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Edited by Jenny Andersson and Sandra Kemp
Futures
Edited by Sandra Kemp and Jenny Andersson
Print Publication Date: Feb 2021 Subject: Literature Online Publication Date: Feb 2021
(p. iv) Copyright Page
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Page 2 of 2
Illustrations
Illustrations
Futures
(p. ix) Illustrations

1.1 Set-up of The Future boardgame (1966). 20
2.1 Interior of the central of three storage vaults at SGSV showing standardized stor
age crates on shelving units. 43
2.2 The ‘Svalbard tube’. 44
2.3 The SGSV’s dramatic concrete portal building and façade. 45
3.1 Royal Society Conversazione programme, 26 April 1873. Royal Society Archives,
PC/3/1/2, p. 1. © The Royal Society. 55
3.2 South Kensington Museum ground plan, 1862. From Guide to the Art Collections
of the South Kensington Museum (1869). V&A, VA.1868.0005. © V&A. 57
3.3 J. R. Brown, ‘Conversazione of the Royal Society at Burlington House’ [Ladies’
Night], The Graphic, 16 June 1888. Royal Society Archives, PC/1/8, general press cut
tings book, 1887–8, p. 20. © The Royal Society. 60
3.4 William Gordon Davis, Soirée guests in the Library of the Royal Society at
Burlington House, 1901. Photograph published in Living London, ed. George R. Sims,
vol. 3 (1903). Royal Society Archives, IM/005277. © The Royal Society. 62
8.1 Typology of five evolving futures approaches. 137
11.1 The Business Planning and Strategy Department’s new logo. 186
12.1 Angelus Novus, Paul Klee, 1920. 208
12.2 Adinkra symbol of Sankofa meaning ‘it is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of be
ing left behind’. 209
14.1 A model of alternative registers of meaningful social temporality that structure
interaction in the vivid present. 228
15.1 Caricature of Patrick Murphy. 251
16.1 Cover illustration for Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City. 265
(p. x) 19.1 The author with his wearable computer c.1998. 320
19.2 Advertisement for Microsoft Band, http://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-

band-read-backstory-evolution-and-development-microsofts-new-smart-device. 324
19.3 Illustration from Fritz Leiber’s ‘The Creature from Cleveland Depths’. 325
Page 1 of 2
Illustrations
19.4 Jingjing and Chacha, the cartoon mascots of the Internet Surveillance Division
of the Public Security Bureau in Shenzhen, People’s Republic of China. 330
24.1 ‘Eight Futures and a Planning Cone’. 414
24.2, 24.3 Futures tree of ‘inept’ vs. ‘adept’ axis; futures tree of ‘closed’ vs. ‘open’
axis. 415
24.4 Futures tree ‘slice’ view, Year 2000. 416
24.5, 24.6 Screenshot and recreated diagram from Shakey the Robot (1972). 417
24.7 Futures tree diagram. 422
24.8 Diagram of seven ‘realistic’ futures. 425
25.1 ‘The Types of Behavior’. 437
26.1 Tables for the interests on loans and the positions of the moon and planets in
the solar system in Annuaire pour l’an 1875. 447
26.2 The predictive keyboard as fortune-telling. 449
26.3 The Monistic Almanac web publication. 451
26.4 Full Feeder Cattle Chart—Cosmic Commodity Charts. 452
26.5 Crisis Proximity Index. 453
26.6 Example vector from Cosmic Commodity Charts, 6 May 1988. 455
27.1 Optimistic vision of algorithmic life embraced by the Future of Life Institute.
465
27.2 Potential anxieties produced by experiencing algorithmically mediated subjec
tivity and social relations: ‘A Deep Paralysis’, original art by John Ledger, 2016. 481
30.1 Souvenirs from the Futures exhibition, Gallery 1/9unosunove, Rome, Italy. 523
30.2 ‘Sharing Masks’ by Homa Abdoli, Mostafa Parsa, Amir Mohammad Sojudi / Isfa
han Art University, Isfahan, Iran. 525
30.3 A multi-language publication, Souvenirs from the Futures. 525
30.4 ‘Yog headset’ by Aniket Kunte, Shilpa Sivaraman, Vyoma Haldipur, Subhrajit
Ghosal / National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India. 527
30.5 Front and back covers of the multi-language publication Souvenirs from the Fu
tures accompanying the final exhibition. 528
Page 2 of 2
Contributors
Contributors
Futures
(p. xi) Contributors
Barbara Adam
is Emerita Professor at Cardiff University’s School of Social Sciences and Affiliated

Scholar at the Potsdam Institute of Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS). The social
temporal has been her intellectual project throughout her academic career, resulting
in five research monographs and a large number of articles in which she sought to
bring time to the centre of social science analysis. This focus facilitated a unique so
cial theory, whose relevance transcends disciplines and is taught across the arts and
the humanities as well as the social and environmental sciences. On the basis of this
work she has been awarded two book prizes as well as several theory-based research
fellowships and grants. She is founding editor of the journal Time & Society.
Mohamed-Ali Adraoui
is a French political scientist and historian. He holds a PhD in Political Science from
Sciences Po (2011) for his work on contemporary Salafism. He was a Max Weber Fel
low at the European University Institute (2013–15) and a Senior Fellow at the Nation
al University of Singapore (Middle East Institute, 2015–17). He is now a Marie Sk
lodowska Curie Fellow at Georgetown University and the London School of Econom
ics. His current research is about the history of US foreign policy towards the Muslim
Brotherhood. He published Salafism Goes Global: From the Gulf to the French Ban
lieues with Oxford University Press in 2019.
Page 1 of 14
Contributors
S. M. Amadae
is a University Lecturer in Politics at the University of Helsinki, and also has status as
Research Affiliate in the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, University of Cam
bridge, and Research Affiliate in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachu
setts Institute of Technology. Amadae has published Prisoners of Reason: Game Theo
ry and Neoliberal Political Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2016), and the
award-winning Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: Cold War Origins of Rational
Choice Liberalism (University of Chicago Press, 2003). Recent research themes in
clude addressing the existential risk posed by cyber attacks on nuclear command and
control; investigating the origins of populist nationalism in late-modern neoliberal
capitalism; and analysing how the Nordic economic model provides alternatives to
both neoliberal capitalism and populist nationalism. Amadae is working at Stanford
University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 2020 on the
project Neoliberal Seeds of Illiberalism: Nordic Alternatives.
(p. xii) Jenny Andersson
is CNRS Research Professor and currently on leave from the CNRS and a visiting pro
fessor at the Department of the History of Ideas and Science at Uppsala University,
Sweden. She was the Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded project Futurepol (A
Political History of the Future, Knowledge Production and Future Governance in the
Post War Period) and co-directed the Franco-German collaborative research centre
MaxPo: Coping with instability in advanced market societies (2016–19). She has pub
lished extensively on the political history of social democracy, the knowledge econo
my, and the future. Her most recent work is The Future of the World: Futurology, Fu
turists, and the Struggle for the Cold War Imagination.
Arjun Appadurai
is the Goddard Professor in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York Univer
sity, where he is also Senior Fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge. He serves
as Honorary Professor in the Department of Media and Communication, Erasmus Uni
versity, Rotterdam, Tata Chair Professor at The Tata Institute for Social Sciences,
Page 2 of 14
Contributors
Mumbai, and as a Senior Research Partner at the Max Planck Institute for the Study
of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen. He has authored numerous books and
scholarly articles. His most recent book, The Future as a Cultural Fact, was published
by Verso in 2013. He currently serves on the Advisory Board for the Asian Art Initia
tive at the Solomon Guggenheim Museum and on the Scientific Advisory Board of the
Forum d’Avignon in Paris.
Zeke Baker
is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University. In his present book

project, called ‘Governing Climate’, he analyses the relationship between climate
knowledge and government in the US, from the late eighteenth century until recent
decades. His research also investigates the relationship between climate scientists
and natural resource managers in California, the emergence of US national security
expertise regarding climate change, and the production and use of weather and cli
mate forecasts in the Arctic. He has recently published articles in the British Journal
of Sociology, Environmental Sociology, Social Science History, and Social Studies of
Science.
David Benqué
is a designer and researcher based in London, where he is a PhD candidate in the

School of Communication of the Royal College of Art. His doctoral research draws
from media-archaeology and critical design practice to investigate algorithmic predic
tion through the notion of ‘diagrams’. He holds a BA in Graphic and Typographic De
sign from the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague, The Netherlands, and an MA in
Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art. He teaches design at Goldsmiths,
University of London.
Paolo Cardini
is a designer, educator, and researcher. He is Associate Professor and Director of the

graduate programme in Industrial Design at Rhode Island School of Design. His work
ranges from product to interaction design with a particular interest in discursive and
speculative design practices. His current research mostly focuses on the interaction
Page 3 of 14
Contributors
between artefacts, identities, and globalization. Paolo asks serious questions about
how we live and answers them with whimsical and playful designs. He regularly lec
tures in conferences and design schools worldwide, contributing actively to the field
with papers and publications.
Liliana Doganova
is an Associate Professor at the Center for the Sociology of Innovation, MINES Paris
Tech. At the intersection of economic sociology and science and technology studies,
her work has focused on business models, the valorization of public research, and
markets for bio- and clean technologies. She has published in journals such as Re
search Policy, Science and Public Policy, Economy and Society, and the Journal of Cul
tural Economy. She is the author of Valoriser la science and co-author of Capitaliza
tion: A Cultural Guide (p. xiii) (Presses de Mines). She is currently preparing a mono
graph on the historical sociology of discounting and the economic valuation of the fu
ture.
Georgina Endfield
is Professor of Environmental History and Associate Pro Vice Chancellor for Research
and Impact for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Liverpool. Her
research focuses on climatic and environmental history, and specifically human re
sponses to unusual or extreme weather events, conceptualizations of climate and cli
mate variability in historical perspective, and the links between climate, disease, and
the healthiness of place in Mexico and southern, central, and east Africa. More re
cently, she has led or co-led a range of AHRC-funded projects related to climate histo
ry, the cultural spaces of climate, and the production of climate knowledge in the UK,
and the impacts of and responses to extreme weather events in historical perspective.
Keri Facer
is Professor of Educational and Social Futures at the University of Bristol and

Zennström Chair in Climate Change Leadership at Uppsala University. Her work is
concerned with the historic and emerging relationship between educational institu
tions and social, technological, and environmental change. She has played a central
Page 4 of 14
Contributors
role in developing the field of Anticipation Studies, was AHRC Leadership Fellow
(2012–18) for the UKRI Connected Communities Programme (a world-leading experi
ment in university–community research collaboration), and is now exploring the role
of universities in convening publics to address climate change. She has published
widely in areas ranging from educational futures, to learning cities, to methodological
questions of collaboration and temporality in knowledge production.
Christina Garsten
is Professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University, and Principal of the

Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. She is a social anthropologist with an interest
in globalization and organizing processes. Her current research focuses on the role of
think tanks in public–private networks of knowledge production and policy develop
ment, and the enhanced role of think tanks as agenda-setters and brokers of expertise
in a changing global landscape. She has authored numerous articles, books, and an
thologies, among them the recent book Discreet Power: How the World Economic Fo
rum Shapes Market Agendas (Stanford University Press, 2018), co-authored with
Adrienne Sörbom.
Jennifer M. Gidley
PhD is an educator, futures researcher, and psychologist. She is an Adjunct Professor,

Institute for Sustainable Futures (UTS), and Southern Cross University, NSW. As Pres
ident (2009–17) of the World Futures Studies Federation, a UNESCO and UN partner
founded in Paris in 1973, she led the global peak body for the world’s leading futur
ists from sixty countries. A sought-after international speaker, advisor, and consul
tant, Jennifer has been involved in projects across Europe, the Middle East, UK, USA,
and Asia, and holds academic affiliations in France and Spain. Jennifer’s PhD was
awarded the Chancellor’s Gold Medal for Academic Excellence. She serves on several
academic editorial boards, and has published dozens of academic papers and several
books. Her recent books include Postformal Education: A Philosophy for Complex Fu
tures (Springer, 2016) and The Future: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University
Press, 2017).
Rüdiger Graf
Page 5 of 14
Contributors
PD, PhD is currently the head of the research unit on the History of Economic Life
(Geschichte des Wirtschaftens) at the Leibniz-Centre for Contemporary History, Pots
dam, and teaches history at Humboldt University. He studied history and philosophy
at Berlin and Berkeley. In 2006, he received his PhD with a study on ‘The Future of
Weimar Germany’ at Humboldt University and, in 2013, his habilitation with a book
on oil and (p. xiv) energy policy in the United States and Western Europe in the 1970s
at Ruhr-University Bochum. He was a visiting scholar at New York University (2003–
4), a John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard
University (2010–11), and a Fellow at the Historisches Kolleg in Munich (2011–12).
Apart from the history of the future and energy policy, he has also published on the
theory of historiography.
John R. Hall
is a Research Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz and

Davis. His scholarly interests span social theory, epistemology, the sociology of cul
ture, the sociology of religion, apocalyptic social movements, and patrimonialism.
Published books include Gone from the Promised Land: Jonestown in American Cul
tural History (Transaction Books, (1987) 2004); Cultures of Inquiry: From Epistemolo
gy to Discourse in Sociohistorical Research (Cambridge University Press, 1999);
Apocalypse: From Antiquity to the Empire of Modernity (Polity Press, 2009); and the
co-edited volume Handbook of Cultural Sociology, 2nd edition (Routledge, 2019). His
current research uses structural social phenomenology to retheorize modernity in re
lation to contemporary society. This effort is currently focused on institutional do
mains (science, religion, social movements, geopolitical security, and others) and their
framings of climate change in relation to social temporalities.
Rodney Harrison
is Professor of Heritage Studies at the UCL Institute of Archaeology and AHRC Her
itage Priority Area Leadership Fellow (2017–20). He is Principal Investigator of the
AHRC-funded Heritage Futures Research Programme and leads the Work Package on
‘Theorizing heritage futures in Europe: heritage scenarios’ as part of the EC-funded
Marie Sklodowska Curie action [MSCA] Doctoral Training Network CHEurope: Criti
cal Heritage Studies and the Future of Europe. In addition to the AHRC, his research
has been funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund, British Academy, Wenner-
Page 6 of 14
Contributors
Gren Foundation, Australian Research Council, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and

