against the ideas of the nineteen-hundreds: an interview with Karl Schroeder

When I started making a list of people I wanted to interview for this site, my main criterion was that they needed to fall somewhere between the two camps of science fiction on the one hand and foresight practice on the other. Karl Schroeder was one of the very first names to be added to that list, not least because he's been stood with a foot in each camp for almost as long as I've been a writer, let alone a futures practitioner!

This interview was a great pleasure for me, despite the technical issues which dogged its recording (which, it bears noting, was back at the very start of 2024; my bad). It was a chance to chat with one of my favourite authors, but also shamelessly dog an experienced professional for tips on how better to conduct the work. Karl dealt with my not-always-subtle lines of questioning and my janky technological set-up with equal aplomb.

So please read on to discover the relation of design constraints to the worldbuilding process, consider the use of narrative as not just a delivery system for scenarios but an analytical device in its own right... and to find out why Karl wants us to get over the science fiction of the nineteen-hundreds.

—pgr

 ​Paul Graham Raven: What does it say on your business card? I mean, I don't know if you have a business card... but if not your business card, your website.

Karl Schroeder: My current business card doesn't say what I do, quite deliberately. It says Unapocalyptic, which is the name of my current newsletter.

For a long time it was a very difficult question for me to answer, what it is that I actually do. I thought it was simple initially. I was a writer—I was a science fiction writer. And this held true, I'd say, for about ten, fifteen years or so. But then I began getting invitations to participate in foresight activities, initially through the National Research Council of Canada and Jack Smith, who is one of our foresight evangelists in this country. From there, I ended up doing foresight work, which involved similar skills, but not quite the same.

And as I was going along, new designations began to appear, two of which seemed to be particularly relevant to what I actually do: one is design fiction, and the other is speculative design. These are all part of a constellation of new approaches to design that are ideational, but are often concerned with constructing not necessarily scenarios or complete perspectives of the future, but rather provocations that are intended to derail people's assumptions, or their most comfortable view of the future, and get them thinking in a different direction.

Now, we've always done this! The early twentieth century was full of this kind of work, particularly in Austria. But these days it's becoming sort of a professional title—so I could designate myself as a speculative designer. I do in fact have a master's degree in strategic foresight and innovation, which is a design degree. And I could say that I produce design fictions, which in fact I often do.

But I also produce science fiction, which is an explicitly different category that uses some of the same tools, but not exactly the same tools, and not for the same purposes. So, it's a very complex field, and for myself, it's a complex designation or answer. It almost depends on the audience that I'm speaking with, how I define myself.

PGR: Yeah, that is an experience I recognize from my own own attempts to explain what it is that I do! So, over the past year, what would you say was the dominant thing that has been going on with you, work-wise?

KS: Mostly setting up and starting my new newsletter—which actually sounds simpler than it is these days. The newsletter has become an alternative to the traditional publishing industry for a lot of authors, and I tested and tried a lot of platforms over many months. One thing I've done with this platform is to lay down a theoretical argument that would be of more interest to people doing foresight, perhaps, by asking the question of what would a twenty-first century science fiction look like? A science fiction whose ideas only came from the twenty-first century, and not the twentieth or nineteenth century. And I am systematically laying out a set of foundations, I guess you'd call them, for worldbuilding that is based only on twenty-first century ideas. It’s been a lot of fun and is, uh, becoming a bigger and bigger project, the more I work on it...

PGR: This is the nature of theory, Karl! [laughs] I’ve spoken to a few other writers about this, who've done similar work. And you are a much more experienced writer of fiction than I am, but I think I've written enough to recognize that the work of theory-making is not dissimilar to the work of building a coherent world in which to set a story. Would you agree with that?

KS: I do agree with that. One of the reasons for my my presence as kind of an outlier, or shall we say even a niche artist in science fiction, is that my ideal was always more Stanislav Lem than Robert Heinlein. I've always been interested in exploring ideas, and I do believe that there is room for a literature of ideas. So my books have always started from some specific philosophical puzzle that I thought I had a resolution to and wanted to describe—but it's far preferable to describe things experientially, if you're able to do it, than didactically. Didactic writing is systematic and very, very useful, because it can be taken apart and interrogated by other researchers. But the real work is to convince.

