Narrating Futures / Future Narratives

This series explores a hitherto unidentified type of narrative: Future Narratives. Future Narratives preserve essential aspects of future time, namely its openness and undecidedness. They do this by operating with ‘nodes’ as their basic unit – situations that allow for more than one continuation. Future Narratives can be found in print, in film, in video games, in scenarios of world climate change, and in other simulations of future trends. Cutting across all media and genre classifications, this burgeoning corpus still lacks a theory and a poetics. This series offers both – and detailed case studies.

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This head volume of the 'Narrating Futures' series defines and identifies Future Narratives. It parses their characteristic features and aims at an abstract classification of the whole corpus, irrespective of its concrete manifestations across the media. Drawing on different theorems and approaches, it offers a unified theory and a poetics of Future Narratives. Locating the media-historical moment of their emergence, this volume paves the way for the following volumes, which deal with how Future Narratives are refracted through different media.