Torres Strait Islander Studies, and the European Commission.
John Holmes
is Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham. He

was Chair of the British Society for Literature and Science from 2012 to 2015, and is
currently Secretary of the Commission on Science and Literature. His books include
The Pre-Raphaelites and Science (Yale University Press, 2018), which won the BSLS
Prize for the best book in the field of literature and science for 2018; Darwin’s Bards:
British and American Poetry in the Age of Evolution (Edinburgh University Press,
2009); and the edited collections Science in Modern Poetry: New Directions
(Liverpool University Press, 2012) and The Routledge Research Companion to Nine
teenth-Century British Literature and Science (Routledge, 2017), co-edited with
Sharon Ruston.
Paolo Jedlowski
is Professor of Sociology at the University of Calabria (Italy), where he is also Direc

tor of the PhD School in Politics, Culture, and Development. His main research fields
are history of sociology, social theory, and sociology of culture. He is the author of
many books and articles on the experience of everyday life, social and collective mem
ories, and communicative practices. Among his latest publications are Memorie del
future: Un percorso fra sociologia e studi culturali (Roma: Carocci, 2017) and ‘Memo
ries of the Future’, in Anna Lisa and Trever Hagen (eds.), Routledge International
Handbook of Memory Studies (London: Routledge, 2016).
Sandra Kemp
is Director of The Ruskin—Library, Museum, and Research Centre. She is Professor in

the Department of History at Lancaster University and Visiting Professor at Imperial
College London. She previously combined senior research fellowships at the (p. xv)
Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) and has worked at the Royal College of Art, the
Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and the universities of Oxford, Edinburgh,
and Glasgow. As a writer and curator, her research is located within the growing dis
Page 7 of 14
Contributors
ciplines of futures studies in relation to visual and material cultures. Her futures-re
lated work spans the exhibition and monograph Future Face: Image, Innovation, Iden
tity (2004–6) at the London Science Museum and subsequent South Asian exhibition
tour; The Future Is Our Business: The Visual History of Future Expertise project at
the V&A (2013); and Ruskin: Museum of the Near Future at The Ruskin, Lancaster
University in 2019. She is Principle Investigator for the AHRC/Labex-funded Univer
sal Histories and Universal Museums project on the role of museums in Europe in
building knowledge about the future.
Charne Lavery
is co-investigator on the Oceanic Humanities for the Global South project based at the
Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER), University of the Witwater
srand (http://www.oceanichumanities.com). She is interested in literary and cultural
representations of the deep ocean, the Indian Ocean, and the Southern Ocean and
Antarctic seas, involved in creatively exploring Southern oceanic underworlds from a
postcolonial–ecological perspective. She is the South African Humanities and Social
Sciences delegate to the international Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research
(SCAR), co-editor of the Palgrave series Maritime Literature and Culture, and has re
cently published essays on ‘Thinking from the Southern Ocean’ and ‘Lascars, Drifters,
Aquanauts’.
Busiso Moyo
is an activist and scholar. Using a largely political economy lens, his current research
is focused on human rights and development, the politics of malnutrition, the geopoli
tics of food and agriculture, global goal-setting, and governance by indicators. Busiso
is a Right to Food researcher with South Africa’s oldest public interest law clinic, the
Legal Resources Centre (LRC) based in Johannesburg, and he’s also an affiliate of the
DST-NRF Centre of Excellence in Food Security hosted by the University of the West
ern Cape (UWC) and co-hosted by the University of Pretoria. He has vast experience
in corporate and public organizations and has appeared on several local television
and radio networks as a human rights defender and commentator. You can find him
@HelardSA.
Page 8 of 14
Contributors
Julia Nordblad
PhD, docent, is Associate Senior Lecturer at the Department of History of Science and
Ideas at Uppsala University. She works on different aspects of the history of the con
temporary ecological crisis, especially its political temporalities. In her current
project she examines nineteenth-century forest politics, and its shifting conceptions of
political long-termism. She has published in journals such as the European Journal of
Social Theory and Redescriptions.
Mat Paskins
is a postdoctoral researcher at the London School of Economics, on the Narrative

Science project. He researches histories of chemistry, past futures, and utopianism in
studies of science and technology.
Vincenza Pellegrino
is Associate Professor of Cultural Sociology (University of Parma, Department of Law,

Politics, and International Studies). She teaches Sociology of Globalization and Social
Politics. Her main research fields are: transnational migrations and postcolonial stud
ies; the future as cultural fact; action research methods; and participatory democracy,
with particular reference to the transformation of the welfare state. Her latest book is
Futuri possibili: Ricerca sociale e costruzione del domani (Verona: Ombre Corte,
2018).
Benoît Pelopidas
is the founding director of the Nuclear Knowledges (NK) program at Sciences Po

(CERI) (formerly Chair of Excellence in Security Studies) and an affiliate of the
(p. xvi) Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford Univer
sity. Nuclear Knowledges is the first scholarly research programme in France on the
nuclear phenomenon which refuses funding from stakeholders of the nuclear
Page 9 of 14
Contributors
weapons enterprise or from anti-nuclear activists in order to problematize conflicts of

interest and their effect on knowledge production.
Laura Pereira
has an extraordinary appointment as a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Complex

Systems in Transition at Stellenbosch University. Having completed her DPhil in Ge
ography at the University of Oxford in 2012, she undertook post-docs in sustainability
science at Harvard’s Kennedy School and under the Bioeconomy chair at the Univer
sity of Cape Town before moving to Stellenbosch University to research development
in the Anthropocene. She is interested in the interface between traditional knowledge
and innovation, the role of futures techniques in transformative change, and develop
ing innovative methods for knowledge co-production in developing country contexts.
As well as her focus on food systems, she was a Co-ordinating Lead Author for UN
Environment’s GEO-6, a Lead Author for the IPBES Regional Assessment for Africa,
and sits on the IPBES expert group on scenarios and models. You can find her @lau
rap18.
Eglė Rindzevičiūtė is an Associate Professor of Criminology and Sociology at

Kingston University London, and was a Visiting Scholar at the Department of History
and Philosophy of Science, the University of Cambridge (January–June 2019). She is
the author of The Power of Systems: How Policy Sciences Opened up the Cold War
World (2016) and co-editor of The Struggle for the Long-Term in Transnational
Science and Politics: Forging the Future (2015), with Jenny Andersson. She is the PI
and director of the AHRC research networking project Nuclear Cultural Heritage:
From Knowledge to Practice (2018–20) and the CoI of the research project Atomic
Heritage Goes Critical (2018–20).
Anders Sandberg
is a researcher, science debater, futurist, transhumanist, and author. He holds a PhD

in computational neuroscience from Stockholm University, and is currently a James
Martin Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Ox
ford. Sandberg’s research centres on societal and ethical issues surrounding human
enhancement and new technology, as well as estimating the capabilities and underly
ing science of future technologies. He is a Senior Research Fellow on the ERC Un
Page 10 of 14
Contributors
PrEDICT Programme and research associate to the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practi
cal Ethics, and the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics. Besides scientific publications in
neuroscience, ethics, and futures studies, he has also participated in the public de
bate about human enhancement internationally.
Odirilwe Selomane
is interested in researching human–nature connections. In particular, he focuses on

how the design of monitoring these connections accounts for current understanding
of complexity. He is also currently involved in science–policy work, which uses scenar
ios to paint potential trajectories and future pathways of consequence to people and
nature. He is affiliated with the Stockholm Resilience Centre and Centre for Complex
Systems in Transition, and is the Director of Programme on Ecosystem Change and
Society. You can find him on Twitter @OdirilweS.
Johan Siebers
is Director of the Ernst Bloch Centre for German Thought at the Institute of Modern
Languages Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London, and Associate
Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Middlesex University London. His research
and (p. xvii) publications are in futures studies, philosophy, theory of communication,
and the history of German philosophy (especially Ernst Bloch). He is founding editor
of Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication.
Nadia Sitas
is a sustainability scientist based at the Centre for Complex Systems in Transition

(CST) at Stellenbosch University working within the science–policy interface with a
specific focus on social-ecological perspectives on power, equity, and gender. For over
a decade, Nadia has been involved in applied research where she has focused on un
derstanding knowledge-exchange processes linked to mainstreaming the environment
into various decision-making contexts. These mainstreaming activities have focused
mainly on co-designing stakeholder engagement and social learning processes, and
developing user-inspired decision support tools related to ecosystem services, social-
ecological resilience, and development planning. Nadia has also been part of large
Page 11 of 14
Contributors
United Nations-led assessments such as the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Plat

form for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and the Global Environment
Outlook (GEO), where she has provided expertise on scenarios and futures-thinking to
enhance the governance of social-ecological systems. You can find her @n_sitas.
Rike Sitas
is a researcher at the African Centre for Cities (ACC), and is the co-founder of public
arts organization dala. Straddling the academic world of urban studies and creative
practice, Rike is fascinated by the intersection of culture and cities, and more specifi
cally by the role of art in urban life. A large part of this focus means unpacking the
notions of public space and public life in Southern cityness. At the ACC, Rike leads on
the urban humanities research focus and is the Coordinator of Mistra Urban Futures
in Cape Town; Coordinator of UrbanAfrica.Net; CoI on Whose Heritage Matters?; and
convenes the ACC Academic Seminar Series and 101 Series. You can find her on Twit
ter @rikesitas.
Adrienne Sörbom
is Professor of Sociology at Stockholm and Södertörn universities. Her primary re

search interests concern the organization of politics, globally as well as nationally.
She has an extensive list of publications, containing titles such as Discreet Power:
How the World Economic Forum Shapes Market Agendas (Stanford University Press,
2018), co-authored with Christina Garsten, and ‘His Master’s Voice? Conceptualizing
the Relationship between Business and the World Economic Forum’ (Journal of Busi
ness Anthropology, 2019).
Apolline Taillandier
is a PhD candidate in politics at the Max Planck Sciences Po Center and the Centre
for European Studies and Comparative Politics at Sciences Po, Paris. Her research ex
amines political ideologies and imaginaries of posthuman futures, at the intersection
of transhumanism, posthumanism, and political liberalism from the 1970s onwards.
Page 12 of 14
Contributors
Christopher Trisos
is an ecologist, with a research focus on understanding how human changes to the

Earth System such as climate change and urbanization impact biodiversity, and how
these impacts in turn influence human wellbeing. Recognizing that environmental
problems are also social problems, he enjoys working in interdisciplinary teams to
produce research with actionable outcomes for decision-making. He has consulted on
climate change adaptation for the World Bank and is a Coordinating Lead Author of
the Africa chapter on climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability for the In
tergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 6th Assessment Report. You can find him
on Twitter @christrisos.
Jacob Ward
is Assistant Professor in the History of Information, Computing, and Digitality at

Maastricht University. He has previously worked at the University of Oxford and the
(p. xviii) Science Museum, London, and has published on the history of Thatcherism,
computing, and telecommunications. His co-edited collection Histories of Technology,

the Environment and Modern Britain was published with UCL Press in 2019.
Ian P. Wei
studied in Manchester, Oxford, and Paris, and lectured at the University of Edinburgh
before taking up his current post at the University of Bristol in 1989. In 2009–10, he
was a Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton. His publications include Intellectual Culture in Medieval Paris: Theologians
and the University, c. 1100–1330 (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Adam R.
Nelson and Ian P. Wei (eds.), The Global University: Past, Present, and Future Per
spectives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). He was one of the founding directors of the
Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Bristol in 1992. After serving as Head
of the Department of History from 2001 to 2004, he established the Ideas and Univer
sities project for the Worldwide Universities Network, which he co-directed for ten
years.
Page 13 of 14
Contributors
R. John Williams
is Associate Professor of English and Film and Media Studies at Yale University. He is
the author of The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology, and the Meeting of East
and West (Yale University Press, 2014), as well as ‘World Futures’ in Critical Inquiry
(Spring 2016). He is currently at work on a manuscript on world time.
Laura Wittman
is Associate Professor of French and Italian at Stanford University, and obtained her
PhD from Yale University. She primarily works on nineteenth- and twentieth-century
Italian and French literature from a comparative perspective, and is interested in
modernism, futurism, and medicine. She is the author of numerous books and arti
cles, and has (co-)edited special issues of Romantic Review and California Italian
Studies. Her book The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Modern Mourning, and the
Reinvention of the Mystical Body (University of Toronto Press, 2011) was awarded the
Marraro Award of the Society for Italian Historical Studies for 2012. She is currently
working on a new book entitled Lazarus’ Silence.
Linda Woodhead
MBE is a historical sociologist of religion, beliefs, and values. Much of her work has
looked at declining Christian influence and the rise of alternative beliefs, values, and
rituals—both spiritual and non-religious. Her books include That Was the Church That
Was: How the Church of England Lost the English People (2016, with Andrew Brown),
Christianity: A Very Short Introduction (2nd edition, 2014), A Sociology of Religious
Emotions (with Ole Riis, 2010), and The Spiritual Revolution (with Paul Heelas, 2005).
Woodhead is Professor of Sociology of Religion at Lancaster University, UK. Her con
tribution to this volume was written while she was a Fellow at Stanford University’s
Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences during 2018–19.
Page 14 of 14
Introduction
Introduction
Jenny Andersson and Sandra Kemp
Futures
Print Publication Date: Feb 2021