And that's where we circle back to the idea of discursive design, which is all about convincing people, and speculative design, which is about laying out for people the foundations of ideas that they may resist or may have never encountered before. So these aspects of my research, this foundational level of where my novels begin, is most closely related to the foresight work. I should say that there is always a necessary evolution away from that, though, and into storytelling, which feeds back and changes everything as it goes. When you go to write the novel, all the research goes out the window, because the novel is its own thing. But I've tried to, as I say, develop platforms or stances from which to write—and this exercise of creating a set of twenty-first century-only story prompts, is an example of doing that work.

PGR: So, how are you defining a twenty-first century idea as distinct from a twentieth century one? And the really obvious answer here is to say "well, Paul, it's an idea that emerges after a particular date…" But I get the feeling there's something... that's the quantitative answer, but there's a qualitative thing that you're getting at there as well. Can you unpack that a bit for me?

KS: There is, of course, a genealogy to any set of ideas, no matter how new they may seem, and there is also often a a traceable history, with those two not being quite the same. A good example would be enactivism or enaction, which is a theory in cognitive science that strongly opposes representationalism and the idea of information processing as being what really goes on in the brains of living organisms; in other words, the mind-as-software paradigm is wrong. The enactivist approach dates back to about 1992, when Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch published a book called The Embodied Mind, but the theory had precedents in dynamical systems theory that went back decades.

But the specific idea, which was only really developed after 2000, is that the mind extends into the environment and the physical body of an organism, and they act together to create perception and cognition. This is entirely different from the brain in a box idea: that you have perception that brings information in, you process that information in the brain, and then you act. Instead, here the idea is that you perceive by acting. A good example is the saccade: your eyes are constantly darting about in a kind of a search pattern. Even when you think you're looking directly at something, you're not! Your eyes are moving back and forth, and your body is constantly moving in space. And these aren't just epiphenomenal side effects: they’re actually how you perceive, by directly interacting with the environment

This is an idea with deep roots, but it is also a very new paradigm, in and of itself. And most of the, the [twenty-first century] ideas that I'm talking about have this form: new interpretations of quantum mechanics, for instance, that are very clearly of this century.

PGR: This is not necessarily a request to name names or particulars, but the science fiction of the twentieth century, that relies on those older theories—what's the quality of that difference that you're trying to bring about? What is it about that old science fiction that you see, and then say “oh no, not that”.

Let me illustrate the point: you'll be familiar with the work of John Clute, the science fiction critic. So he had a riff he used a lot in the late Noughties, I think, where he used to talk about “the old sf” and “the new sf”, as a shorthand for a sense that he had that things were changing. The distinction went something like this: in the old sf, the reward for saying “yes” was the future; but in this “new sf” that he'd identified, the reward for saying “yes” was death. Which was a very Clutean way of saying, you know, that kind of blithely optimistic, solutionist, Heinleinian sf of the twentieth century went through a period of crisis around the turn of the century

Now, I think Clute probably started writing about that maybe fifteen years ago, and there's been a lot of water under the bridge since. I definitely have a sense that we are in something new again, beyond that—that the “new sf” that he was talking about then was a transitional thing, and we're certainly getting into something new now. But I'd be interested to hear what you think that “old sf” was, and what you think the new sf is that you want to make—what is the thing where you say, “that is the one thing I want to not be doing”.

KS: I recently wrote a piece on my newsletter called “The Science Fiction of the 1900s”. The nature of the provocation there is to pause in your thinking and ask whether the future world that you're describing is based on ideas of the 1900s, or even the 1800s. By ceasing to say “twentieth century” and saying “the 1900s” instead, we subtly reframe our view of where we are. But this isn't just an academic exercise. John Clute was right that the received science fiction of my youth was really about the limitless possibilities of the future, whereas the science fiction that it was possible to write immediately after the turn of the century was necessarily pessimistic. The future was a blank for us for quite a long time, and the only model that we had was this positive and positivistic vision.

I've given an example in the form of Gerard K O'Neill's space colony idea. I wrote a piece in the newsletter called “The Single Family Space Colony” [part one, part two], where I reframed the discussion about what colonizing space could look like. And here we suddenly find ourselves able to talk about post-colonialist space settlement and, and ideas like that, which wasn't really possible until very recently. I don't know exactly what the sea change has been, but I think it is true that we are starting to be able to make a break with that positivistic gung-ho vision of the future, and say that there is not only one alternative to that, which as John Clute would put it would be death! It's just that we needed a little time to marshal our imaginations to see what the other real possibilities were, and the genres we call solarpunk and hopepunk are examples of our first stab at that—books like Ruthanna Emrys's A Half Built Garden.

