewey to Whitehead, and using a linguistic construction from Ancient Greek—Ames describes zoetology as a “process worldview” that captures the Chinese “shengshenglun” (蛺蛺紶), or “art of living” (Ames 2023, 90). This approach to life and the cosmos trades the Western tradition’s “beings” for “becomings,” insisting that “everything is constituted by its particular relations with everything else” (Ames 2023, 90). In a zoetological view, flux is a constant, and we exist enmeshed in “unbounded natural, social, and cultural ecologies” (Ames 2023, 90). We’re always being constituted and reconstituted by these ever-shifting relationships—with other people, with our natural and built environments, with social forces—and our thoughts and actions are reciprocally contributing to the perpetual reconstitution of those environments and systems. Zoetology also represents an anticipatory view, in the spirit of Dewey’s perspective on imagination or reflexivity in second-order cybernetics: we are all continuously changing and reaching towards the present moment and the future.

With zoefuturism, the shape of the future is determined neither by a transformation in “what it means to be human,” which was never static or knowable in the first place, nor by the introduction of a technological novum (à la Suvin, 1972) that redefines identity, or social forms, or the operations of the natural world. Rather, the futures we envision are shaped by open-ended, labile assemblages of relations, in fluid ecologies—by vast webs of connectedness, causality, shared responsibility, and care. It’s a sensibility that lends itself to tolerance for uncertainty, to embracing mutuality, and to appreciating complex systems and emergent behaviors. To invoke a precept from Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, “God is Change.”

The CSI Approach

Many of CSI’s books take the form of collections of speculative fiction short stories, presented alongside essays and artwork. The books frequently address a challenge at the nexus of technology and society: we’ve published on models for climate action rooted in local community realities; on possibilities for human activity in space, with particular attention to off-world economies; on how a transition to solar energy could reshape politics, governance, and culture; on devising ways to manage nuclear waste that are respectful of the people and lands that host storage facilities; and more. Some of these books have been funded by private philanthropies, or created in partnership with nongovernmental organizations with expertise in a particular field; others are supported by grants from U.S. government agencies, including NASA, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and the Department of Energy; we’ve funded the occasional small fiction project ourselves. 

All of these projects involve a synchronous collaborative component, which usually takes the form of an in-person workshop wherein contributors work in small groups to co-create visions of the future in response to prompts, provocations, and creative constraints designed by our team, usually in consultation with one or more co-editors with expertise in a related area. In these small groups, we intentionally bring together people from different backgrounds, with diverse perspectives on and experiences with a topic: in Cities of Light, a book exploring the transition to clean renewable energy sources, one small group included a professional speculative fiction author, an energy-systems researcher with a background in electrical engineering, a painter, a geographer who works on transportation and mobility issues, an artist who works mainly in public art and architecture, and an engineer who specializes in the design of batteries. In a few cases, this collaborative work has been done virtually, and sometimes in a more distributed fashion—for instance, a series of shorter virtual working sessions that unfold over the course of several months, rather than a multi-day in-person convening. 

In the rest of this essay, we’ll discuss two stories that have been created through this process, then published by CSI. Applying a zoefuturistic perspective to each story has sensitized us to new ways of thinking along with the narrative, emphasizing elements of relationality and an open-ended, processural approach to meaning, power, and identity. We’ll conclude by stepping back to consider how the method through which these stories are created might help to account for some of their zoetological traits. 

Entanglement

As CSI was founded in 2012, we embarked upon our first major book project: a collaboration with 17 top science fiction authors to explore hopeful, technically grounded visions of the future. Inspired by ideas formulated by author Neal Stephenson in the wake of his 2011 World Policy Journal article “Innovation Starvation,” the stories in what became the 2014 anthology Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future were intended to center technology-aided visions of the near future that engineers, scientists, and others could take up and act upon within a single professional lifetime: approximately 50 years from graduation to retirement. 

https://csi.asu.edu/books/

Working in close consultation with scientists and engineers across a variety of fields, from learning science and structural engineering to biology, astronomy, ecology, and architecture, the science fiction authors envisioned futures shaped by great feats of engineering and thrilling acts of human ingenuity. Several stories in the volume, though, focused more on triumphs of human coordination and collaboration than on gadgets or earth-shattering insights. Upon reevaluation, Vandana Singh’s “Entanglement” seems characteristically zoefuturistic in its emphasis on a porous, shifting, contingent global network as the driver for change. Its cast of characters find themselves in states of crisis and transition, and Singh masterfully captures moments of articulation between different registers of meaning: the fleeting connections among these geographically distant humans; the abstract, protean, terribly present specter of climate change; and an array of nonhuman ecologies, natural phenomena, and life forms that inhabit the planet together. 