Subject: Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies - 20th Century On
wards
Online Publication Date: Feb 2021 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198806820.013.31
Abstract and Keywords
The concept of futurity requires critical perspectives that go beyond the literary. This in
troduction sets the context for the cross-disciplinary conversations between the arts and
humanities, social sciences, and STEM disciplines on futures-thinking that are the subject
of this volume, The introduction identifies the core themes of power, action, and shifting
temporal modalities that underpin constructions of futurity and practices of futures-mak
ing, It outlines current debates over the extent of human agency within these larger
processes. The second half of the introduction contextualizes the essays in the book with
in five thematic sections and demonstrates the increasing centrality of futures-thinking in
all disciplines.
Keywords: futures studies, futurity, futures-making, multidisciplinarity, temporality, literary theory, future imagi
naries, historicism, human agency
‘How can one state a become a different state b?’ F. H. Bradley asks, in Appearance and
Reality.1 The question raises some fundamental and appetizing problems for the idealist
philosopher: how should we understand cause and effect in relation to time? How do they
hold together? How much of our imagining of the future has to do with causality at all,
and how much to do with other ‘elements’ in a ‘complex whole’? Taking a prompt from
Bradley, the literary critic Fredric Jameson proposes, in Archaeologies of the Future, a
taxing range of questions for criticism dealing with utopian—or dystopian—literature. The
content of Utopia, as he describes it, emerges out of the fairy tale: it expresses desires
that emerge from ‘the life world of the peasantry, of growth, of nature, cultivation and the
seasons, the earth and the generations’, though the social solidarity and collectivity that
once underpinned the fairy tale may be barely recognizable in the ‘industrial or post-in
dustrial era’.2 Engagement with Bradley then leads Jameson on to the problem of how lit
erature has given form to such thinking about change over time: ‘What difficulties must
be overcome in imagining or representing Utopia?’ How does the literary text, and how
should the literary critic, mediate between imagining ‘everyday empirical Being’ and un
derstanding ‘historical transition’? The problems, and the opportunities, ramify: how to
Page 1 of 16
Introduction
think about human lives, individual and collective; how to deal with personal and collec
tive identity, and the forces that preserve or erode it; how best to understand time and its
effects; how to imagine the role of technology and the extent of its transformative pow
ers; and what to make of the humanities’ psychological as well as material investments in
the future—desire, hope, fear…
To write about the future is, in all the ways these questions propose, a critical act—
though the degree to which any given writer, or genre, steps up to the critical challenge
will vary widely. There may, indeed, be a limit to how far we are competent (p. 2) to imag
ine change from our current and past conditions of existence, as Jameson suggests. Even,
or especially, in the hands of so political a critic, it is clear that futurity requires critical
perspectives that go well beyond those of the literary formalist. At a minimum, the sub
ject puts literary criticism into conversation with sociology, political theory, and the study
of technology. This collection of essays in the Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to
Literature series responds to the opening up of ‘futures studies’ as an explicit invitation
to pursue such cross-disciplinary conversation between the arts, humanities, and social
sciences but also beyond, with STEM subjects, on a topic of persistent universal interest.
A brief glance at the development of futures studies over the course of the long twentieth
century will help to establish what is new in the multidisciplinary orientation of the kinds
of work undertaken and envisaged here. The predictions and narrative projections of fu
tures-imagining have historically taken quite various forms (prophecy, revelation, utopia,
dystopia, sci-fi, cyberpunk, cli-fi, and so forth). But the critical study of futures-writing is,
for the purposes of this volume, understood as a product of developments over the late
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Technological changes during the nineteenth century
(including electrical telegraphy; the opening up of genetics; major advancements in dis
ease control and medical intervention; the mechanization of warfare) gave rise in that pe
riod to a range of utopian and dystopian writings, projecting various kinds of human
worlds—most famously in William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) and H. G. Wells’s
The War of the Worlds (1897)—and with them an increasingly attentive body of literary
criticism focused on defining the core features of the genre. Indeed, even before the suc
cess of Morris and Wells, James T. Presley had produced, in the 1870s, an ‘elementary
classificatory system’ for the genre distinguishing utopias proper (those that depict an
ideal future state of society) from those that deal in contemporary satire, in plausible his
torical prediction, or in modern forms of travel romance—and listing ninety-seven titles
by way of illustration.3
By the mid-twentieth century, utopian thought appeared (for obvious political reasons)
discredited, but the future was by then established as a serious subject for literary and
social-scientific inquiry. Indicatively, ‘futurology’ is a coinage credited (by the OED) to Al
dous Huxley, writing in 1946, to thank a fellow writer for a pamphlet entitled ‘Teaching
the Future’: ‘I think that “futurology” might be a very good thing.’4 Inspired perhaps by
the metanarratives of epochal change in discourses of post-Fordism and post-industrial
ism, key social science thinkers of the mid-twentieth century (Ernst Bloch, Paul Ricoeur,
Emile Durkheim, Norbert Elias) revisited the problem of historical and social time, chal
Page 2 of 16
Introduction
lenging the predominant pessimism of (p. 3) contemporary Marxism (Bloch); identifying

utopia as a potential corrective to the negativity of ideology (Ricoeur); and scrutinizing
the terms on which institutions secure or fail to secure certain versions of the future
(Durkheim).5 By the end of the Cold War, historians were regularly turning to past con
structions of the future as a way of giving focus to problems of representation, memory,
and nostalgia.6 The sheer reach of Elias’s Essay on Time (Über die Zeit) (1984)—elaborat
ing the dependence of the concept of time on human attitudes that are inseparable from
very long historical processes of social development—indicates the new freedom to range
relatively free from the constraints of earlier twentieth-century political history.7
Though much of the conceptual thinking behind later twentieth-century futures studies
was taking place outside literature departments, there were crucial exceptions—none
more important than the concluding essay of Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious
(1981) and Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto (1991). Both works emerged directly
from left traditions of political critique, indicating the new appetite for resistance to the
growing submersion of contemporary politics in individualism and identitarianism, but
they offered dramatically different perspectives on the future as a domain of literary and
cultural studies. While for Jameson, ‘The Dialectic of Utopia and Ideology’ was an occa
sion to extend and clarify a perspective (first outlined in Marxism and Form [1971])
whereby all class consciousness is to be seen as ‘in its very nature Utopian’, Haraway of
fered an (in some sense much more radical) displacement of human agency.8 Her ‘utopian
dream of the hope of a monstrous world without gender’ proved hugely fertile not just for
gender criticism but for technology studies, animal studies, and science fiction studies—
though it has also prompted fierce and ongoing criticism for its ‘naïve embrace of tech
nology’, its apparent willingness to dispense with gender and other identitarian cate
gories that still have real effects in many people’s lives, and more.9
For the literary critic, the encouragements to engage with the very broad interdisci
(p. 4)
plinary field that is futures studies today are multiple. Speculative writing about the fu
ture has always held a special place within literary studies—in part because it offers a ve
hicle for meditating on the kind and extent of ‘knowingness’ that literature (in all its
kinds) offers us—of ourselves, of others, of the world around us. There are also technolog
ical imperatives to recognize the subject as having particular importance for literary criti
cism, including innovations that have affected the forms and distribution of ‘the literary’.
Digital culture has changed, and is changing, the ways in which we think and read,
prompting debate about the extent to which conceptions of the literary and literary value
are in turn undergoing fundamental revision. Absorption in the medium through which
we access literary content, Marjorie Garber suggests darkly, may be at risk of overwhelm
ing our apprehension of what we read.10
Broader trends within the humanities and social sciences have enlarged the scope of for
mal and political inquiry for literary criticism. Historiographic approaches to the future
have shifted in recent years from presenting the future as a problem within Begriffs
geschichte (history of concepts on the model of, for example, Reinhart Koselleck’s Fu
tures Past [1979]11) to addressing it as a means of world-making and world-ordering. Im
Page 3 of 16
Introduction
portant works in this line, including Vanessa Ogle’s Global Transformations of Time
(2015), revisit the problem of global time, reconsidering utopia and dystopia in world his
tory, and bringing global histories of science to bear on forms of prediction, modelling,
and forecast.12 Design historians, meanwhile, have taught us to consider the imagining of
futures through the use of materials and the technologies devised to exploit them—an in
fluence reflected in the coinage of the term ‘design fiction’ by the science writer Bruce
Sterling in 2005 to describe the prototyping of future scenarios in ways that enable an
emotional (p. 5) and critical response.13 In the adjacent fields of STS and innovation stud
ies, others have encouraged a view of technological change as dependent on a set of an
ticipations of the innovation process.14 And vital work in anthropology, geography, and so
ciology, on modelling, algorithms, big data, and forms of prediction, has given critical the
ory new tools for addressing the future at a level above that of national literary imaginar
ies.15 Arjun Appadurai’s The Future as Cultural Fact (2013) is perhaps the most important
example of a recasting of the future in anthropology and critical studies as a global prob
lem.16
The political drivers for literary criticism to engage with these and other developments
are obvious. Climate change, the emergence of new (and old) diseases resistant to treat
ment, the rise of protectionism, and the emergence of new nationalist and populist agen
das make utopian and dystopian thinking once again pressingly topical.17 One sign of the
critical ambivalence that is often the outcome of trying to hold political and technological
developments together in a single critical narrative is the success of the Israeli archaeolo
gist Yuval Noah Harari’s two books Sapiens (2014) and Homo Deus (2016), on the past
and future of the human species.18 In Homo Deus, Harari likens humanity to an algo
rithm, evolving according to patterns hidden in our genetic code, programmed to make
choices that bolster the fate of human civilization even if these choices lead to what ap
pears to be a voluntary abdication of humanity, and the letting go of now outdated princi
ples of liberalism and humanism. Our future is inseparable, Harari argues, from that of
the algorithms which we have created in our image: when these mechanistic copies of
ourselves are capable of more sophisticated knowledge and understanding than we our
selves are, the question of what is good for humanity will have lost its singularity.19
Such discourses on acts of futures-making, oscillating between radical techno-optimism

and ethical pessimism and, in either mode, according little or no space to the power of
human action, debate, or politics, are of course objectionable—and several of the writers
in this volume do object to Harari’s thinking—but his framing (p. 6) of the problem of the
future as a question of what it means, or will mean, to be human unquestionably repre
sents the dominant concern of current theorizations in futurology. The essays in this vol
ume follow that trend. Futurity, here, refers to the manifold acts of futures-making enact
ed implicitly in social life and cultural signification, as well as to explicit thinking about
the ends and finalities of human activities. That representations of the future contain cer
tain assumptions and claims about what it means to be human, to have a life, and to in
habit a viable portion of the universe is one of the common themes that run through the
essays brought together here. Another is the powered dimension inherent to conceiving
of the future. Constructions of futurity are, we suggest, more than mere representations
Page 4 of 16
Introduction
or images of futures: they are powered techniques, narratives, artefacts, and forms of ac
tual futures-making. Some are designed to ‘make real’ virtual future worlds—livable and
rehearsable beforehand through games or scenarios, for instance.20 Others push the hu
man imagination to encompass unimaginable life worlds beyond the narrow time spans of
human existence—think of the so-called Clock of the Long Now being built in the Cali
fornian desert by the Long Now Foundation.21 Many of these artefacts are future fictions,
representations, and material futures at the same time, hence challenging how we think
about and interpret representation and link it to problems of power and action. By being
embedded in technologies, in visual art, in design, in texts and manifestos, or in instru
ments and artefacts of time-making, and in institutions of culture and its heritage, repre
sentations of the future make certain futures thinkable—while unmaking, or blocking, the
thinking of others.
A key ambition of this volume, in other words, has been to bring the arts and humanities
to the work of interpreting how such constitutions of meaning lead to forms of action and
inaction—questions often deemed to be primarily the concern of the social sciences. But
the aim has equally been to encourage recent developments whereby some social scien
tists are taking a more active interest in forms of representation and of narration. One
such area of flourishing interdisciplinarity has arisen in response to the financial sociolo
gist Jens Beckert’s work on the role of future imaginaries in economics, understood as a
set of stories and premised on the future.22 Around this and similar arguments many oth
er scholars from across the humanities and social sciences have been able to meet: show
ing how central banks make use of rhetorical devices when they present forecasts of
macro-economic stability, or how the World Economic Forum in Davos stages world fu
tures by constant calls to ideas of capitalist renewal. Social scientists and literary critics
share an (p. 7) interest here in questioning the relative status of those discursive media in
which the rapid technological developments of the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries find articulation: as a result, both are broadening their analyses of text and im
age to encompass a generous variety of multimedia. As futures are created through mani
fold forms of representation, then, the essays in this volume embrace a multitude of
forms. These include narratives, manifestos, speech acts, images, and designs relating to
the future but also forms of quantification (such as budgets), and material objects such as
collections and exhibits. We take these forms of representation to be products of a social
struggle to give content to futures and set in course forms of social action.
In raising questions of power and authority, futurity keeps returning us to dispute over
the role and extent of human agency: the reach and scope of the human agent; his or her
capacity to embrace this scope and act ethically or responsibly for the future; and how
such questions interact with questions of the multiple ways of knowing and foretelling fu
tures. Barbara Adam, one of the most influential current thinkers about the future, ar
gues, in a central contribution to this volume, that futures need to be ‘honed’: that is,
brought into being through new relationships between knowledge, action, and ethics. A
key dimension of all the essays that follow is the conception that futurity involves a range
of knowledge practices, including scientific rationality, expertise as conventionally under
stood, and many forms of layman knowledge or unconventional knowledge such as art or
Page 5 of 16
Introduction
science fiction. The latter are understood not (or not just) as representations of and cul
tural engagements with the future, but as epistemic inputs—ways of creating forms of
knowledge on the future. The accent on ‘powered’ anticipation of the future above should
not, of course, be taken as a return to a strictly positivist assertion of the importance of
scientific knowledge on the future. Rather, the essays in several cases bring out the ways
in which claims to know the future rely on ways of knowing the past and the present, of
ten straddling the scientific and the religious, the verifiable and the imagined, the objec
tive and the emotional.
We take the need for cultural and geographic plurality in the conception of these ways of
knowing and feeling to be vital to the enterprise, both in its own right as a fascinatingly
diverse register of cultural practices and actions toward the future, and by way of chal
lenging what we may think that we already know about the shape of the future.23 Several
essays here reveal that what some historians once took to be a story of the secularization
and rationalization of the future through the Enlightenment movement, putting the future
into the ‘hands’ of humans, is a much less clear-cut, infinitely more complex problem.24
Individual essays show, for (p. 8) example, how climate science interacts with cosmic no
tions of human fate, as well as with popular understandings of weather cycles. Climate
science intermingles with Manifest Destiny ideas of human stewardship, leading to new
notions of responsibility for the planet. Other essays treat prediction in ways that require
us to be cognizant not just of its role as a big data management tool, informing security
regimes in crime prevention or anti-terrorism, for example, or the complex systems of fi
nancial markets, but of its function within less controlling enterprises, including science
fiction, cybernetics, and scenarios. In such contexts, ‘predicting’ the future may be, still,
a suspect political technology in the modern world, deeply involved in what Michel Fou
cault called the governmentalities of the present (ordering and making sense of the gov
ernable and the ungovernable), but it can also retain richer, less politically reducible con
nections with speech as a creative act—speaking the future in advance of any actual state
of existence we or those after us may come to experience.25
The Structure of the Book