Imagine a near future that really is a complete break with the traditions of super positivistic, super male, super white, super heteronormative, American visions of the future. In place of that, you can have an optimism—but it has to be an earned optimism now. In other words, we can't have the naive futures that we had in the past. If we're going to describe a utopia now, we have to describe how we get there, or we have to justify it—because we're in a deep hole that we have to dig ourselves out of as a species right now, and everybody recognizes that.

There's two ways to approach that if you're a science fiction writer. One is to jump over it by a couple thousand years, and just say that it was solved; the other is to wrestle directly with the moment that we're in, and with the very near future, and to write fiction that you know is going to be obsolete by the time that it is published. And very few people have the courage to do that—because we are all trying to push the boundaries and stay one step ahead. But I think we have to stop doing that; we have to start writing works that we know will not be able to keep up, because we don't want to be ten years ahead of the curve at this point, we want to be six months ahead of the curve—because we have to actually make decisions and make changes in the real world right now, and for that we have to be fully engaged with the world as it is now

PGR: Yeah... no one [in sf] wants to be claiming prediction any more. But at the same time, no one's particularly averse to accidentally getting it right, you know? Like “oh, I didn't mean to, but yeah, I did kind of nail it that time”… [laughs]

But there's something interesting in that question of publishing in the face of an obsolescence that you know is inevitable. That's really interesting to me. And this reminds me of a Bruce Sterling riff, right? He used to have that thing about products being “obsolete before plateau”—a product that's almost useless as you launch it. What is the value of that? Because clearly you think there's something to it.

KS: Sure—and this loops back to speculative design, to what is it that you're trying to do either in design or in writing fiction, and the idea that we're trying to model the future accurately in science fiction is one of those ideas of the 1900s that we have to discard. So, what do we have in its place? Clute would have said death, because the idea of what to have in the place of that was undeveloped back then. But what you have is you have tools to inspire engagement with the world: experiential futures, foresight workshops, things-from-the-future, and so on. Some of them are fictions, and some of them are design fictions, which are not intended to be works of literature in the typical sense, but are expressing ideas through literary devices, you might say—and then that shades into science fiction.

But if you think of science fiction now as design, then it's no longer a question of obsolescence. It's a question of: is this design grounded in the moment? And that's a very different thing to ask yourself: you're not trying to be right about the future any more, what you're trying to do is lay down some design principles or design ideas that people could actually use right now, in both thinking and adjusting their actions towards the future. So it doesn't matter if your ideas or your predictions are obsolete, is science fiction has become a form of design.

PGR: Yes—and I'm reminded here of the notion that science fiction is not about the time in which it is set, it is about the time in which it is written. So if I'm understanding you correctly, you're kind of really leaning into it: you're really saying, no, the whole point of this is what it can tell us about today. That sense that it's not the displacement in time of the story or the artifact or whatever it is; the narrative, it's not looking forwards at all, in a way. It's actually looking down, it's looking at our feet.

KS: Well, yeah, again, that depends partly on what you think the future is. Most of us take the Einsteinean geometrical view of time where you move along a line. I don't think that way about time; for me, the future is the dimension of surprise. Foresight and science fiction are both about surprise, fundamentally—and they're about how we respond to it, how we make ourselves resilient in the face of it, although they approach this from very different direction.

But there's also a pragmatic aspect to keeping your horizons as close to yourself as possible, particularly with regards to where your ideas are coming from. I completely fall out of faith with a novel set in the future that imagines all kinds of fantastic changes due to nanotechnology and artificial intelligence and space travel and biological or genetic alterations, and yet fails to imagine that we might have different ways of governing ourselves. The monarch, the tyrant, the autocrat, you know, democratic processes, parliaments and so forth: they show up again and again in futures that are otherwise presenting themselves as, radically different and new.

So when I talk about experimenting with ideas that are entirely of this century, well, that's one of them. What would it mean to make a break with the past regarding governance? Both democracy and autocracy, communism and capitalism. So, for instance, I created an alternative to both communism and capitalism in my last novel, Stealing Worlds; rather than the capitalist owning the means of production or the workers owning the means of production, in this case, the means of production own themselves. And it's on that level of using these works, using science fiction and speculative design and foresight to recognize your blind spots, and then deliberately try and design around them—that's kind of the project.