The story links together a small group of strangers strewn across the world: an Inuit scientist working to combat methane emissions in the Arctic, a recently widowed Texan homemaker who stumbles into anti-fracking activism, an environmental scientist who crosses paths with an anonymous Banksy-esque muralist in the Amazonian city of Manaus, a young Dalit man struggling with brutal caste politics in a village in western India, and a technologist from Shanghai who journeys to a remote monastery, where he meets a solitary monk living in the ruins of an avalanche caused by a melting glacier. All of these characters are in an unsettled state: discouraged by the anomie of an industrial world hurtling itself heedlessly toward destruction, set adrift from their families and communities, coping with grief and loss, grappling with prejudice and structural violence. They’re linked by an experimental network of devices that connect people serendipitously to one another when they’re feeling lonely, or abandoned, or in extremis; the connections last only a moment, and are patchy and buggy, but each character in the story experiences some kind of transformation as a result of this transitory intervention. 

“Entanglement” is obsessed with networks, network effects, and the emergent properties of complex systems. Irene, the Arctic scientist, is creating a collective of self-organizing robots called “brollys” to identify and prevent methane leaks and melting sea ice, and is beginning to realize that the bots are becoming surprisingly sophisticated. In the Amazon and Texas vignettes, small political acts catalyze nascent local movements for climate action; a possibly numinous connection with a deceased relative may contribute to Irene being saved by a beluga whale when she nearly drowns in icy water; Dr. Ismail, a Nigerian computer science professor who inspires Yuan, the Shanghai-born inventor of the serendipity-connection devices, lectures about the dangers of knowledge silos and the need for transdisciplinary thinking about complex world systems. 

Intrinsically tied to this network theme is the notion of the “butterfly effect,” from the famous observation by mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz; the story features both a butterfly, in the form of a drawing passed clandestinely from the street artist to the environmental scientist in Manaus, and a tornado in the western Indian village. In a gesture towards zoefuturistic open-endedness, Singh begins the story with a set of ellipses, “…flapping its wings…,” and ends with a rhymed phrase enclosed in ellipses, “…a butterfly…,” demonstrating that all of these hyperlocal and seemingly individual actions are linked in a global system. Describing zoetology, Ames calls this “holography—literally, the whole as it is implicated in each thing… [a] way of understanding things that begins from the notion that everything is constituted by its particular relations with everything else” (2023, 90). 

Everything in Singh’s story is entangled: these strangers, by Yuan’s networked devices, but also the entire biosphere, which can be pushed towards healing or collapse by a repertoire of small actions whose effects radiate out. “Entanglement” blossoms in a zoefuturistic reading: we can see clearly that people and climate phenomena alike are not discrete beings but, as in the Book of Changes, “events” that are happening, in complex dynamic relation, always poised for transformation.

Take Three

Almost ten years after the publication of Hieroglyph,in the spring of 2023, CSI brought together classical musicians, arts leaders, and music educators with speculative fiction authors and a few others with expertise from further afield—civil engineering, public health, and learning science—to consider the future of an institution that is drenched in symbolism and laden with historical baggage: the symphony orchestra. From the legacy of the Western European Enlightenment to cultural elitism, from rarefied aesthetic experiences to the primacy of a calcified canon, these institutions carry incredible cultural weight, and are often positioned by orchestra professionals, donors, and political figures as purveyors of a rich, unassailable, and largely unchanging tradition of artistic excellence, exacting rigor, and spiritual nourishment. But orchestras are facing existential challenges of relevance, representation, and sustainability. We can readily imagine orchestras riven: they find themselves increasingly ill-suited to the needs, tastes, and values of the communities in which they are situated, but any deviation from the status quo can feel like a negation, a compromise, or a dereliction of their duty to protect and promulgate their values. In this gathering, we collectively imagined these institutions reshaped as vibrant spaces for building community, as models for learning and human coordination, and as providers of resources to aid in health, resilience, and social cohesion. 