The book is organized into five sections, closely interrelated:
I. Future Histories
II. Knowing the Future
III. Futures as Salvation and Apocalypse
IV. Futures of Life
V. Future Worlds
Part I, Future Histories, examines the future as a historically situated category, under
pinned by concepts of time and dependent on historically and culturally specific represen
tations of past and present. Futures can be local, imperial, global, and universal. The es
says in this section depart from Western narratives of linear progress along an axis of
Page 6 of 16
Introduction
time to examine the situated character of notions of the future and to articulate different
relationships between time, space, historiography, and historicity.
Jenny Andersson’s opening chapter focuses on the material role of the artefact in futures-
making by charting the development of the boardgame, The Future, by the (p. 9) RAND
Corporation. Andersson skilfully illuminates the subtle combination of scientific and cre
ative narratives within constructions of the future and also attends to the geopolitics and
social processes embedded within accompanying strategies of prediction. Andersson’s
chapter introduces the reader to the core issues within the collection of authority over,
and individual agency within, processes of futures-making.
Moving from the single material object to the material practices of conservation, Rodney
Harrison takes the practice of biobanking as a case study in order to reassess and rede
fine current understandings of heritage. For Harrison, conservational practices are not
exclusively oriented towards preserving what remains of biological and cultural diversity
from the past, but play a powerful and vital role in assembling, building, and designing fu
ture worlds. Following on from Harrison, Sandra Kemp concentrates on the Victorian phe
nomenon of the soirée to examine the role of the museum in perpetuating future imagi
naries and projecting narratives of nationhood. Kemp delineates the temporal and spatial
interrelations (between past, present, and future and between words, spaces, and ob
jects) which are integral to the envisioning and embodiment of future imaginaries
through exhibitions. In doing so, Kemp uncovers the cultural politics and social processes
in making, preserving, and taxonomizing knowledge.
The next two essays switch from a focus on specific material histories and practices to
wider methodological concerns in historiography. Challenging singular and linear con
cepts of historical progression, they make critical interventions about the way in which
pluralized histories of the future are recorded and interpreted. Mat Paskins argues that
traditional histories of the future have been extremely selective in the range of sources
they include. Paskins’s chapter identifies and examines the multifaceted form of the peri
odical as a vital source material for historiography. For Paskins, the immense variety be
tween voices, visions, forms, and temporalities at play within this public discourse de
serves our critical attention because it opens up multiple representations of futures and
futurity which compete and coexist with one another. Rüdiger Graf meanwhile tackles the
question of how to write contemporary history in light of our own ignorance of the future.
Graf demonstrates that recent historiography, with an emphasis on linearity and a unified
horizon of expectation, overlooks the pluralization of the future that occurred over the
course of the twentieth century. Graf responds by defining four basic modes which gener
ate futures and advocates these as a methodological innovation for the practice of con
temporary historiography.
While Graf examines the inherent challenges within representing ‘a history of the present
time’, Laura Wittman explores constructs of ‘the present as history’. Her chapter delves
into the modernist movement of Futurism and elucidates Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s vi
olently charged model of an ‘explosive now’. Wittman traces the evolution of Marinetti’s
Page 7 of 16
Introduction
thought through close readings of various drafts of his manifesto and his war diaries. In
doing so, Wittman illuminates the (p. 10) significance of embodied practices for under
standing the Futurist strategy of breaking into the present.
Part II, Knowing the Future, reassesses and problematizes the fundamental issues of rep
resentation, ontology, and epistemology in futurity. How are futures known and told? In
what way are claims to futurity underpinned by claims to expertise and power, and what
is the impact of such claims on notions of freedom and agency? This section explicates
the methods by which futuricity exercises its hold on the world by exploring the relation
ship between prediction, knowledge, and human action in a range of discourses, prac
tices, and institutions.
The first half of this section focuses on the ways in which conceptual thinking from fu
tures studies—and its intertwining of theory with practice—emerges out of, interacts
with, and challenges concepts of temporality and action within the social sciences. The
section opens with an interview with Barbara Adam, in which Adam reflects upon thirty-
five years of futures-thinking rooted in her original work on time and temporality. Adam’s
initial work on time theory expands to encompass ethics, collective-responsibility politics,
and creative practice in articulations of futures and futures-making. Adam’s concluding
four verse meditations, ‘Honing Futures’, explore the processes of imagining, anticipat
ing, designing, and actioning futures, and the interdependencies of time, space, and mat
ter within the active creation of futurity.
Turning to the emergence of, and relationality between, disciplines within academia, Jen
nifer Gidley charts the changing sociopolitical implications of the shift from the concept
of a singular future to the pluralization of futures in the 1960s. Gidley brings to bear the
democratizing effect of multitudinous futures upon the evolution of theory and practice
across academic disciplines, paying particular attention to the development of futures
studies, and proposes future directions for the diverse and global representation of fu
tures in the twenty-first century. Meanwhile, Paolo Jedlowski and Vincenza Pellegrino’s
chapter provides a practical application of sociological theory (conceptualizing the future
as a horizon of expectations) to contemporary discourse in order to examine the envision
ing of futures by younger generations. Discovering that hegemonic discourse emphasizes
‘defuturization’, the chapter reflects upon ways sociology may intervene in communica
tive practices to help younger people broaden their aspirations and realize more open fu
tures.
Moving away from the social sciences towards philosophy, Johan Siebers reassesses the
impact of futurity upon the conceptualization of creativity and subjectivity from a philo
sophical point of view. Siebers extends Bloch’s account of the ontology of not-yet being to
examine the significance of futurity upon language, concepts, and ideas. In doing so,
Siebers proposes a new direction for the humanities as centrally concerned with an open
future and its place in human existence, awareness, and culture.
Page 8 of 16
Introduction
The remainder of Part II examines the ethical and political quandaries of repre
(p. 11)
senting the future in practice by focusing on the histories of two very different kinds of in
stitutions which were intimately connected with predicting the future: British Telecom
and the university. Jacob Ward examines computerized simulation and surveillance as an
agent of economic and political futurity in modern Britain by tracing the transition of the
Long Range Planning Department of the British Post Office’s Telecommunications Divi
sion from a state-owned monopoly in 1967 to the privatized corporation British Telecom
in 1981. Ward carefully delineates the company’s complex representations of computer
ized futures—which drew upon utopian and dystopian categories from science fiction—in
relation to the rise of Thatcherism and the renegotiation of the individual’s relationship to
the state. In the final chapter of this section, Keri Facer and Ian Wei uncover the multi-
layered history and strategies of the university as an institution of the future from me
dieval colleges, to post-Enlightenment centres of discovery, to the emergence of futures
departments in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Throughout, Facer and Wei chart
the critically and politically laden relationship between society and university, and reflect
upon the ethical and social responsibilities of academics working within future-oriented
disciplines.
Part III, Futures as Salvation and Apocalypse, investigates the return of eschatological,
messianic, and apocalyptic thinking in different representations of rhetorical address to
the future. The chapters draw on a range of contemporary discourses: from actual politi
cal manifestos to web-based materials, and from participatory observations to contempo
rary visions of human catastrophe. The essays in this section uncover the cultural politics
at stake within these presentations of religious, environmental, social, and global futures.
The section opens with Linda Woodhead’s recovery of the different ways religious and
secular cosmologies represent relationships to the future. Woodhead delineates three ma
jor models (apocalyptic; world-repair; divination) and argues that while these models
have been misunderstood, stigmatized, or overlooked, they are still highly influential. She
considers the ongoing relevance, and dangers, of these pervasive modes of relating to the
future. John R. Hall and Zeke Baker further interrogate the operations of religious con
cepts of salvation and apocalypse by examining them in relation to climate futures. Their
chapter undertakes an exploratory survey of ‘popular theologies’ espoused by religious
formations in the US in order to bring to light affinities and disjunctures between alterna
tive ways that global salvation can be (or fail to be) envisioned and engaged. They pay
particular attention to the distinctive social temporalities of salvation and apocalypse
within these discourses in order to examine the cultural antinomies of climate crisis.
Georgina Endfield turns to the complex histories and geographies of ‘weather wising’ and
extreme weather events. Drawing on empirical research from her (p. 12) AHRC-funded re
search project Spaces of Experience and Horizons of Expectation: The Implications of Ex
treme Weather in the UK, Past, Present, and Future, Endfield uncovers a range of tools
and technologies used by historical subjects in short- and long-term practices of weather
Page 9 of 16
Introduction
forecasting. In doing so, she examines the interplay of credibility, authority, and status in
volved in practical methods of prediction.
The remainder of Part III reassesses and problematizes rhetoric and representations de
veloped in different geopolitical spaces—sub-Saharan Africa; global digital space; and,
more controversially, jihadist ideology—and offers alternative models and approaches to
counter the uncertainty present within different visions of global futures, such as environ
mental futures, and sociability in the digital era. Laura Pereira, Charne Lavery, Busiso
Moyo, Nadia Sitas, Rike Sitas, Odirilwe Selomane, and Christopher Trisos articulate an
African futurist approach to framing and tackling the challenges of social-ecological fu
tures. The chapter argues that narratives from non-Western cultures offer more diverse
approaches to decision-making under conditions of uncertainty than the archetypical sce
narios depicted in current (Western) models of environmental futures. It uses science fic
tion from sub-Saharan Africa as a source for a more inclusive and experiential-based
quantitative model to consider future trajectories for the planet.
Anthropologist and futures-thinker Arjun Appadurai explores the paradox that collective
socially imagined visions of the future seem both abundant and scarce: on the one hand,
images of possibility and hope emerge from the social and cultural diversity of our world;
on the other hand, these are limited by fear, censorship, and commercial and political
propaganda. Appadurai argues that the scarcity of social futures in the digital era is a re
sult of a process of Schumpeterian destruction: a process which threatens human creativ
ity, curiosity, and the social relations of the non-virtual world.
In the final essay of Part III, Mohamad-Ali Adraoui examines the Islamic State of Iraq and
Syria’s conceptualization of history and the future in relation to their understanding of es
chatology and the ‘End of Times’. Drawing on a range of verified jihadist literature,
Adraoui demonstrates the way in which the Islamic State’s fundamentalist
(mis)interpretation of Islamic prophetic discourse merges terrestrial and celestial time.
This is then used to justify and exacerbate the use of extreme violence by the organiza
tion in pursuit of its aggressive political aims.
Part IV, Futures of Life, considers how anticipatory practices (from technology, biology,
and design, among others) shape imaginaries and representations of human life forms,
with a focus on the body. The human body has been a central site for prototyping ideas of
the future in literature, the arts, science, and technology: a site of fantasy and exhilara
tion that is simultaneously tinged with the horror of future anticipation. The essays in this
section probe and critique representations, and technological and biological practices of
the future, which reconfigure our understandings of the body, life, nature, and being in a
changing human environment. The first half of the section focuses on future imaginaries
of the body while (p. 13) the second half considers the challenges, problems, and opportu
nities that future bodies, modes of being, and environments pose for relationships be
tween present and future generations.
Page 10 of 16
Introduction
Anders Sandberg focuses on the notion of the ‘exoself’ as a vision of the extended human
in the future. He reconsiders the technological advancements which allow us to modify
bodies and outsource cognition and examines the profound ways in which they change
how we relate to the world: from practical exoself components, like watches and smart
phones, to more complex visions of futurity, such as prosthetics, spacesuits, and exoskele
tons. Sandberg maintains that while radically enhanced posthumans are too abstract to
visualize, exoselves provide a ready-made image of a transhuman that is increasingly tan
gible. Apolline Taillandier’s chapter focuses on representations of the future of human life
in three transhumanist imaginaries of the posthuman. It delineates libertarian, liberal,
and conservative posthuman imaginaries, arguing that the posthuman condition is de
fined by changing scientific, moral, and political narratives: narratives which are deter
mined by varying rates of change and approaches to ethics and risk. It demonstrates how
these changing posthuman imaginaries shape spaces of present and future political imag
ination.
Where Sandberg and Taillandier explore the literary and scientific imaginaries which
have emerged directly out of biotechnological advancements, John Holmes instead exam
ines science fiction as a medium to project, explore, and critique multiple biological fu
tures. Holmes is particularly concerned with the operations of myth within Olaf
Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930), a classic text which projected a future for human
evolution across two billion years, three planets, and eighteen species. Holmes argues
that both the form of myth and Stapledon’s mythic futures are means to interrogate the
present and draw out latent possibilities within human biology and society which are as
yet unrealized.
The final half of the section reassesses and problematizes several anticipatory initiatives
(medical, environmental, economic, and political) which rely on different assumptions
about the nature of intergenerational relationships and different interpretations of future
change within the globe’s environments.
Julia Nordblad turns to more recent articulations of the relationship between present and
future generations in her survey of four contemporary discussions of climate change, in
cluding Pope Francis’s encyclical and the Brundtland Report. Nordblad exemplifies how
the concept of future generations harbours disparate and conflicting views over the ex
tent to which future generations can be known, and delineates the political, economic,
and ethical complexities embedded in constructions of intergenerational relationship. The
final chapter in this section assesses the way in which non-biological operations, such as
economic discounting, assume negative inter-temporal relationships (whereby the future
is devalued). Liliana Doganova draws on the history of discounting—from capital budget
ing to forest management to pharmaceutical research—to argue that discounting is a po
litical tool, and (p. 14) assesses its profound impact upon natural environments, human
behaviour. and experiences of the world.
The final section—Part V, Future Worlds—examines constitutions of futurity as embedded

