Posted: 7th June 2024

Framing the future with fiction

In the second webinar of our new Future Narratives series, we welcomed Dr. Will Slocombe, literary scholar, sci-fi specialist, and co-director of the Olaf Stapledon Centre for Speculative Futures at the University of Liverpool. With wit, depth, and generous storytelling, Will made a compelling case for using speculative fiction as a tool for navigating and shaping the future.

But this session wasn’t about predicting the next flying car. As Will put it, the best speculative fiction doesn’t just invent the automobile, it shows us the traffic jam.

Why speculative fiction?

According to Will, speculative fiction helps us engage with the long-term by thinking not only in terms of what’s likely, but what’s possible. It challenges us to move beyond five-year plans and think in generational timelines. Referencing the work of Olaf Stapledon, he encouraged participants to zoom out and consider how seemingly pivotal events (like war or AI development) might look different when placed in a 400- or 4000-year timeline.

Throughout the webinar, Will moved between two poles: reading the future and writing it. He showed how stories, especially science fiction, help us interrogate assumptions about identity, technology, and power. We discussed examples of data-driven storytelling (like climate maps and demographic forecasts) and creative exercises (like imagining a future diary entry or city skyline). These were practical tools leading to deeper reflection. How much of the future we imagine is actually just a remix of cultural tropes we’ve already absorbed?

You didn’t need to be a sci-fi expert to engage. Will made it clear: speculative fiction is a lens, not a genre club. Whether you’re designing policy, running community workshops, or teaching young people, futures literacy is about recognising narrative as structure and challenging the defaults.

Representation matters

A key theme was representation – who gets to imagine the future? Who gets heard? Drawing from projects with young people, refugee communities, and policymakers, Will described storytelling as a gateway to empowerment. When participants start to express ideas, they begin to understand that they have agency in the system.

Will left us with this reminder: “If you take the people out of futures, there are no futures.” Whether you’re working on curriculum, social change, or cultural analysis, it’s the human narrative – messy, imaginative, and hopeful – that makes it all matter.

Image: from Stapledon, Time Chart for Last and First of Men. For full version see liverpool.ac.uk.