possibility studies

If we lose faith in the future, we are likely to do less to make a better future happen. In this way, fatalism can, indeed, become fate.

In the words of speculative fiction writer Ursula Le Guin: ‘As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.’

“experience is never limited and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web, of the finest silken threads” (p. 12). Those silken lines are threaded and rethreaded, knotted and reknotted, to make and remake webs of sense.

the world’s most visible public intellectuals today more often revive or reassert old ideas, rather than generating new ones. The result is that old zombie orthodoxies survive far longer than they should.

Consequently, when we think about possibilities it’s not as much about what we do in the present that shapes the future, but more about how we use the future to shape the present (Damhof, 2022).

‘We need to rewild our imagination. We must learn how to dream again, and we have to learn that together.’

As stated by Glăveanu (2022) in his Manifesto, “[t]he possible re-emerges as an organizing category in our lives and our thinking not despite but because of living through the seemingly impossible and unimaginable.” The possible, transitions, temporalities, and the pluriverse appear as part of the same complex process of civilizational transition.

Although science may proceed through the experimental pluck of one scientist or another, it is ultimately a collaborative endeavor. Similarly, speculative fiction is read by the singular reader but experienced by a fanbase and sometimes a whole culture (or cultures).