in the processes and representational forms of current geopolitics and economics. Tech
Page 11 of 16
Introduction
nologies such as forecasts and scenarios depend on sophisticated narratives of the future
and are often justified by rhetoric and appeals to authority. The essays explore how epis
temic and material practices such as modelling, simulation, and scenarios posit and enact
future worlds both by embodying them in artefacts, and by projecting them as if they
were universal fate and destiny. The section pays particular attention to how such fu
tures-making exercises open up or close down possibilities and forms of plurality on glob
al, local, and personal scales.
The first half of the section focuses on the history of prediction from a variety of different
fields. The essays interrogate the methods and authority of, and counter-reactions to,
computerized models of prediction and assess their influence upon past, current, and fu
ture understandings of humanity. The section opens with R. John Williams’s exploration of
the institutional evolution of scenario planning: from the inception of the management
technique during the 1960s at RAND to its expansion into corporate management in the
1970s. Emerging as a countermodel to the predictive power of the computer, Williams de
lineates how scenario planning incorporated several new age and countercultural spiritu
alities that seemed to support the pluralized futurity it advocated. Eglė Rindzevičiūtė
turns to the seminal research of Norbert Wiener to reassess the overlooked area of scien
tific prediction within cybernetics. Understood as a complex epistemological concept,
rather than a technological tool, cybernetic prediction emphasizes the role of uncertainty,
and Rindzevičiūtė reflects upon its potential for future-oriented practices within the
broader fields of contemporary science, governance, and politics.
David Benqué employs critical design practice to explore the relationship between data
science, astrology, and divination, and identifies the almanac as a precursor to current
forms of algorithmic prediction. Benqué draws on the practice-based project The Monis
tic Almanac to experiment with computational astrologies and to argue that divination
opens up opportunities for critical design practice to question the authority of predic
tions. S. M. Amadae’s chapter illustrates how the influence of algorithmic thinking ex
tends beyond predictive technologies into contemporary projections of life itself. It eluci
dates the emerging concept of ‘life as algorithm’, epitomized by the distinctive evolution
ary and materialist theories of Richard Dawkins and Max Tegmark. Both thinkers under
stand life as an algorithm programmed to achieve success in survival and reproduction,
which ultimately blurs the boundaries between AI and humanity.
The remainder of Part V explicitly explores the impact of global future-orientated indus
tries upon the concepts of authority, individual choice, and upon local and personal acts
of futures-making. Benoît Pelopidas uncovers the inherently political condition of global
acts of futures-making by focusing on the naturalization of (p. 15) nuclear weapons and
their removal from the realm of democratic choice. The chapter takes the Cold War era as
a case study to delineate the concept of ‘nuclear eternity’ as a means of reducing public
choices about the use of nuclear weapons. Pelopidas reassesses the dominant narrative
about the 1960s as an emancipatory decade by arguing it witnessed a significant shrink
ing of future political possibilities. Christina Garsten and Adrienne Sörbom examine the
anticipatory practices of the contemporary future industry (epitomized by think tanks and
Page 12 of 16
Introduction
management consultancies), which offers the premise that the future can be designed.
They illustrate the paradoxical relationship between anxiety and notions of individual
agency generated by the multiple actors and interests within the industry and interrogate
the cultural and economic politics of the soft power exerted by the industry.
The final chapter of the collection offers an alternative to the technological determinism
of global futures and is emblematic of the volume’s overarching emphasis on experiential
practice and cross-disciplinary conversation. Paolo Cardini reflects on the Global Futures
Lab, a critical-design initiative which invites international students to ‘build “culturally
specific” future design realities’ in order to challenge the current dominance of Western
aesthetics within speculative design and the creative industries. Cardini is a compelling
advocate for more pluralist perspectives and localized visions in personal future imagi
naries so that we can draw ‘a more culturally diverse and geographically dispersed pic
ture of our tomorrow’. (p. 16)
Notes:
(1) F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), 194, as quoted
in Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other
Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), 85.
(2) Archaeologies of the Future, 85.
(3) See Peter Fitting, ‘A Short History of Utopian Studies’, Science Fiction Studies 36, no.
1 (2009), 121–31, 123.
(4) OED Online, n. 1. The reference is to Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed. Grover Cleveland
Smith (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969), 542.
(5) Ernst Bloch in Das Prinzip Hoffnung, 3 vols. (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1955–9), trans.
Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight, The Principle of Hope, 3 vols. (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1986); Paul Ricoeur, ‘Ideology and Utopia’, in From Text to Action: Essays
in Hermeneutics, II, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Evanston, IL: North
western University Press, 1991), 300–16; Emile Durkheim, ‘Individualism and the Intel
lectuals’, Political Studies 17 (1969), 14–30.
(6) For example, Steven Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Lynn Hunt, Measuring Time, Making History
(Budapest: Central European University Press, 2007); Roxana Panchasi, Future Tense:
The Culture of Anticipation in France between the Wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2009); Francois Hartog, Régimes d’historcité: Présentisme et expériences du
temps (Paris: Seuil, 2014).
(7) Norbert Elias, Essay on Time, ed. Steven Loyal and Stephen Mennell (University Col
lege Dublin Press, 2007), http://norberteliasfoundation.nl/docs/pdf/09EssayonTime.pdf.
Page 13 of 16
Introduction
(8) Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconsciousness: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act
(London: Methuen, 1981), 289.
(9) Donna J. Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in

the Late Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
(London: Free Association Books, 1991), 149–81, 181; Alison Fafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 104; Ben Anderson, ‘Preemption, Precau
tion, Preparedness: Anticipatory Action and Future Geographies’, Progress in Human Ge
ography 34, no. 6 (2010), 277–98.
(10) Marjorie Garber’s The Use and Abuse of Literature (New York: Pantheon Books, 2011)
and Kevin Stein’s Poetry’s Afterlife: Verse in the Digital Age (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2010) are indicative of work in this area, as are critical approaches to
metaphor by theorists (e.g. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson).
(11) Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. and in
tro. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004 [1985]), 3–4, 236–48. See al
so the chapters ‘Begriffsgeschichte and Social History’ (75–92) and ‘“Space of Experi
ence” and “Horizon of Expectation”: Two Historical Categories’ (255–76).
(12) Vanessa Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time (Cambridge, MA and London: Har
vard University Press, 2015); Michael Gordin et al., Utopia/Dystopia: Conditions of Histor
ical Possibility (Princeton University Press, 2010); Jenny Andersson’s and Eglė
Rindzevičiūtė’s recent The Struggle for the Long Term: Forging the Future (New York:
Routledge, 2015); Jenny Andersson, The Future of the World: Futurology, Futurists and
the Struggle for the Post-Cold War Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2018); Elke
Seefried, ‘Reconfiguring the Future: Politics and Time from the 1960s to 1980s’, Journal
of European History 13, no. 3 (2015), 306–16; Rudiger Graf and Benjamin Herzog, ‘Von
der Geschichte der Zukunftsvorstellungen zur Geschichte ihrer Generierung: Probleme
und Herausforderungen des Zukunftsbezugs im 20. Jahrhundert’, Geschichte und
Gesellschaft 42, no. 3 (2015), 497–515.
(13) The term is first gestured towards in Sterling’s book Shaping Things (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2005). Sterling gives a definitive explanation of ‘design fiction’ as ‘the deliber
ate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change’ in an interview with To
rie Bosch, ‘Sci-fi Writer Bruce Sterling Explains the Intriguing New Concept of Design
Fiction’, Slate (March 2012), http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/03/02/
bruce_sterling_on_design_fictions_.html. See also work such as ‘United Micro King
doms’ (2012/13) by designers Dunne & Raby, http://www.dunneandraby.co.uk.
(14) Nik Brown, Brian Rappert, and Andrew Webster (eds.), Contested Futures: A Sociolo
gy of Prospective Techno-Science (Abingdon: Routledge, 2000).
(15) Arjun Appadurai, The Future as Cultural Fact (London and New York: Verso, 2013);
see for instance the work of critical social theorists such as Ben Anderson, Andrew
Lakoff, or Louise Amoore.
Page 14 of 16
Introduction
(16) See for earlier perspectives Johannes Fabien, Time and the Other: How Anthropology
Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014 [1983]).
(17) IPSP report, https://www.ipsp.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IPSP-Executive-

Summary.pdf.
(18) Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, trans. Harari, John Pur
cell, and Haim Watzman (London: Harvill Secker, 2014) and Homo Deus: A Brief History
of Tomorrow (London: Harvill Secker, 2016).
(19) Harari, Homo Deus, 83–90, 395–97, and chapter 9, ‘The Great Decoupling’, 307–50.
(20) George Mallard and Andrew Lakoff, ‘How Claims to Know the Future Are Used to Un
derstand the Present’, in Michelle Lamont et al. (eds.), Social Knowledge in the Making
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 339–79.
(21) See Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole
Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago Press, 2006).
(22) Jens Beckert, Imagined Futures: Fictional Expectations and Capitalist Dynamics
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).
(23) Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007); Peter
Gibson and Lorraine Daston, ‘Fear and Loathing of the Imagination in Science’, Daedalus
127, no. 1 (1998), 73–98; Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2012).
(24) Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Modernity and the Planes of Historicity’, Economy and Society
10, no. 2 (1981), 166–83; Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing
History, Spacing Concepts (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002); Lucien Hölscher,
Die Entdeckung der Zukunft (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1999); Lucien Hölscher, ‘The History of
the Future: The Emergence and Decline of a Temporal Concept in European History’,
Conceptual History Newsletter 5 (2002), 10–15; Lucien Hölscher, ‘Mysteries of Historical
Order: Ruptures, Simultaneity and the Relationship of the Past, the Present’, in Bernard
Bernanke and Chris Lorenz (eds.), Breaking up Time: Negotiating the Borders between
Past, Present and Future (Amsterdam: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2013), 134–52.
(25) Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge University
Press, 1999).
Jenny Andersson
Jenny Andersson is CNRS Research Professor and currently on leave from the CNRS
and a visiting professor at the Department of the History of Ideas and Science at Up
psala University, Sweden. She was the Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded
project Futurepol (A Political History of the Future, Knowledge Production and Fu
ture Governance in the Post War Period) and co-directed the Franco-German collabo
Page 15 of 16
Introduction
rative research centre MaxPo: Coping with instability in advanced market societies
(2016–19). She has published extensively on the political history of social democracy,
the knowledge economy, and the future. Her most recent work is The Future of the
World: Futurology, Futurists, and the Struggle for the Cold War Imagination.
Sandra Kemp
Sandra Kemp is Director of The Ruskin—Library, Museum, and Research Centre. She
is Professor in the Department of History at Lancaster University and Visiting Profes
sor at Imperial College London. She previously combined senior research fellowships
at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) and has worked at the Royal College of Art,
the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and the universities of Oxford, Edin
burgh, and Glasgow. As a writer and curator, her research is located within the grow
ing disciplines of futures studies in relation to visual and material cultures. Her fu
tures-related work spans the exhibition and monograph Future Face: Image, Innova
tion, Identity (2004–6) at the London Science Museum and subsequent South Asian
exhibition tour; The Future Is Our Business: The Visual History of Future Expertise
project at the V&A (2013); and Ruskin: Museum of the Near Future at The Ruskin,
Lancaster University in 2019. She is Principle Investigator for the AHRC/Labex-fund
ed Universal Histories and Universal Museums project on the role of museums in Eu
rope in building knowledge about the future.
Page 16 of 16
The Future Boardgame: Prediction as Power over Time
Jenny Andersson
Futures
Print Publication Date: Feb 2021

Subject: Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies - 20th Century On
wards
Online Publication Date: Feb 2021 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198806820.013.1
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter charts the development of the Future boardgame as a means to demonstrate
the subtle combination of representations of science and narratives of imagination and
storytelling in constructions of futures. In advocating the study of material histories of the
future (as to opposed to studying the cultural history of future visions), this chapter iden
tifies the central role of the future as artefact. Future artefacts, it concludes, are a cen
tral way of analysing repertoires of futures-making between scienticity and imagination,
and they also provide important stories of circulation and exchange.
Keywords: prediction, gaming, future, social choice, desirability, time, Cold War
US Patent application number 3,473,802—‘Apparatus for playing a game concerned with

the forecasting of simulated happening or non-happening future events’—features a
boardgame entitled The Future (see Figure 1.1).1 The game comprised a set of event
cards, a card receiving and orienting device, a number of separate game boards that indi
cated different series of future events, and a probability scale marked with percentages.
Page 1 of 17
Figure 1.1 Set-up of The Future boardgame (1966),

designed by Hans Goldschmidt, T. J. Gordon, and Olaf
Helmer, and manufactured by Kaiser Aluminum and
Chemical Corporation. Author’s photo. See http://
www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/14073/future/.
The Future boardgame is a striking example of a future artefact—of the fact that the his
tory of the future of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is not merely a history of vi
sions or images of the future, but also a highly material history of objects, devices, and
technologies carrying forms of futurity and predictive ambition.2 These artefacts, or so
the chapter suggests, were far from neutral objects; they embodied various claims to
know and shape the future, and they were, or so it is proposed here, concentrates of
forms of futuristic expertise.3 As such, they are vital to the contemporary history of pre
diction, and to our understanding of prediction as a powered social technology with ambi
tions to shape the social world, manage social conflicts, and create forms of order to the
general messiness of social time. (p. 20) They raise questions therefore of what the desir
able future was, who had the authority to invent and create it, and with what pretensions
to scope and influence.
I want to propose in this chapter therefore that prediction is an activity caught up in vi
sions of global space, and that the history of methodologies of future research and fu
tures studies from the 1960s and 1970s intersects with the history of rapidly shifting vi
sions of world order, to the point that it can be suggested that forms of predictive
methodologies developed after 1945 as political technologies intended to govern and con
trol global space.4
Games, Scenarios, and Geopolitics

The Future game, which was developed by three former RAND strategists and futurists—
Theodore Gordon, Olaf Helmer, and Hans Goldschmidt—has some (p. 21) interesting an
swers to give us to these questions. There was a marker for each event that could be
moved along the probability axis, and a die with which probability values could be deter
mined. Red and green arrows on the board determined whether the probabilities of
Page 2 of 17
events were decreasing or increasing. An indicator button determined whether events oc
curred or not. Various factors ruled the movements of this button up and down the proba
bility. These factors are noteworthy: the first involved the ‘opinion of experts’ as to the
probability of an event occurring or not occurring. This was considered a ‘known factor’,
and forms of expert opinion could thus be used within the game to determine how the
game board should be set up and which possible future events should be depicted on it.
The second factor was ‘ordinary chance’—reflected in numbers randomly allotted through
the die—which, similar to Buckminster Fuller’s early 1960s world maps or dies, was a
non-symmetrical, many-sided die.5 A third factor could be thrown up by drawing event
cards—these included so-called ‘ordinary event cards’, but also ‘wild cards’, or ‘news
event cards’. The unimagined wild cards affected the occurrences or non-occurrences of
all other future events in the overall series of events played.
Score sheets kept note of the correct forecasts of each player. In one version of the game,
the winning player was simply the person who correctly forecasted the most events or
non-events thrown up by the event cards, but in another version of the game, play money
could be used in order to turn the game from an amusement device into a strategy game
where players competed over the wisest investment of their money. In the latter, winning
the game was based on most successful investment in relation to the kind of occurrences
that the game turned out. By using money, players could also compete with each other
over what was in the game referred to as ‘most desirable world’, using play money as rep
resentations of fictitious investments into each desirable world. Learning or rehearsing
political economy had been the purpose of boardgames way before this period.6 In the
game, the most desirable world was the one that attracted the largest value of investment
of the other players. In other words, the success of the desirable world was judged on the
basis of its competitive attractiveness in a simulation of a business transaction.7
The board of future events was determined by a range of factors pertinent to the econom
ic imaginary of the mid 1960s and early 1970s, including a rise in automation, a more ef
fective UN system, the rate of private investment abroad, the doubling of private per
capita income, the invention of ultralight metal substitutes, the development of ocean
mining, the invention of antigravity machines, and the exploitation of oceanic continental
shelves for mineral ores. The game was developed for the (p. 22) American multinational
corporation Kaiser Aluminum, a central player on Cold War commodity markets as one of
the world’s largest purchasers of aluminum bauxite.8 In the mid 1960s, Kaiser Aluminum,
not unlike other multinational corporations such as, most famously, Royal Dutch Shell
(see Williams, in this volume), began developing new forms of strategic management that
were intended to increase the quality of strategic decision-making.9
Strategic decision-making, or ‘decision-making under conditions of uncertainty’, had been