Each of our four working groups considered the future of the orchestra through a different thematic lens, designed to bring into focus different social functions and roles that a future orchestra might play in connection with the communities that host and sustain it. Sound Systems, the resulting book, is accordingly divided into four sections:Orchestra as Game, Orchestra as Public Good, Orchestra as Network, and Orchestra as Infrastructure. In response to the final lens, Karen Lord’s short story “Take Three” provokes us to radically reframe our expectations of orchestras and classical music by projecting into the far future, placing orchestras in a moment where humans are new entrants in a larger interplanetary community with other intelligent life forms.

In “Take Three,” music provides the foundation—an infrastructure—for interspecies communication in a world where humans interact regularly with extraterrestrials. The Shining Ones communicate with humans (and presumably other species throughout the cosmos) using the Official Speech, a musically complex and demanding universal language. In this future, orchestras as we know them are well-nigh extinct, but we do see two very different infrastructures in which music is deployed. One is the House of Music, an increasingly outmoded haven for tranquil, elevated aesthetic experiences for a dwindling clientele of aesthetes, where classical music is paired with haute cuisine and artful, soothing décor. The other is the Earth Ethnomusicology Project, one of a number of hybrid endeavors wherein humans collaborate with the Shining Ones. This boundary-breaking program researches, performs, archives, and mashes up all kinds of musics, classical and otherwise, in settings virtual and physical, indoor and outdoor, on Earth and off-world. As Sara, a student and adherent of the project, explains: “Our locations are real and virtual, permanent and ephemeral. Part historical museum, part educational center. Recording, performing, teaching, learning, creating the new, reviving the old. We are working to develop our own approved vernacular, equal in dignity and complexity to the Official Speech of the Shining Ones.” 

Pierre, our main character, is an accomplished cellist from a storied musical family, but after the collapse of the traditional ecosystem of orchestras, he finds himself running a House of Music, aging past his musical prime and fading into obscurity. He hasn’t been discovered by a sponsor and invited to join the Shining Ones and learn the Official Speech, which has become “the common language of law, diplomacy, and trade,” but he’s also wary and resentful of the hegemony of the Shining Ones and wishes ardently to turn back the clock and claim his rightful place in a vaunted symphony orchestra. Pierre is a finicky type, a perfectionist and a bit of a prig, intolerant of momentary failings and creative licenses taken by his fellow players. When Sara visits his House of Music, she reveals that she and one of the Shining Ones had observed Pierre playing in a quartet years earlier; his inflexibility and exacting standards of artistic precision made him seem ill-suited to study the Official Speech or help to develop an Earthly corollary to it. As she shares, “The music of the Official Speech is not a recitation. It’s a conversation.” 

So far, so zoefuturistic, right? Through this encounter between Pierre and Sara, author Karen Lord pits slavish devotion to a narrowly defined, stagnant, inherently elitist definition of excellence against something more fluid and relational. We don’t get to see much of the Shining Ones in the story, and whenever Pierre looks at one of them, they exude a painfully brilliant light that makes them celestial, but also murky and aloof. So, it’s left to the reader to speculate about what kind of interplanetary community humans have joined, or been induced to join. But galactic power relations aside, we’re encouraged to imagine the Official Speech as offering harmony, connection, cohesion, as opposed to a traditional classical music paradigm built on hierarchy and a sharp division between speakers (players) and listeners. The Earth Ethnomusicology Project model that Sara describes to Pierre blends the intensive skill development and human coordination of the classical ensemble with sounds, practices, and vibes from a broad array of Earth’s musical cultures: “modern panyards with professional steel orchestras performing, teaching, and passing on their distinctive legacies. … New schools dedicated solely to percussion, building on centuries-old traditions of multiple cultures. Choirs of vocal and bodily instruments—tapping feet, clapping hands, hooting and trilling and clicks and whispers.”

In a virtuosic turn, Lord encloses Pierre’s entire journey in a metatextual frame. Just before the story’s end, we learn that we have been reading through a rendition of Pierre Doit Choisir, an experimental symphonic piece that is a beloved artwork in this future of humans and Shining Ones, which Lord terms “the Extraterrestrial Age,” the successor to our current “Information Age.” We learn that Pierre is a fictional character, perhaps inspired by one of three historical Pierres, or perhaps a composite figure, or a purely metaphorical construct. Pierre Doit Choisir has three different endings, and the orchestra and conductor for each performance select which ending to play. In some renditions, the orchestra plays all three denouements, or has the audience vote; and “One version, adapted with permission from the creators by the Night Crew Collective, has three orchestras playing the three concluding movements at the same time in stormy yet harmonious cooperation.” There is a universally adhered-to norm that performances of Pierre Doit Choisir should not be recorded, meaning that “the question of what Pierre will choose to do remains in a state of suspended anticipation, never to be resolved until the hour of performance.”

