Writing the History of the Future

Memorial to Jules Verne, Amiens, ID 381624172 © Linda Williams | Dreamstime.com

One way to put my life in context is: when I was born, Robert Heinlein was king of science fiction.

Not that I knew this until ten or so years later, when I started to read my family’s collection of sci fi Penguins. We, naturally, also favoured British writers, who, if not noticeably more female or non-white, were at least less American gung-ho.

Now, the world of the future is very different, with some ‘non-binary’ writers, Afrofuturism, and radical ecologies. And good aliens, my favourite.

Between then and now, there have been a lot of post-apocalyptic dystopias, which I tend to keep away from. Post-scarcity anarchism is much more my thing (see Ursula K LeGuin, and Iain M Banks’ ‘Culture’, for example).

And hope.

If one defining feature of good Asset Management is developing longer term planning, and infrastructure urgently requires a future vision, can hopeful science fiction help us?

What’s your most inspiring example of a fictional future?

And a vision of future infrastructure?

See also Dandelion Networks and the Cherry Tree Challenge