developed during the Second World War in forms of operations research and applied
mathematics.10 Uncertainty is arguably one of the least problematized, most taken for
granted notions in the social sciences today, along with its epistemological twins ‘risk’ or,
indeed, ‘future’. In fact, the notion of uncertainty has opened the door for an entire new
field of sociological reasoning, much of which has drawn on Frank Knight’s notion of the
Page 3 of 17
way that strategic actors seek to shift endemic uncertainty into controllable forms of
risk.11 In the light of the standing of the concept in contemporary social theory, it makes
sense to reflect on its historical meanings. So what did it mean? During the war, to make
decisions under conditions of uncertainty referred to concrete military problems, such as,
for instance, the distribution of incoming enemy air fire.12 As military technologies devel
oped and became applied also to problems of civilian decision-making in the 1950s and
1960s, the notion of uncertainty changed meaning to denote specific social and political
problems, and in particular those of value change in affluent industrial democracies.
When scenarios began to be used on a grand scale by both public and private entities in
the mid to late 1960s, uncertainty was perceived as a specific phenomenon marked by im
pressions of a volatile world situation marked by rejections of the present world order,
and by new forms of global interdependence and value revolutions in the Western as well
as in the developing world.13 As both Western populations and emerging publics in the
global South expressed disgruntlement and (p. 23) dissatisfaction with the content and
speed of development and the allocation of world resources, the stability of world mar
kets was threatened. The shift in forms of planning from linear tools, such as forecasts, to
methods which projected a plurality of futures, such as scenarios, in the 1960s and 1970s
can be explained with reference to this impression that there were, in fact, plural worlds
opening up. In the literature around scenarios, the notion of plurality has been taken to
refer to new forms of creativity in the business environment and a consequent rejection of
linear forms of forecasting and planning.14 But it referred also, sometimes explicitly and
many times implicitly, to the fact that the hegemony of one (Western) world was increas
ingly under threat and to the fear that in the wake of a demise of this one world a plurali
ty of unknown worlds might follow. 1960s and 1970s scenarios were concentrated images
of the possible worlds that might follow on from a demise of a Western-dominated world
order.
After 1975, scenarios would be used directly to depict the possible futures of a new
‘world order’ in which the ‘third world’ reclaimed for the first time in history the right to
reject the future images of the industrialized north and pursue other images of the future,
to do with the return of forms of traditionalism and nationalism and the rejection of colo
nialism. The notion of the third world was coined by a French demographer, Alfred Sauvy,
who was himself interested in forms of future research and so-called prospective reason
ing in 1950s France. The consultants who developed scenario planning in Europe in the
1970s, for instance Pierre Wack or the OECD consultant Jacques Lesourne, both French
engineers, were knowledgeable about prospective thinking and merged it with the sce
narios as developed by Herman Kahn. Key to both of their arguments was that futures
were not predetermined but open and plural—an argument that could in its specific con
text, however, be purposefully used to downplay both ecological notions of a world with
given boundaries, and arguments about a new world model of development.15
The concern in the activity of prediction with world order and developments in the inter
national system was not at all new by the 1960s and 1970s; on the contrary, contempo
rary forms of prediction grew arguably out of attempts, in the direct post-war period, to
understand the future development of the international system and emerging world
Page 4 of 17
order.16 These ambitions were embedded in predictive technologies and artefacts such as
scenarios or the Future game.
This helps us understand that the Future game, designed as an innocent gadget and later
trademarked as a commercial game, was perhaps not such an innocent thing at all, but
rather a kind of concentrate of powered futures, the influence of (p. 24) which went well
beyond the power of the individual actors that had created it. The literature around antic
ipation, uncertainty, scenarios, and foresight is heavily marked by a kind of littérature
grise in which the inventors of futures—the scenario makers, foresight crafters, predic
tors, and futurists themselves—define what future research is about, usually with general
references to its beneficial effects on the management of ‘uncertainty’. We don’t need to
revisit the notion of uncertainty here, but from the perspective that I have implied, we
might understand the explosion in anticipatory activities and futures creation in the last
decades as a reflection of the fact that social, economic, and cultural development appear
once again difficult to control, and that unimagined and deeply unpredictable worlds have
opened up in a wide range of fields, ranging from financial futures to social and environ
mental ones. It is, in this context, not surprising that forms of anticipation are a booming
industry yet again. In the littérature grise around futures studies, however, scenarios and
forecasts tend to be praised as ingenious epistemological devices that can somehow help
actors, ranging from nation states to world corporations to concerned citizens, to find
forms of foreknowledge of the ephemeral future and think creatively or, as it were, ‘out
side of the box’, about the plurality of choices open to them. The future, it is said, is open,
an empty canvas on which we can project new hopes and desires. It is also frequently
said that it is plural, and that future visions reflect the necessary creativity and complexi
ty of social life.17 Oftentimes this is, as R. John Williams, Jacob Ward, and Arjun Appadu
rai point out in this volume, a language of creativity that is directly connected to corpo
rate visions of social life and to visions of the future embodied in pervasive management
ideologies.
Open or Closed Futures

‘Open’, from this perspective, does not seem like the most accurate term. This chapter
proposes that, in actual fact, the future is not open, but rather a terrain to a large extent
already made, marked by various claims to foreclosure and only rarely in any real way in
fluentiable and remakeable through our individual or collective efforts. This is not intend
ed as a deterministic or dystopian standpoint. Rather, it seems important to recognize
that the future is a field of action, a terrain onto which many of our forms of action actual
ly stretch out and on which they leave both intentions and consequences that have real
effects over time. Barbara Adam proposes that the future is marked by our timeprint, the
sum of all our speculation, quantification, exploitation, and prospection into future time.18
I would add to this that not only do (p. 25) all actions (and inactions) have consequences
over time, but some forms of action also consciously aim to chart, prospect, or claim the
future. They do so with a range of predictive devices at hand. It seems reasonable to
think that these devices have some form of influence on coming time, although it is noto
Page 5 of 17
riously difficult to point to exactly what. Who can say that because a scenario was writ
ten, something happened? But on the other hand, who can think that the huge efforts that
go into futures-making in the contemporary world are merely speculative or symbolic?
Foresight and scenario exercises are used today at the very highest levels of world gover
nance, from the UN system to the corridors of Davos.19 The metaphors used here, which
draw on references to acts of prospection of minerals, or indeed to colonial processes of
claims-making and enclosure, are suitable because they bring our attention to the role
that the future seems to hold in the historical imaginaries of Western capitalism. The
modern history of prediction is arguably precisely about its role to act as a form of fore
closure and prospection—a closing of the plural field of the future and a reduction of un
certainty, so that forms of action can be taken on the future and the future integrated into
modernistic dreams of colonization and control.20
The principle that the future is open is, in history, a dangerous, liminal, and exceptional
one. Most accounts of future history emphasize the Enlightenment, the period of econom
ic and technological acceleration, as the period when futures became open, as change be
came a manmade horizon, and time a historical construct. When historians follow, in this
manner, the goalposts set out by German Begriffsgeschichte, they lose sight of the link
between prediction and power. Reinhart Koselleck, in one of his key texts, written for the
journal Economy and Society, which first translated one of his seminal essays in
Zeitschichten in 1982, wrote of prediction that it ‘produces the time within which and out
of which it weaves’.21 As such, prediction was power over social and historical time. Sci
entific prediction, emanating from the modern social sciences, replaced religious concep
tions of telos and religious order with new and secular understandings of the order of
events. Through processes of rational foresight, futures were, once again, made probable
and knowable, and forms of order were restored. A power over the future grounded in
theological reasoning had been replaced by future power grounded in the Absolute State;
states that were, of course, also the multinational banks and corporations of their era. For
Koselleck, then, the scientification and rationalization of the future of which so much has
been made was profoundly about replacing one form of power with another, and impor
tantly, he describes this as the ‘closing’ of a dangerously open future.22
A different element in Koselleck’s argument has gained less traction, namely his
(p. 26)
idea that it was through the modern notion of the future that the world became an or
dered entity in which the Western world was identified as the locus of progress, and other
global parts were projected as falling behind on the axis of history.23 The anthropologist
Johannes Fabian, in his 1983 book Time and the Other, stressed that time is one of the es
sential principles of ordering in a global space that is structured not only around spatial
conceptions but also according to an imaginary axis of time.24 As time becomes a raster
for seeing the world, forms of prediction became, it can be argued, highly concrete forms
of intervention into global time and space. The economic historian Vanessa Ogle has
pointed out that time, time-making, and the measurement and standardization of time
had deeply imperial functions, holding together markets over large spaces, subjecting
labour forces to factory processes, and establishing central rule over the periphery. Time
was, in other words, both an object of colonization and the instrument for important
Page 6 of 17
forms of claims-making into distant space and time.25 Timothy Mitchell and James Scott,
likewise, see the charting of territory—which is not a mere spatial but also a deeply tem
poral function—as the foundation of government and governmental power, and as the ba
sis of control over future territory.26 Such charting takes place, for instance, through
maps. Scenarios can be likened to such maps, only they are maps of time. As such, they
are also what Michel Foucault referred to as sites of calculation and saw as concentrated
embodiments of governmental rationality.27
It is noteworthy from this perspective that not more substantial scholarly work has been
devoted to the geopolitical, social, and economic history of forms of prediction, and to the
role of prediction as a central form of world-ordering in the contemporary. Scenarios are
a telling example. When Royal Dutch Shell began using the scenario method in 1967 and
imported it from Kahn’s package of corporate scenarios at the Hudson Institute, the sce
nario method was, on the surface, a communicative device, an experiment of the Cold
War imagination.28 While Kahn’s Thermonuclear War and Megadeath scenarios have been
understood as iconic forms of Cold War culture in their representations of an apocalyptic
future, what was arguably more important about the scenario method was the discovery
that it could (p. 27) be used to draw up images of desired and undesirable future worlds,
and that these could then, as literary and narrative devices, be spread and diffused in an
effort to work on the collective human imagination. It matters, then, who the collective
was. The question of the audience was crucial to the scenario method as it spread from
Hudson on—so crucial that an article in Life magazine in 1968 wrote of Kahn that his
power depended entirely on his capacity to transfix the audience.29 In the years follow
ing, scenario tools spread from the domestic American context into the world, carried by
large corporations. An audience of a terrified American public thus changed into a pro
jected, imagined, global audience in the managers and strategists of global affairs.
Kahn himself had in mind a very specific target audience for the scenarios—the people
who make decisions, planners and strategists in political organizations, and the managers
and business leaders of the global corporation. American historiography ignores the fact
that the so-called prospective method, a way of thinking through possible consequences
and outcomes of action that prefigured the scenario method, had first been used by
French consultants, planners, and business leaders. When Wack brought the scenario tool
to Shell, he had already experimented with prospective analysis in the domestic context
in France, where he (among other planners such as the architect of the EURATOM pro
gramme, Louise Armand) saw it as a way of planning for a French energy market, which
was still in the 1960s heavily nationally protected but exposed to pressures of liberaliza
tion by the emerging European Economic Area.30 It was after scenarios in the French
context had shown that it would become impossible to protect energy markets on the na
tional level that Wack moved the scenario tool to Shell and to global oil markets. In the
late 1960s, it was already clear to Shell consultants that the oil market was shifting from
a buyer’s to a seller’s market, and that key countries in the third world were in the
process of gaining a significant leverage on the Western world. No longer could formerly
Page 7 of 17
imperial powers dictate the price and the rate of exploitation on oil, as the nationalization
of Anglo-Iranian Oil in the mid 1950s had already made clear.31
Wack’s two retrospective articles on Shell’s use of scenarios in the Harvard Business Re
view (articles that became icons of the management literature) contained a clear descrip
tion of how Shell had managed to break with its previous emphasis on linear forecasting
of oil prices. In the last years of the 1960s, Shell began complementing its previous so-
called unified planning machinery (which planned the movement of oil from the ground,
to the tanker, to the refinery, the gas station, and the consumer in a linear manner) in or
der to resort instead to experimental studies with horizon planning of five- to six-year pe
riods. One of these (p. 28) studies showed that there might be large disruptions in the oil
market, and that oil companies might appear as old ‘dinosaurs’ the day mere expansion of
oil supply was no longer possible. Experiments with horizon planning went on to sort be
tween ‘predetermined elements’—such as who held large oil reserves and who did not—
and ‘uncertainties’—such as, for instance, political events having an impact on prices, in
given scenarios, taken from Hudson. The scenarios conducted in 1971 and 1972 were in
strumental to the Western world’s discovery, not only of the fact that in a not distant fu
ture, the third world would be able to act as a collective agent against Western interests,
but also that as a collective agent, the third world had interior fractions that could be
strategically exploited. The 1971 scenarios contained four different scenarios: a surprise-
free one, a scenario in which the renegotiation of the Tehran agreements lead to a dou
bling of national tax on buying oil companies, a low growth scenario with low oil demand,
and a scenario where coal and nuclear energy replaced oil. In 1972, the Shell scenarios
predicted the eventual breakdown of an OPEC-style coalition over differences in oil re
serves and absorptive capacity between oil-producing countries.32
Wack’s two articles in the Harvard Business Review were explicit on the purpose of the
scenario tool. The purpose of scenarios was to shape a global corporate mentality and a
shared vision of the future of the corporation between managers across its many divisions
and entities. Such a shared vision of coming challenges and how they could be met would
help the organization reduce uncertainty and find strategic responses. As argued by
Wack, if managers could be pushed to understand the oil market as a system, driven by
various system logics (determined by the relationship between the consuming Western
world and the producing countries of the Middle East), then they could also be led to un
derstand the overall direction of this system and identify future strategic points. In addi
tion, Wack argued, each corporation (for instance Shell as opposed to the Japanese steel
maker Nippon Steel) was a ‘microcosm’ of corporate world views, informing decision-
making and strategic action. To create successful action for the future hence hinged on
the capacity to reshape the image of the future of the corporation and influence the men
tal images of managers—‘lead these to the water’ so that they would identify the relevant
scenario and the logical course of action.33
This need for a shared image of the future was partly explained by the business organiza
tion itself. The modern multinational corporation, which was born first in the East India
Company but born again in the 1950s and 1960s in the Cold War struggle over natural re
Page 8 of 17
sources, was, not unlike the global empire, a thoroughly (p. 29) decentralized structure.
Like Shell, it had main offices and regional offices, entities and sub-entities, branches and
localities, and a need therefore to meet problems of interdependence with market move
ments over large territories in global flux. As public organizations also discovered prob
lems of global interdependence and shared challenges in the 1960s and 1970s, this ex
plains the important forms of exchange between public planning bodies and multinational
corporations around future research. In the 1960s and 1970s, methods such as forecasts
and scenarios circulated between public planning entities and corporate decision rooms,
oftentimes through the same consultants, many of them similar in background and career
to Wack or Kahn (meaning they were engineers, economists, or mathematicians, and in
terested in forms of modelling, feedback problems, decision theory, and operations re
search). Creating a shared image of the future was a solution to a problem having to do
with experiences of feedback effects and unpredictable reactions across large territories,
and with the wish to train a new instinct in how to handle such forms of unpredictability
by the development of a certain kind of future-oriented rationality in decision makers.34
From Predictable to Desirable Futures