None of the three paths available to Pierre work out perfectly. In the first, he briefly joins the Earth Ethnomusicology Project but cannot find his place in this nonhierarchical milieu. He returns to the House of Music, “growing more and more eccentric as he clings to unreliable memories of the idealized past when there were no Shining Ones, when his lineage and vocation made him more than ordinary.” In the second, he joins up and is subjected to myriad therapies and trainings to try to undo his performance style, which is perceived by his new collaborators as “over-rehearsed and lacking in sincerity.” He stays with the project but retreats to its periphery, where he works on perfecting the Vibrational Aesthetic, which was his vocation at the House of Music. In the third, he joins up and while he is ruffled by the lack of hierarchy (“frustrated that there are no higher rungs to rise to, no lower rungs to look down on”), and while he never quite overcomes the “taint of stiffness” in his playing, he is able to find some contentment, particularly in brief moments of fascination and joy that make “his blood beat faster under his cultured, crystalline shell.” 

In “Take Three,” we see an approach that resonates with a zoefuturistic aesthetic on several levels: Pierre’s struggles to shift from a fixed, hierarchical, insular lifeway to one characterized by interchange, relationality, improvisation, and continual reinvention; the nebulous, adaptable model for creative exploration and interspecies thriving pursued by the Earth Ethnomusicology Project; the refusal of closure in Pierre Doit Choisir, which leaves the fate of Pierre, who stands in for humanity’s atavistic strains in this newly expansive interplanetary future, continually open for revision and interpretation. Likewise, Lord’s story itself slyly divulges and withholds information in a way that leaves much about Pierre and the fate of humanity unwritten. Do we prefer this future where music and language meld together? How much do we sympathize with Pierre? Are Sara and her cohorts shedding their humanity in joining the Shining Ones, and if they are, is that ultimately a good thing? 

Zoefuturism and the Conditions of Literary Production

When we combed through the Center for Science and the Imagination archives with a zoefuturistic lens, we easily stacked up a dozen candidates, across several books and collections, before settling on “Entanglement” and “Take Three” to focus on here. This raises the question: Is there something about the way we’re producing these stories that’s inclining them towards a zoetological sensibility? 

Though this is just speculation (and we’ll once again disclaim that zoefuturism is a new concept for us), we’d like to suggest that perhaps the collaborative, socially intensive methods by which CSI stories are produced might tend to generate more relational, open, polyvocal narratives. These stories, perhaps, key on process rather than closure, and on the dynamic interactions among a plurality of systems instead of discrete, bounded singularities. 

The process of literary production is often mythologized as an act of heroic individual creativity—think Jack Kerouac perched in his fire lookout in the Cascade Mountains—but for most writers and most books, it involves intensive sociality as much as focused solitude. This might take any number of forms: authors visit physical locations, talk with informants on the ground in the places or communities about which they are writing, participate in writers’ groups, read works-in-progress at public events, attend virtual sessions on topics related to their work, join fellowships at universities, or work closely with editors or other advisors. This social process is often hidden, or absorbed into a text, only to be found on acknowledgements pages or in interviews with authors around a book’s publication; sometimes it’s entirely submerged, unspoken. And of course the texts themselves are always talking to one another, communicating through the intersections of language, style, homage, adaptation, and dialog.

At CSI, we make the social process around the creation of a vision of the future, and a story that wends its way through that future, explicit. We foreground it in project descriptions, in editors’ introductions, in “About this Book” sections and author’s notes at the end of a story, in detailed “Credits” pages that describe each contributor’s precise role in a book. We write about the process in scholarly articles and, when we discuss our publications in popular media, the workshop that gives rise to the book is often given equal airtime as the content of the book itself. The book, and the short fiction in it, are artifacts of a process of collaborative imagination. They document a set of enthusiastic, complex, and searching conversations whose essence, with luck, is captured in some way in the stories, essays, art, and other materials that comprise the eventual book. 

