“‘Life must be lived forward,’ the philosopher Kirkeagaard observes, ‘but can only be understood backward.’ But that understanding should not be treated like an exigent dose of magnesia.”
— Robert Cowley, What If?, 20011
Future Histories of Life, Otherwise is a collection of five creative works that mangle the logics of traditional history writing. Historians sneeze their way through dusty archives, conduct oral histories, and pore over classic texts to weave together plausible stories about the past. We (writing as practitioners!) focus on the human actors whose ideas, relationships, and innovations shaped the great detections and inventions of modern science, from vaccines to synthetic biologies to cosmological beginnings.
The contorted histories of life that follow, however, engender alien possibilities of being and becoming. The results call into question official futures—what professional futurists call assumptive events-to-come. By following unrealized possibilities of the past into undisclosed futures beyond our time horizon, our experiments pose questions about what it means to be human within a vast cosmic web of life, on Earth and perhaps beyond.
Stories about the past are often mistaken as the basis for predictive models of the future: the history of Ford’s assembly line and the Model T presages flying cars; 20th-century quantum mechanics begets instantaneous space travel. But is accuracy of fortune-telling, only gained in hindsight, the point? Are not these models, more importantly, insights into our present desires and hopes for the future?
A 1988 Los Angeles Times contemplated a nuclear family’s daily life in 2013. The Morrow family (an aptronym) interacted with a smart home, a smart car, a robo-pet, clogged highways, a portable computer capable of global communication, panoptic surveillance, exercise in virtual reality, a dire shortage of housing, and work-from-home technology.2 Such predicted phenomena did become facts of our lives a little over a decade ago—but not exactly as the article’s authors had predicted. Indeed, students do learn through “3x5-inch computer ‘smart cards’” but the technology did not, by 2013, need to be plugged into a computer to run off CD-ROMs or laserdiscs (“The entire Library of Congress could fit on one laser disc [sic] 25 years from now.”) That would be a minuscule slice of the internet. On an iPhone. The father, Bill, is a hard-working business executive making deals with Tokyo; Camille is his surgically improved but burdensome mother; Alma is the beleaguered wife who must still manage the household through robots, appeases her mother-in-law and drives a minivan; and Zach is the rebellious son. To our eyes, the Morrow are not so enlightened. Reading the piece in hindsight is like reading an alternative reality; when you squint, the official future from 1988 and the real one in 2013 blur together.
It’s not important that such a future did or did not materialize. Future Histories of Life, Otherwise is unconcerned with the material outcomes of prediction. Rather, we focus on how imagining alternate pasts—contemplating our current moment as an alien future—helps us defamiliarize the historical narratives we take for granted. In this way, Future Histories of Life, Otherwise scaffolds new ways of thinking through what counts as a desirable future.
Future Histories of Life, Otherwise draws inspiration from a variety of future methods. Novelists narrate fantastical futures on fabulated planets, politicians campaign on simulated models, and historians sketch foreclosed counterfactuals. Such tools cultivate spaces of dreaming and wondering to more richly imagine past and future humans. These storytelling tools deepen the practice of historical research that is essential for futures-making. They encourage a fresh look at different narrative instruments to help us better see our present moment.
Science Fictions
This collection draws heavily from literary architectures often found in science fiction, a genre that treats narrative as a form of creative simulation. The worldbuilding process requires rules. Rules structure a story. With certain axiomata in place, the author is free to imagine the ways these elements combine, running the simulation and discovering unexpected outcomes.
After the emergence of a global pandemic in March of 2020, many readers returned to legendary science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler’s Parable series. In the novels, the protagonists must navigate uncertainties in an unraveling world. The disease, climate catastrophe, and extreme wealth disparity Butler described, writing in 1993, resonated with contemporary audiences, many of whom marveled at her uncanny ability to foretell the future they seemed to be living through. But was Butler a prophetess?
Butler’s process was not dictated by fortune-telling but rather keen observation. Even a cursory look through Butler’s archive and personal papers reveals the copious research she conscripted into the story-telling process. Countless newspaper clippings, magazine articles, and scientific papers make up the weighty corpus of research she compiled over her career. In an essay wryly titled “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future,” Butler demystified her future-telling abilities by explaining that all she did was “look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.” The axiomata for the worlds Butler built were based on the conditions she observed. The space in between allowed her to imagine what might come next.
