<aside> 👋 Hey hello there. Below you find a collection of resources that will hopefully provide you with some insights into what crafting speculative worlds and imagining possible future entails. Enjoy! — @Edwin Gardner (Compiled for Foreland)
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Ian Chang: “To think about beginnings, we have to go back to the moment before a World is born, to the moment of a curious creator looking at Reality — chaotic, meaningless, scary, but latent with potential — and wondering what to do with it. Philip K Dick said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” A World is conceived when a creator decides to pick some part of Reality and start believing in it again. Think of JK Rowling stuck on a broken train for four hours, her mom dying, and the life arc of Harry Potter coming to her fully formed. Think of Elon, after the Russians rejected his bid to buy a used rocket, firing up his spreadsheet and costing out how to build one from scratch. Think of George Lucas, unable to secure the rights to Flash Gordon serials, thinking I’ll just roll my own episodic space opera. Think of your mom looking at your dad for the first time and imagining, I could build something with that. The belief is fragile at first, but immediately suggests both a stabilizing structure and interesting generative dysfunction. The creator sets about trying to structure this belief and channel its potential. And at the same time, the creator begins to imagine another satisfaction: putting aside the role of creator and being a person living inside the belief, the beneficiary of its potentiality, a believer.”
Worlding Raga: 2 - What is a World?
Worlding Raga: 4 - Who Worlds?
I build a world with fantasy master N.K. Jemisin
Kim Stanley Robinson: “...the story of getting to a new and better social system, that’s almost an empty niche in our mental ecology. So I’ve been throwing myself into that attempt. It’s hard, but it’s interesting.”
Imagining the End of Capitalism With Kim Stanley Robinson
Ezra Klein: “This conversation with Robinson was fantastic. We discuss why the end of the world is easier to imagine than the end of capitalism; how changes to the biosphere will force humanity to rethink capitalism, borders, terrorism, and currency; the influence of eco-Marxism on Robinson’s thinking; how existing power relationships define the boundaries of what is considered violence; why science fiction as a discipline is particularly suited to grapple with climate change; what a complete rethinking of the global economic system could look like; why Robinson thinks geoengineering needs to be on the table; the vastly underrated importance of the Paris climate agreement, and much more.”
The most important book I've read this year
🎧 Ezra Klein’s podcast with Kim Stanley Robinson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpjjSClcp-8
The collaboration between Walt Disney and rocket engineer and former nazi Werner von Braun played a huge role in winning popular support for the space race by mixing science and imagineering. (1954)
Abstract: Scholarship in the history and sociology of technology has convincingly demonstrated that technological development is not inevitable, pre-destined or linear. In this paper I show how the creators of popular films including science consultants construct cinematic representations of technological possibilities as a means by which to overcome these obstacles and stimulate a desire in audiences to see potential technologies become realities. This paper focuses specifically on the production process in order to show how entertainment producers construct cinematic scenarios with an eye towards generating real-world funding opportunities and the ability to construct real-life prototypes. I introduce the term 'diegetic prototypes' to account for the ways in which cinematic depictions of future technologies demonstrate to large public audiences a technology's need, viability and benevolence. Entertainment producers create diegetic prototypes by influencing dialogue, plot rationalizations, character interactions and narrative structure. These technologies only exist in the fictional world - what film scholars call the diegesis - but they exist as fully functioning objects in that world. The essay builds upon previous work on the notion of prototypes as 'performative artefacts'. The performative aspects of prototypes are especially evident in diegetic prototypes because a film's narrative structure contextualizes technologies within the social sphere. Technological objects in cinema are at once both completely artificial - all aspects of their depiction are controlled in production - and normalized within the text as practical objects that function properly and which people actually use as everyday objects.