This social process doesn’t end in publication, either; in the case of Hieroglyph, for instance, we used the book’s launch to stand up dozens of conversations about the power of imagination and storytelling for helping us to come to grips with possible futures, and to deliberate about the roles that a wide variety of technologies could play in society. Those conversations spanned venues ranging from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to New America, a think tank in Washington, DC, to the headquarters of technology companies like Tumblr and Google, to the venerable civic events series Town Hall Seattle, to bookstores in New York, San Francisco, Toronto, Phoenix, and other cities, to the pages of the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Slate magazine, MIT Technology Review, and more. It was precisely the post-launch sociality around Hieroglyph that created the energy necessary for us to continue publishing stories created in this manner—conversations stemming from that book led to us establishing the Future Tense Fiction series (now published in Issues in Science and Technology, the house magazine of the National Academy of Sciences); to the book Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities, supported by a grant from NASA; and to smaller-scale endeavors like Us in Flux, a series of flash fiction stories published during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic that imagined futures shaped by community resilience and mutual aid. 

This mode of literary production necessarily captures the flow and flux of an ongoing conversation. These stories are provisional, and they exist as dotted-line paths towards many possible futures, rather than a prediction or an endorsement of a particular route ahead. Fiction authors who work with us are inundated with ideas and angles from diverse perspectives, through the workshops and convenings that inaugurate these projects and throughout the process of consultation, editing, publishing, and post-publication conversation. An author might easily start a project with deep discussions with a half-dozen people—they might confer with a visual artist, an engineer or technologist, a historian or literary scholar, a policy wonk, and a graduate student just starting their career in a specific field. Each of these people imparts not just information, but a perspective, a stance, a set of priorities and values, moral and ethical concerns, anxieties and uncertainties. Collecting, filtering, and condensing all of this input and transforming it into a story can lead to narratives that are richly layered, engaging with many voices and different registers of reality, like Singh’s “Entanglement” and Lord’s “Take Three.” These stories reflect the complex social worlds that underpin their conception and production. 

Now that we have access to zoefuturism and zoetology as lenses for thinking about and around our work, we’re excited to see what new ideas and possibilities they bring into focus. If we’ve been scattering zoetological seeds all along, what if we set our minds to intentionally planting and growing a garden of them? Zoefuturism taps into what science fiction stories can do best: helping us to dwell with the complexity that characterizes our experience of the universe, rather than trying to winnow it down into something flatter and more manageable. One of the persistent joys in our work at CSI has been to see the futures we cultivate blossom and take on vibrant new lives of their own. 

Works Referenced

Ames, Roger T. 2023. “‘Zoetology’: A New Name for an Old Way of Thinking.” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 93: 81–98. doi.org/10.1017/S1358246123000012. 

Butler, Octavia. 1993. Parable of the Sower. Four Walls Eight Windows.

Eschrich, Joey, and Clark A. Miller, eds. 2021. Cities of Light: A Collection of Solar Futures. Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University. csi.asu.edu/books/cities-of-light. 

Finn, Ed, and Joey Eschrich, eds. 2017. Visions, Ventures, Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures. Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University. csi.asu.edu/books/vvev.

Lord, Karen. 2025. “Take Three.” In Sound Systems: The Future of the Orchestra, edited by Alex Laing, Joey Eschrich, and Ed Finn. Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University. csi.asu.edu/books/soundsystems. 

Singh, Vandana. 2014. “Entanglement.” In Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer. William Morrow.

Stephenson, Neal. 2011. “Innovation Starvation.” World Policy Journal 28 (3): 11–16. doi.org/10.1177/0740277511425349.

Suvin, Darko. 1972. “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre.” College English 34 (3): 372–382. doi.org/10.2307/375141. 

Joey Eschrich is the managing editor for the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University and assistant director of Future Tense, a partnership of ASU and New America. He has coedited a number of collections of fiction and nonfiction, most recently Climate Imagination (MIT Press, 2025).  

Ed Finn is the founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, where he is an associate professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the GAME School and academic director of Future Tense, a partnership of ASU and New America.

More on the Nebulas: Past, Present, and Future Conversations

Happy Nebula Season! The celebration continues.

On March 15, 2025, it was our privilege and delight to celebrate this amazing group of new finalists. For over 60 years, the Nebulas have recognized the best in speculative fiction writing, and that tradition continues with this year’s incredible cohort, which includes writers from more forms of SFF than ever before.

First Steps in a Continuing Mission

In 1965, we started with four categories. Want to know more? Last year, Past President Michael Capobianco gave us a brief history of “The First Nebula Awards”, which gives you a sense of how far we’ve come and how exploration has been part of the process since the start.