Butler’s work reveals that science fiction is not so different from the practice of history, in which writers synthesize archival material into a compelling narrative. They make choices about which pieces of information should shape a story. In the case of science fiction, these bodies of evidence can be fabricated, but the storytelling process is just as revealing.
Simulations
Like science fiction writing, role-playing is a simulation that probes one’s reality to unspool futures from present clues. Self-defined professional futurists who hail from areas like technology, government, and economics, develop material and virtual simulations. In immersive role-playing, characters must operate within the world’s rules, but their ability to make choices in real-time creates dynamic contingencies. The outcomes, like Butler’s fiction, can feel uncomfortably prescient.
In June 2020, the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) convened heavy-hitters of D.C. politics, journalists, and government officials from across the political spectrum, from neoconservative writer Bill Kristol to John Podesta, former President Bill Clinton’s Chief of Staff. Participants played then-President Trump, then-Vice President Mike Pence, the then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, and others. They gamed out various scenarios about the results of the upcoming November election. One revelation was that President Trump could, very plausibly, refuse to leave office and subvert the democratic exchange of power. TIP assessed that “President Trump is likely to contest the result by both legal and extra-legal means, in an attempt to hold onto power.”3
Infamously, Trump did just that. “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” he instructed Georgia’s top election official on January 2nd, 2021. Trump exhorted Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election results in the Senate. His undermining of the peaceful transfer of power culminated in the January 6th insurrection—an event that made TIP’s simulation seem like a prophecy to the hysterical Right.4 As the 2024 presidential election looms, Trump’s cronies continue to miscast TIP in bad faith, ironically framing it as the Left’s deep-state initiative to subvert the democratic process.5
The continuing uproar demonstrates just how potent futures exercises can be for self-reflexively living through history-in-the-making.
“What If?”
Conventional historians, too, are seduced by futures-making through experimentation with counterfactuals. Robert Cowley’s What If? commissioned pithy essays in which military historians imagined what-might-have-beens if momentous events had zigged, not zagged. What if Alexander the Great had died in his youth? The Persians’ worldview, not the Greeks’, would have dominated politics and religion. If the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire had lugged cannons to the 1529 siege of Vienna—in fact, a summer storm thwarted his plans— he would have changed the course of the Tudor dynasty and Habsburg Empire. The course of Western history would be an alien story. “What ifs can lead us to question long-held assumptions,” writes Cowley. “What ifs can define true turning points. They can show that small accidents or split-second decisions are likely to have [as] major repercussions as large ones.”5 Historical contingencies are forks in the road. We’ll never know what lay ahead on the alternative path.
Welcome to Future Humans’ Future Histories of Life, Otherwise
This collection draws inspiration from sci-fi, scenarios, and what-ifs to suggest historians should exercise capacious methods of story-telling for new ways of thinking about the past. When we denaturalize the present by immersing ourselves in alternate histories, we can ask better questions about how we got here.
We invited scholars to play with methods that subvert time’s linear march. In “The Blue Planet Event: Aliveness and the Axiomata of Astroecology,” anthropologists Dana Burton and Valerie Olson formulate “aliveness” as an assemblage of entities rather than single organisms. They use this perspective to rethink some of modern biology’s most established axiomata from an ancient Martian vantage point. In “Haunted on Mars,” Asif Siddiqi contemplates an unrealized Soviet space future and considers how the missed possibilities of the past can weigh on posterity. Gerardo Aldana, in “Citlalli in the Sky with Cnidaria,” collapses near futures with ancient histories, exploring contact according to Mayan cosmologies. “Empire of the Dandelion,” written by Lois Rosson and Claire Isabel Webb examines the extractivist logics of commercial aerospace ventures. We resituate corporations as entities that exist within an ecosystem. “Extraterrestrial Ectogenesis” by Evie Kendal uses imagined digital platforms to explore political dissent over issues of reproductive rights in this moment when it is simultaneously under threat on Earth and is gaining traction as a future technology in outer space.6
We—who have day jobs as scholars, not poets, or science fiction writers—found it useful to self-reflexively comment on our experiments. Accompanying each piece is an Exegesis that steps out of the story to break down for readers how fact and imagination come together.
We hope each story inspires you to hold together the pluralities of pasts, nows, and futures as we co-create life on and beyond Earth.