Many people write about the future – in all formats and on all topics. But what categories of stories about the future can actually be distinguished between?
Just before going into the answers to this question, one may wonder why this question is important. Well, it is so because the future is unknown, as it has not yet happened. Therefore any writing about the future ventures into things we know less about than today, making it a very complex affair.
Two categories writing about the future can be clearly separated from each other:
- The most obvious is probably fiction writing. Here we find books such as the Hunger Games, and, of course the whole science-fiction genre, with books like 1984 and The War of the Worlds. In these books the author have imagined what a future could look like, to create an interesting setting for a plot, to provoke the reader to think, to surprise etc.
- Less obvious is the non-fiction writing (in this case not to be confused with facts). Here we find research from disciplines of foresight/futurism, and other structures ways of thinking about the future. In these writings the authors use certain tested methods like scenario-building to create possible futures. To tackle the complexity of the future, methods are most often participatory, to have the input of many qualitative opinions and viewpoints and thereby create a collective intelligence, of sorts. From this input the authors then write stories about several alternative plausible futures, to be used for vision-building, strategy development and to promote long-term thinking in society.
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