The examples of scenarios and strategy games shows that, by the mid 1960s, predictive
artefacts were drawn into a geopolitical struggle over global markets, and over a Fordist
and essentially colonial world order faced with forms of disruption. At Christmas in 1966,
the Futures boardgame was sent out to 160 corporate managers in the US. These includ
ed the managers of Kaiser Aluminum itself as well as managers of other large corpora
tions. It should be explained that the boardgame was not the only artefact of its kind: a
report written by the forecaster Erich Jantsch in 1968 describes several strategy games
created by, or for, American corporations, all of them with the common denominator of
their interest in the Cold War struggle and their central location in direct proximity with
the so-called military industrial establishment. These included the missile manufacturer
Lockheed, General Motors, the Bell telephone company, and Xerox. These companies had,
in the 1960s, become increasingly interested in so-called technological forecasting.
Technological forecasting became something of a craze after the publication of the Imper
ial College London professor Denis Gabor’s book Inventing the Future in 1964. It
stemmed from ballistic research, military logistics, and advancement in mathematical log
ic in the late 1950s and early 1960s. A direct consequence of so-called operations re
search, technological forecasting put forward that goals, objectives, and (p. 30) decisions
could be set out in a virtual action field, in which future consequences of present action
could be visualized and hence evaluated beforehand. These consequences were given the
visual form of decision trees that had branch points: graphic illustrations of future devel
opments in which decisions led, at key points, to depictions of sets of possible conse
quences, as the branches stretching out from a tree. At each point of decision, there were
new possibilities, and if a desired goal—for instance, a necessary technological innovation
or breakthrough—could be correctly foreseen, then the necessary investments and deci
Page 9 of 17
sions leading up to this technological future could also be anticipated and defined. Fu
tures thus became controllable, at least within the space of the chart.35
Branch points was a term coming from stochastic reasoning, which through forms of fore
casting would eventually be transposed to not only technological but also political and so
cial systems. In the latter, branch points denoted points of decision-making that could
change the social structure of a nation or the character of its polity, towards what fore
casters argued were desirable futures of ‘the system’. Forecasts were thus much more
than virtual charts of a possible field of action; they were visions of the social and politi
cal world. Most of them were also utterly technocratic products in which the choice of de
sirable future was a problem of rational choice, logistics, and engineering in an expert-led
search for an ideal world.
Other chapters in this volume deal with what they propose to be a shift from singularity
to plurality in futures-thinking in the 1960s and 1970s. Several chapters also point to the
collusion between forms of futurism and rational choice theory, surveillance, and a con
cern with order. I want to suggest here that this concern with order did not have directly
to do with the problem of predictability, but rather with the problem of desirability. Pre
diction was only indirectly or even unwillingly about the actual probability of future oc
currences, but it was directly a discussion about how to reach somehow substantiated
judgements on the desirability of possible futures. The problem of future plurality was
here as often a threat as much as a promise.
To make judgements on the desirability of future worlds translates into a problem of mak
ing judgements on what would be good and bad world developments. Scenarios, games,
and models were not predominantly exercises or rehearsals of what might happen, but a
kind of learning device or sorting mechanism for the problem of desirability. By depicting
a set of desirable and non-desirable future states, they outlined arguments and reflec
tions on how a state deemed as undesirable could be pushed towards a state of desirabili
ty. R. John Williams, in a recent article and a forthcoming book (see Williams, in this vol
ume), describes how Kahn arrived at the scenario method from his mathematical experi
ments with stochastic reasoning.36 These experiments were intended to find regularities
in (p. 31) outcome in large numbers. At some point, Kahn was frustrated by a tiring exer
cise, and began thinking of other ways of conjuring outcomes that did not reflect a small
number of probabilities, but rather possible openings of multiple possibilities. This deci
sive move in predictive experimentation opened up the problem of desirability. Scenarios,
based on Hollywood scripting techniques, and drawing not on mathematical logics but on
intuition and narration, became Kahn’s well-known solution to the problem of how to
choose between good and bad futures. The scenario method could be used in order to
give visibility to different possible future worlds (made up of consequences of decisions in
the present) so that a form of anticipatory evaluation could be performed. As such, the
scenarios were never intended to be mere descriptive accounts of future events, but from
the outset they were designed to be guides for action by probing, rehearsing, or indeed
Page 10 of 17
prospecting the future.37 The point of this prospection was to allow for a form of rational
choice between a bad, good, or better future world.
Kahn has been depicted by some authors as an oracle, a mystic, or even a utopian, but it
should be pointed out that he was part and parcel of the discussions of the meaning of hu
man rationality that at this time were taking place at his home institution, the research
and development think tank of the US Air Force (RAND).38 In these discussions, rationali
ty was understood as something that could be learnt, for instance through rehearsal of
games and scenarios from the ‘worst’ to the ‘good’ or ‘optimal’ outcome. Through such
rehearsals, the future was, as Grégoire Mallard and Andrew Lakoff have proposed, inte
grated into the present. That the central problem of thinking about the future was not to
predict it, but to transform it into a normative problem of choosing a course of action,
was a problem thrown up by early experimentation with prediction at RAND. Predictive
experiments at RAND beginning already in 1945 immediately ran into problems that had
to do with the problem of desirability as well as with the problem of the self-fulfilling
prophecy. Both problems seemed to run counter to established notions of objectivity in
scientific observation.
Objectivity was a problem centrally debated in physics before the war, including by many
of the refugee scholars and émigrés who found themselves amongst other places at
RAND, and predictive experimentation was engulfed in debates on its epistemological sta
tus and truthfulness. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have shown from the history of
science that objectivity has never been a self-evident property of science nor a claimed
virtue of scientists; rather, historic notions of objectivity have been based on things as dif
ferent as the virtue of scientists, trained judgement, and representation of nature-like
phenomena in art, imagination, and narration.39 Karl Popper’s 1953 idea of objectivity as
dependent on the verification (p. 32) or falsification of causal statements was a simplifica
tion of much more complex debates in the history of science. A number of the scientists at
RAND who after 1945 began experimenting with prediction had witnessed the turn to to
talitarian regimes in Eastern Europe. Objectivity was not, to them, a simple principle, be
cause they had witnessed the collusion between scientific principles and regime control.
Their turn inward to science itself, including to rationality assumptions and calls to pre
diction, was to an important extent a reaction to this, as they distrusted the political
sphere and decision-making by the masses. Meanwhile, they saw science as making a
necessary contribution to the principle of freedom.40
In 1954, the epistemologist Michael Polanyi insisted that the principle of liberty demand
ed a constant attention and affirmation of normative principles of good and bad. In addi
tion, Polanyi argued, objectivity was not an internal property of science, but a constituted
effect of science and the intersubjective judgements of scientists. Scientific truth oc
curred in a free community of scientists, united in their commitment to the normative ide
al of the free society, and the point of prediction was not to verify possible future occur
rences as to an actual outside happening, but to contribute to a reflection on desirable so
cial ideals and above all the principle of freedom.41
Page 11 of 17
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No. 0013: De inbraak in den slaapwagen
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Title: Lord Lister No. 0013: De inbraak in den slaapwagen
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Release date: May 28, 2022 [eBook #68190]
Language: Dutch
Original publication: Netherlands: Roman- Boek- en

Kunsthandel, 1910
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LORD LISTER

NO. 0013: DE INBRAAK IN DEN SLAAPWAGEN ***
[Inhoud]
[1]
[Inhoud]
☞ Elke aflevering bevat een volledig verhaal. ☜

UITGAVE VAN DEN „ROMAN-BOEKHANDEL VOORHEEN A. EICHLER”, SINGEL
236,—AMSTERDAM.
[Inhoud]
DE INBRAAK IN DEN SLAAP-COUPE.
EERSTE HOOFDSTUK. 1
OP LEVEN EN DOOD.
Door de kruinen der aloude boomen van het Bois de Boulogne te

Parijs schudde de herfstwind met boozen ruk de bladeren, die naar
beneden dwarrelden en zich vormden tot een reuzentapijt, dat door
de ondergaande zon met haar valen schemer werd belicht.
Op een afgelegen plek van het bosch stonden drie mannen, in lange
reisjassen gekleed, die vol verwachting het smalle pad langs keken,
dat naar den straatweg leidde.
Een van het drietal wendde zich af met zwijgend gebaar en nam een
mes uit een leeren taschje, dat hij op een boomstronk had
neergelegd. Daarop nam hij nog eenige medische instrumenten en
een paar fleschjes met geneesmiddelen uit het taschje en begon toen
langzaam en zorgvuldig een rol dermatolgaas op te rollen.
„De dokter maakt zich al klaar voor zijn werk,” sprak een der andere
heeren, „wie weet, voor wien hij de verbandmiddelen heeft uitgepakt,
graaf Epernay?”
De toegesprokene, een jongeman van onberispelijke gestalte, knikte

toestemmend met het hoofd.
„Waarde markies,” zei hij toen tot zijn vriend, die minstens tien jaar
ouder was dan hij en nog de fiere houding en de gebruinde
gelaatstrekken van een officier bezat, „ik ben er nog zoozeer niet van
overtuigd, dat het duel niet zal doorgaan! De gevolgen ervan zijn niet
te overzien, vooral niet voor u, waarde markies, daar ge [2]eerst sinds
drie maanden met de mooiste vrouw van Parijs getrouwd zijt, die, als
u vandaag een ongeluk mocht overkomen, zeker ontroostbaar zou
zijn!”
Markies Raoul de Frontignac, aldus heette de Fransche officier, die
slechts voor dezen tocht zijn uniform had afgelegd, schrikte zichtbaar
en fluisterde toen met lichtelijk bewogen stem:
„Mijn lieve Adrienne, mijn mooie, jonge vrouw! Ja, ge hebt gelijk,
graaf, voor haar zou het een zware slag zijn, als de kogel van mijn
tegenstander mij van het leven beroofde!
„Maar juist om haar wil moet deze zaak tot de uiterste consequentie
worden doorgevoerd. Haar eer staat op het spel en daarmee is ook
de mijne gemoeid.
„Wat tusschen mij en lord Lister is voorgevallen, is slechts op de

pistool uit te vechten. De hoon, door hem mij aangedaan, kan slechts
door bloed worden uitgewischt!”
De jonge graaf schudde verwonderd het hoofd.
„Sta mij toe, markies,” sprak hij, „over een aangelegenheid te

spreken, die zelfs voor mij, uw secondant, nog een raadsel is!
„Dat het bij dit duel om een dame gaat, is mij heel duidelijk, maar het
is mij onverklaarbaar, hoe gij beide, markies de Frontignac en lord
Edward Lister tot zulk een oneenigheid zijt gekomen.
„Want, nietwaar, lord Lister was immers uw vriend?”
„Mijn beste vriend,” bevestigde de markies met bitterheid in zijn stem;

„ik heb lord Lister geëerd als een volmaakt gentleman, als een ideaal
vriend en nooit, nóóit zou ik hebben geloofd, dat hij zoo zou kunnen
treffen als dat geschied is! Maar wat wilt ge, beste vriend, het is een
oude geschiedenis. Als twee vrienden dezelfde vrouw liefhebben,
worden zij maar al te dikwijls verbitterde vijanden! Maar, inderdaad,
lord Lister had reeds hier moeten zijn. Hoe laat is het al? Vijf minuten
voor zes!”
Met een ongeduldige beweging had markies Raoul de Frontignac zijn
kostbaar horloge voor den dag gehaald.
„Mijn horloge gaat toch goed?” vroeg hij toen.
„Zeker!” antwoordde de secondant, „lord Lister heeft nog vijf minuten

tijd, voordat hij hier moet zijn!
„Maar wij zullen hem toch niets kunnen verwijten, als hij een kwartier
of een half uur later komt. Hij is vanmorgen eerst van Newhaven
vertrokken, het schip heeft acht uren noodig om, bij goed weer, het
Kanaal over te steken.
„Om één uur ongeveer kan hij in Havre zijn; de sneltrein naar Parijs
vertrekt om twee uur! Dan kan hij eerst om half vijf aan het station zijn
en als hij dan.…”
„Een automobiel,” viel de markies in, „er stappen twee heeren uit. Het
is lord Lister met zijn secondant. Stil, daar is hij!”
Van achter de boomen trad een jongeman van omstreeks

dertigjarigen leeftijd te voorschijn. Hij droeg een gekleede jas met wit
vest, sierlijke lakschoenen aan de smalle, aristocratische voeten, een
cylinderhoed en een witte chrysanth in het knoopsgat en het geheel
gaf hem het voorkomen, alsof hij zoo juist van de een of andere
feestelijkheid was teruggekomen.
Terwijl markies de Frontignac eenige schreden achteruit trad,

naderde graaf Epernay den jongen Engelschman en reikte hem de
hand.
„Ge zijt op uw tijd, lord Lister!” sprak hij, „het is één minuut vóór
zessen!”
„Dan ben ik nog een minuut te vroeg gekomen,” antwoordde de lord,
„ik zal den volgenden keer nog stipter zijn! [3]
„Mag ik u intusschen mijn secondant voorstellen, baron Sidny Bruce!”
De Fransche graaf en de Engelsche baron gaven elkaar de hand en

begonnen toen samen over de voorschriften van het duel te
onderhandelen.
„Wij hebben niet meer veel af te spreken,” fluisterde de graaf.
„Driemaal worden de kogels gewisseld, den eersten keer op een

afstand van twintig pas; dan tien pas voorwaarts en lossen en ten
slotte op vijf pas afstands. In het laatste geval is de dood van een der
duellisten onvermijdelijk!”
„Dat denk ik ook,” antwoordde de baron met de koelbloedigheid van

een Engelschman.
„Gij hebt ook pistolen meegebracht,” vervolgde graaf Epernay, „hier

zijn onze wapens. Wij zullen er om loten, wiens wapens gebruikt
zullen worden.”
„Dat is overbodig,” sprak baron Sidny Bruce, „lord Lister heeft mij
uitdrukkelijk verklaard, dat hij alleen de wapens van den markies
wenscht te gebruiken!”
„Uitstekend! Maar laat ons toch allereerst trachten dit afschuwelijke

duel te verhinderen!”
„Lord Lister heeft mij reeds verklaard dat hij bereid is, de zaak in der
minne te schikken, maar hij twijfelt eraan, of de markies daarvoor te
vinden is!”
„Ge kunt het echter in ieder geval probeeren!”

