Future Politics
September 17, 2014 12:07 PM   Subscribe

Future Politics (PDF link) is a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign class by Jake Bowers on the political theory of science fiction and a great recommended reading and discussion list for the rest of us.

How can imagining the future help us understand the present? How does considering the future help us think critically about politics today?...The future hopes and imaginings of past political thinkers do not include either enough detail or enough information about our rapidly changing technological, social, political, and economic landscape to provide us with enough practice to confidently confront the future as citizens as it happens to us. Science fiction allows us a much more detailed view of life in alternative futures, and the writers that we choose to read here tend to think seriously and logically about how current cutting edge technology might have social and political ramifications — however, science fiction authors are also mostly working on a narrative and thus may skim over core concepts that ought to organize our thinking about politics and society. Thus, we read both together in order to practice a kind of theoretically informed futurism (which is not the same as prediction or forecasting, but is more like the practice of confronting the unexpected).
posted by Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory (4 comments total) 28 users marked this as a favorite
 
Appropriate that this link originates from HAL's hometown.
posted by Captain l'escalier at 12:56 PM on September 17, 2014


Interesting...I used to read Steven Shaviro's blog more often, http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/, but I think his work is similar. I'm interested in how sci-fi and alternative futures drive people's core expectations in concrete ways, and people like Huntington study the role of expectations and civil unrest or order.
posted by brainimplant at 6:58 PM on September 17, 2014 [1 favorite]


This would be a great basis for a Mefi book club once Fanfare allows books.

I've already read most of the books, and his syllabus alone unfortunately doesn't really give me a new way to approach these books.
posted by tofu_crouton at 8:18 AM on September 18, 2014


not SF, but fantasy politics maybe or fantasy political economy? i dunno, but i thought the widow's house, the fourth book of daniel abraham's dagger & coin series, was really good on pseudo/semi-historical finance!

also btw for that matter on the role of 'technology' (magic! ;) in a clash of civilisations, the long price quartet is excellent; not sure if it's deliberate or not, but i suspect abraham is channeling vance!
posted by kliuless at 7:11 AM on October 14, 2014


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