Over time, we came to celebrate speculative fiction across more forms. Sometimes new award categories stuck, and sometimes they fell away. As our History Committee pursues interviews with past presidents and Grand Masters this year, more of SFWA’s wild and wonderful Nebula lore will be added to our archives, and we can all deepen our understanding of this dynamic industry and its shifting priorities over the decades. As the board liaison for the History Committee, I can’t wait to dive deeper into the past, contextualizing it for current and future members.

But in every season of the Nebulas, one core truth prevails: We empower creators across our industry to KEEP ON WRITING. As I said in our finalist announcement, what a joy it is to now honor poetry and comics with Nebula Awards, and to bring them into the Nebula conversation.

The Joy of New, Great Writing

Our Poetry and Comics Committees worked hard for the inclusion of these latest awards. Thank you to everyone who spearheaded this work, from the initial rules to final edits, to spreading the word about fantastic eligible works.

On SFWA.org, we’re rolling out new Nebula celebration spaces, like our Nebula Finalist Page, that will support readers and voters wanting to learn more about all the works on our ballot and the creative teams that support the writers listed there. The Nebula Award Reading Packet is now also available for voting SFWA Members, on the Action Items bar in our Membership Portal. Please remember that these materials are shared among SFWA members as a courtesy from publishers, and do not distribute any of their contents with the broader community.

Next Steps for Promising New Awards

The days of a simple flat ballot being the sum total of finalist representation are behind us.

This ballot is rich, multilayered, and diverse. We have tough decisions ahead of us as we log in to vote on our final choices. I’ve already read many of this year’s works myself, and I have been downloading the rest onto my Libby account, gathering friends to play some new games, and ordering new books and magazines from my local indie. 

Launching a new award is the beginning, not the end, of the conversation.

When the Ray Bradbury Nebula Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation and our Nebula Award for Game Writing first launched, they prompted the same questions about creative teams that are now raised by members of the greater comics community. It is not always easy to differentiate the writing from other key components in these mediums – like the incredible illustrations, lettering, titles, and coloring on these works of art.

At the same time, the Nebulas are SFF writers’ “Oscars”: awards chosen not by general fans, but by fellow writers celebrating the craft they know best. These writers are at the top of their craft, and it is our honor to celebrate their works at the Nebula Awards in June.

Still, we have work to do as we continue to build the genre and the teams that make these works shine!

How the Community Is Pitching in

Along with Finalist Cards that include more creators in the overview of each work on the ballot, we are working with our Comics Committee to honor artists at the Nebula Conference in Chicago this June, while celebrating the core focus of our writing organization’s awards.

We also invite your feedback via sarc@sfwa.org to support the rules committee’s upcoming review of Nebula procedures, since we now have three multimedia awards that will benefit from more consistent standards for representation.

We heard your feedback, and we thank you for taking the time to share it. The Board meets on April 9 to select a name that better represents the award’s purpose of honoring comics writing, but we are also already united in our belief that comics – like games, and dramatic presentations – are art forms where the sum of their parts is far more than words on the page. 

While three of our comics finalists this year are written and created by authors who were also their own illustrators, creating a comic, graphic novel, or illustrated work is frequently a collaborative process. Many of the writing finalists for our inaugural Comics Nebula are part of truly spectacular teams, and we encourage you to check out what such collaborations can create.

Next Steps for Our Other Multimedia Awards

The multimedia teams involved in Games and Dramatic Presentations also raised another conversation this year.

As you know, this was our first year asking writers if they had used LLMs in the writing of their works. The resounding answer was NO (with quite a few expletives thrown in, “FUCK no!” being my favorite), but the team approach to these art forms creates a different challenge for a writers’ organization trying to promote writer-focused awards. We are still waiting to hear back from Bradbury and Game finalists on award acceptance and their responses to the LLM question. Those entries are marked as provisional on the ballot.

Our industry is changing, but the rich history of SFWA’s Nebula Awards shows that it’s always been changing. That’s why SFWA is at its best when we approach new sites of creative tension with curiosity, in community, whenever they arise. With every new award and rule change, we need to support our core mission of writer uplift, advocacy, education, and defense.

We’re so glad to be celebrating this giant leap with Poetry and Comics with you.

And we stand firm in our commitment to keep growing with the needs of our genre community.