„Heeren!” begon graaf Epernay met luider stemme tot de beide
tegenpartijen, „het is onze plicht, u er opmerkzaam op te maken, dat
dit duel bloedige en vreeselijke gevolgen kan hebben!
„Daar het bekend is, dat gij vroeger goede vrienden waart, denken
wij, dat een wederzijdsche verklaring— —”
„Geen sprake van”, viel markies de Frontignac met scherpe stem in,
„er zijn beleedigingen, waarvoor geen excuus is!”
Lord Lister hoorde deze woorden aan met een groote

onverschilligheid op zijn knap gelaat.
Toen vroeg hij baron Bruce een lucifer en stak een sigaret aan.
„Kijk eens, Bruce”, sprak de gentleman toen tot den Engelschman, „ik
heb dit keer zeven ringen geblazen. Totnogtoe kon ik het nooit verder
dan tot zes brengen. Hoe vind je dat kunststukje?”
„Very fine”, antwoordde baron Bruce glimlachend.
In hetzelfde oogenblik naderde graaf Epernay en hield lord Edward

Lister het geopende kistje voor, waarin de met zilver beslagen
pistolen op het zachte fluweel lagen.
De lord nam een der wapens en weldra had ook markies De

Frontignac zich van een wapen voorzien.
Twintig schreden werden afgemeten, de duellisten gingen staan.
Markies De Frontignac had zijn overjas uitgetrokken op voorbeeld

van lord Lister, die zijn jas had uitgedaan en nu in zijn sneeuwwitte
hemdsmouwen stond.
„Mylord”, sprak graaf Epernay, „gij hebt als gedaagde het eerste
schot. Ik tel één, twee, drie!”
„Spinnen in den morgen baren veel zorgen!” mompelde lord Lister,
„en wijl die spin daar boven in den ouden lindeboom mij al lang
verveelde, zal ik ze maar naar de andere wereld helpen!”
Een schot kraakte en hoog in de linde was het spinneweb

verscheurd.
„Wees zoo vriendelijk om eens even te bukken, baron”, sprak de

schutter op spottenden toon, „de spin ligt morsdood aan uw voeten!”
„Ik geloof niet, dat wij hier zijn gekomen om grapjes te maken”, stoof
markies De Frontignac toornig op, „ik wensch u erop te wijzen, dat ik
mijn kogel [4]zóó zal afschieten, dat hij het web van uw leven totaal
verscheurt!”
De markies vuurde.
Zijn kogel floot langs lord Listers hoofd en nam een paar van zijn
donkere haren mee.
„Niet slecht!” meende de Engelschman, „maar ik zie, dat het u ernst

is, Voilà! Ge zult hem hebben! Vlak onder den derden knoop van uw
vest!”
„De heeren kunnen tien pas naderen!” zei graaf Epernay.
Maar lord Lister antwoordde:
„Niet noodig!”
En in hetzelfde oogenblik, dat de graaf tot drie telde, draaide lord

Lister zich bliksemsnel om en schoot onder zijn linker schouderoksel
door.
Een kreet—een doffe slag—markies De Frontignac lag bloedend op

den grond.
Allen snelden op den getroffene toe.
„Is het doodelijk, dokter?” vroeg lord Lister zacht.
„Verloren!” sprak de dokter toonloos, „wij kunnen hem niet eens naar
zijn rijtuig brengen, over een kwartier is alles voorbij!”
„Laat mij dan met hem alleen. Hij mag niet sterven, zonder mij nog
eens de hand te hebben gedrukt
„Frontignac, beste vriend, herken je me? Waarom heb je mij

gedwongen, een einde te maken aan je leven, dat mij zoo dierbaar
was?”
De zwaargewonde opende wijd de oogen en de blik, waarmee hij lord

Lister aankeek, gloeide van onverzoenlijken haat
„Ik wilde je bewaren voor een groot ongeluk”, vervolgde lord Lister,
terwijl hij zich diep over den stervende heenboog, „ik zweer je, dat ik
niets deed dan een vriendschapsdienst, toen ik.…..”
Daar verstomden plotseling de woorden op de lippen van den

spreker, hij kromp ineen en zijn oogen keken vol doodelijke
ontsteltenis naar den stervende.
Deze had hem zachtjes, héél zachtjes een woord, een enkel woord in
het oor gefluisterd en daardoor was zijn vijand al het bloed uit de
wangen geweken.
Dit eene woord, dat de overwonnene den overwinnaar had

toegefluisterd en dat dezen zoo vreeselijk had getroffen luidde:
„Raffles!” [5]
Wij maken onze lezers er opmerkzaam op, dat deze bijzonder belangwekkende
1
geschiedenis dateert uit den tijd, toen de Engelsche politie nog niet wist, dat lord
Lister, de zeer geziene aristocraat, dezelfde was als Raffles—de meesterdief.
Destijds was hij inderdaad nog „De groote Onbekende”. ↑
[Inhoud]
TWEEDE HOOFDSTUK.
DE BEKENTENIS VAN DEN STERVENDE.
„Ik smeek u, Heeren, laat mij eenige oogenblikken met den markies
alleen, wij willen afscheid van elkander nemen. Ik heb hem onder vier
oogen nog een laatste mededeeling te doen!”
Op heeschen toon kwamen deze woorden den Engelschman over de

lippen, maar in het volgende oogenblik had hij ook volkomen alle
tegenwoordigheid van geest terug gekregen.
Graaf Epernay, de Engelsche baron en de dokter verwijderden zich

nu.
De Engelschman stond onbewegelijk, totdat hij er zich van overtuigd

had, dat de drie mannen buiten het gehoor waren.
Toen boog hij zich opnieuw over den gewonde en fluisterde:
„Ongelukkige, kent ge mijn geheim?”
„Ik ken het, lord Lister!” antwoordde de markies met matte stem, „ik,
je beste vriend, wist al sinds langen tijd, dat jij John C. Raffles bent,
die door Scotland Yard al sinds zoo langen tijd wordt gezocht en op
wiens hoofd een prijs van duizend pond sterling is gesteld.”
„Maar waarom heb je mij dan niet verraden?”
„Ik zweeg, omdat ik van je hield, maar nu ik je haat, zal ik ook

spreken!”
„Je zult daar geen tijd meer voor hebben”, sprak Raffles op somberen
toon, „niet jij zult het de wereld meedeelen, dat lord Lister de groote
onbekende is, die alle detectives in spanning houdt, omdat hij
duizendmaal sluwer en moediger is dan zij allen. Niet gij zult
vertellen, dat lord Lister onder den naam van John C. Raffles bij de
inbrekerswereld bekend is.
„Neen, jij bent ten doode gedoemd, ongelukkige en voordat er een

kwartier verloopen is, zul je voor den rechterstoel van God
verschijnen!”
Een gorgelend geluid ontsnapte de zwaar gewonde borst van den

markies.
„Ik weet, dat je mij maar àl te goed hebt geraakt, lord Lister,”
antwoordde hij, „maar ik heb ervoor gezorgd, dat mijn geheim niet
met mij in het graf gaat!
„Je hebt het heiligste, dat ik bezat, het liefste ter wereld met je
minachting bezoedeld, daarvoor wil ik— —”
„Houd op”, viel lord Lister in, en zijn groote grijze oogen schoten
vonken, „houd op, markies, dit punt verdient opheldering.
„Je hebt mij tot dit duel gedwongen.
„Ik kon het niet weigeren. Dat was ik aan mijn eed als edelman
verplicht.
„Maar ik zweer je thans nog eens, nu je de dood [6]zoo nabij is, dat ik
de waarheid sprak, toen ik je op dien avond van het bal toevoegde:
„Als je Adrienne de Malmaison tot je vrouw maakt, dan geef je je

edelen naam aan een eerlooze avonturierster, aan een deerne; en je
voorvaderen zullen uit hun graven opstaan om je te straffen voor die
snoode daad!”
Het gelaat van den markies was reeds vaalgrauw geworden.

Maar nog eens spande hij alle krachten in.
„Ja, die woorden heb je mij toegevoegd, lord Lister.
„En, zooals ik zei: deze minachting kost jou of mij het leven, wij
strijden op leven en dood!”
„Je ziet, beste vriend, dat het jou het leven moet kosten.
„Maar voordat je heengaat, zal ik je toch van mijn onschuld

overtuigen!
„Zie je dezen brief?
„’t Is Adrienne’s handschrift, zooals je ziet en als je nog lezen kunt,

arme, bedrogen kerel, dan zul je bemerken, hoe je geleefd hebt aan
de zijde van een beestachtig wijf.”
Vlug had lord Lister een geel geworden brief uit zijn portefeuille te
voorschijn gehaald.
Hij hield het blad papier voor de oogen van den stervende en deze
las de volgende woorden:
„Dierbaarste lord Lister!
„Ik smeek je, mijn geheim te bewaren. Zoo juist heeft markies Raoul de
Frontignac mij gesmeekt, zijn vrouw te worden. Die arme, goede gek is tot
over de ooren op mij verliefd. Hij is rijk, van voornamen stand, en iemand,
die zich om den vinger laat wikkelen, als een mooie vrouw het er op
aanlegt.
„Ik smeek je, lord, verstoor mijn geluk niet. Denk eens aan de dierbare
woorden van vroeger, die ons vereenigden. Als de markies hoort, dat ik de
dochter van een kaartlegster ben, en dat je mij in een bordeel in Kaïro hebt
gevonden, waar mijn moeder mij heenbracht, toen ik zestien jaar was, dan
is voor mij alles verloren.
„Maar ik weet, dat je een gentleman bent en zoo iemand verraadt geen
vrouw, die hem eens zoo vurig heeft liefgehad.
„Adrienne de Malmaison.”
„Deerne, mooie slang, je hebt mijn leven vergiftigd”, siste de markies

en hij stiet den brief op zij, „om die door en door slechte vrouw ben ik
dus in den dood gegaan! Daarvoor heb ik mijn besten vriend
opgeofferd! Edward, Edward! Kun je mij vergeven?”
De Engelschman greep de beide handen van zijn vriend, die reeds

koud begonnen te worden.
„Of ik je vergeven kan? Maar beste kerel, ik ben het immers, die
vergiffenis moet vragen en niet jij!”
„Jij bent onschuldig, Edward, ik heb je tot dit duel gedwongen. Maar
waarom heb je mij niet eerder gewaarschuwd, dan had ik die feeks
liever geworgd dan dat ik haar mijn naam had gegeven!”
„Ik kòn, ik mocht niet spreken. Ik zou geen edelman geweest zijn, als
ik haar verraden had, want helaas heeft haar schoonheid ook mij vele
jaren geleden betooverd en ik haar zoete gunsten van haar
aangenomen, die verplichten tot zwijgen, zelfs tegenover de beste
vrienden!”
„Ik begrijp je! Ik zou ook niet anders hebben gehandeld!” De

stervende zuchtte zwaar.
„Maar luister nu naar mijn vreeselijke bekentenis, Edward, ook jij bent
verloren—ik heb je in het verderf gestort!”
„Ik vermoed verschrikkelijke dingen”, stiet lord [7]Lister uit,

„ongelukkige, je hebt een vrouw het geheim van mijn leven

Futures Sandra Kemp and Jenny Andersson Full Chapter PDF

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Futures Sandra Kemp And Jenny

The Future of the World: Futurology, Futurists, and the

Thriving Mind Jenny Brockis

The Second Mother Jenny Milchman

The Second Mother Jenny Milchman

Hill, Sandra - Sweeter Savage Love Sandra Hill

The Silk Road: Connecting Histories and Futures Tim

Pineapple Street: A Novel Jenny Jackson

Options, futures, and other derivatives Tenth Edition

(p. iv) Copyright Page

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

© Oxford University Press 2021

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

First Edition published in 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020934982

Printed and bound by

(p. ix) Illustrations

19.2 Advertisement for Microsoft Band, http://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-

(p. xi) Contributors

is Emerita Professor at Cardiff University’s School of Social Sciences and Affiliated

(p. xii) Jenny Andersson

is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University. In his present book

is a designer and researcher based in London, where he is a PhD candidate in the

is a designer, educator, and researcher. He is Associate Professor and Director of the

is Professor of Educational and Social Futures at the University of Bristol and

is Professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University, and Principal of the

PhD is an educator, futures researcher, and psychologist. She is an Adjunct Professor,

is a Research Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz and

Gren Foundation, Australian Research Council, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and

is Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham. He

is Professor of Sociology at the University of Calabria (Italy), where he is also Direc­

is Director of The Ruskin—Library, Museum, and Research Centre. She is Professor in

is a postdoctoral researcher at the London School of Economics, on the Narrative

is Associate Professor of Cultural Sociology (University of Parma, Department of Law,

is the founding director of the Nuclear Knowledges (NK) program at Sciences Po

weapons enterprise or from anti-nuclear activists in order to problematize conflicts of

has an extraordinary appointment as a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Complex

Eglė Rindzevičiūtė is an Associate Professor of Criminology and Sociology at

is a researcher, science debater, futurist, transhumanist, and author. He holds a PhD

is interested in researching human–nature connections. In particular, he focuses on

is a sustainability scientist based at the Centre for Complex Systems in Transition

United Nations-led assessments such as the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Plat­

is Professor of Sociology at Stockholm and Södertörn universities. Her primary re­

is an ecologist, with a research focus on understanding how human changes to the

is Assistant Professor in the History of Information, Computing, and Digitality at

computing, and telecommunications. His co-edited collection Histories of Technology,

Print Publication Date: Feb 2021

Abstract and Keywords

lenging the predominant pessimism of (p. 3) contemporary Marxism (Bloch); identifying

Such discourses on acts of futures-making, oscillating between radical techno-optimism

The Structure of the Book

The final section—Part V, Future Worlds—examines constitutions of futurity as embedded

(2) Archaeologies of the Future, 85.

(9) Donna J. Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in

(17) IPSP report, https://www.ipsp.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IPSP-Executive-

The Future Boardgame: Prediction as Power over Time

Print Publication Date: Feb 2021

Abstract and Keywords

is Professor of Sociology at the University of Calabria (Italy), where he is also Direc

United Nations-led assessments such as the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Plat

is Professor of Sociology at Stockholm and Södertörn universities. Her primary re