Keep writing – and reading!

The Final Nebula Ballot closes 11:59pm PDT on April 15. Support these writers and read their work (you’ll be glad you did)!

Write on,

Kate Ristau
SFWA President

The post Press Release March 27, 2026 appeared first on SFWA - The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association.

Hellcon, the 64th Japan Science Fiction Convention, has announced the finalists for the 2025 Seiun Awards (the Japanese equivalent of the Hugo Awards), honoring the best original and translated works published last year in Japan.

Best Translated Novel

• The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands, Sarah Brooks, tr. Yasuko Kawano (Hayakawa Bunko SF)
• The Book of Elsewhere, China Miéville & Keanu Reeves, tr. Masayuki Uchida & Rei Yasuno (Kawade …Read More

Luminous by Silvia Park (Simon & Schuster) is the winner of the 2025 Otherwise Award (formerly the James Tiptree, Jr. Award), given annually to works of science fiction or fantasy that expand and explore our understanding of gender.

The author of the winning work will receive $200 in prize money and a medal, and will be honored at WisCon 2026, to be held online May 21-25, 2026.

The …Read More

The shortlist for the 2026 International Dylan Thomas Prize has been announced. The six-title list includes genre books Open, Heaven by Seán Hewitt (Jonathan Cape; Vintage) and Under the Blue by Suzannah V. Evans (Bloomsbury Poetry).

The annual Dylan Thomas prize, in partnership with Swansea University, awards £20,000 the best published literary work in the English language, written by an author aged 39 or under. This year's judges are …Read More

Finalists for the 2026 Imadjinn Awards have been announced. Categories, titles, and authors of genre interest include:

Best Science Fiction Novel

• Dead to Rights: A Car Warriors Autoduel Novel, Jay Barnson (Three Ravens)
• Frozen Echoes, Ed Downes (Undertaker)
• Bifrost Down, Jon R. Osborne (Seventh Seal)

Best Fantasy Novel

• The Blacksmith's Boy, Bruce Buchanan (Wild Ink)
• The Healer's Heir, Katie Fitzgerald (self-published)
• A Count of Courage, Nancy Moser …Read More

Hachette Book Group has cancelled the upcoming US release and will discontinue the UK release of horror novel Shy Girl by Mia Ballard after reviewing the text for signs of generative AI use.

Shy Girl was self-published in February 2025 and republished in November in the UK by Hachette imprint Wildfire. NielsenIQ BookData measured the UK sales at approximately 1,800 print copies. According toThe Guardian, the book was recently …Read More

When the Tides Held the Moon by Venessa Vida Kelley (Erewhon) is one of the five titles shortlisted for the inaugural James Patterson and Bookshop.org Prize, a new literary prize celebrating debut authors, hand-selected by independent booksellers.

Titles, which must be full-length debut books published in the United States within the past 12 months, are nominated by booksellers working in qualifying independent bookstores. The winner and runner-up, which receive …Read More

The shortlists for the 2026 Carnegie Medal for Writing and Carnegie Medal for Illustration, honoring UK books for children and young adults, were announced March 10, 2026. Titles and authors of genre interest include:

Carnegie Medal for Writing

• Ghostlines, Katya Balen (Bloomsbury Children's)
• Popcorn, Rob Harrell (Dial US; Piccadilly UK)
• The Boy I Love, William Hussey (Walker US; Andersen UK)
• Wolf Siren, Beth O'Brien (HarperCollins Children's)
• Twenty-Four Seconds from …Read More

Baen Books has announcedthe ten finalists for the 2026 Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award.

• Thomas Butler
• Jason P. Crawford
• Joyce Frohn
• Liam Hogan
• Philip Levin
• Paul Malory
• Joel C. Scoberg
• Gideon Smith
• Tiffany Smith
• Wesley Stine

Winners receive a year's membership in the National Space Society, and the first place story will be offered publication on the Baen website at professional rates. According …Read More

The Climate Fiction Prize has announced its inaugural shortlist. Founded by Rose Goddard, Imran Khan, and Leo Barasi and supported by Climate Spring, the prize seeks to celebrate the most inspiring novels tackling the climate crisis.

Shortlisted titles and authors of genre interest include:

• Dusk, Robbie Arnott (Astra House US; Chatto & Windus UK; Picador Australia)
• Awake in the Floating City, Susanna Kwan (Pantheon US; Simon & Schuster …Read More