PGR: You are still to some extent constrained by the expectations that people who buy novels have—they want to be entertained as well, right? So how much of your approach to... you get your idea and you develop it a bit, you do your research and then there's the point where the writing of the story takes over, quite a radical break there in terms of your process. What does that switch feel like? How are you thinking and asking questions before, and how are you thinking and asking questions afterwards?

KS: Well, now we get to the meat of worldbuilding. If you have designed the world of your story properly, the ideas that you want to talk about, however complicated, complex, or radically new they are, will just naturally appear—because they're built into the architecture of the world. If you've done that right, then you just focus on your characters and whatever adventures they're having, and let the fact of where they are be what conveys the ideas. In Lady of Mazes, for instance, which is really a book about sociology, we have a feature in which every person at adolescence can decide what technologies they will or will not allow in their lives. For some people, uh, what we consider to be the modern technological world simply disappears; they can fully sort of go back to nature in a sense. And some people go the opposite way, and all places in between—because the premise of the book is that technology is legislation. Bringing a new technology into your life is the equivalent of legislating some change in society and in yourself.

Now, if this is true, then we will never properly govern ourselves until we are able to freely choose what technologies we allow in our lives. Having constructed the world in which people can do that, I was then able to spin out multiple stories on multiple levels that explored all the ideas that I wanted to explore, without any additional effort—because again, it was all built into the architecture of the world itself.

That said, with Lady of Mazes, I wrote the first hundred pages three times, and threw out each version before it finally caught on the fourth and, and kept on going. So, it wasn't an easy project, and there was a lot of note-taking involved, and a lot of notes came out of it that I go back to on a frequent basis and say, oh, I really have to do something with this.

PGR: So the two processes were not entirely discreet—you did not sit down and say, “right, I am just doing the worldbuilding now”, and then, “now I've finished world building, now I will start writing”. I'm feeling there's a sort of overlap, you're still doing some tinkering and building as you go through as well in the actual writing phase. Would that be a fair characterization?

KS: Oh, yeah, absolutely. In fact, it's a very important discovery that I made when I was actually doing foresight for the Canadian Army. They asked me to write a couple of short novels for them, that were based on scenarios they'd constructed and were set about ten, fifteen years in the future at that time. What I discovered was that you enter into a dialogue with the page when you start writing.

You write something down and then it speaks back to you and says, no, actually that won't work, because when you put the characters in the situation, when you bring together a whole set of different technologies or ideas that each individually seem sound and watch them bounce off each other, suddenly, you discover that certain things just don't work, that certain futures don't make any sense. On the flip side of that, often you get synergies between different technologies that result in entirely new visions of what could happen in the future—like a synergy between renewable energy, precision fermentation, and the electrification of transport, these things play off against each other. I'm writing a novel right now set in the Arctic and one of the features of it is that due to global warming, the ice roads no longer work—the highways that we build on frozen rivers in the winter. So northern communities need a new way of getting fuel and things to them, and in this book there is a drone network, autonomous drones that form a “matter net”, capable of delivering anything to anybody, anywhere in North America, including all the way up to the pole.

So suddenly communities are disintermediated from needing roads: the health of a northern community no longer has to do with whether there are roads or whether there's a runway, because there's an entirely different transportation infrastructure available , and that in turn affects the nature of the country as a whole. So, one idea, when you embody it in narrative and play it off against other parts of a story, can often mutate into something completely new.

PGR: I guess this is probably more of a problem in foresight circumstances than in purely fictional ones, but if you presented that in a foresight setting to a room full of policy makers, am I right in assuming that you're not wanting them to leave the room saying, “oh, well, what we need to do is build a whole load of big drones”. It's not that simple, it's not like “here's the answer, I made a story!”

KS: That's right.

PGR: I think you used the word of provocation earlier, right? Sometimes you have to explain to the client, we're not saying “here it is” when we propose a thing, we're not saying, “this is what we should do”... but we might be saying, “why shouldn't we do this?” Not in the sense that your five year old might say “why shouldn't I do this?” But possibly also that sense! You know, why can't we do this? What are the structural obstacles behind this that we're not thinking about, that looking at it this way exposes for us?

KS: Yeah. In the case of matter net, one thing to understand about Canada is that 85 to 90 percent of the land area of the country is not serviced by roads, and cannot be serviced by roads because of how rugged it is. This has historically made this country imagine itself in a particular way compared to Europe or the United States, where national road systems that essentially reach anywhere are possible, and despite the immense natural wealth of Canada,we have, as a culture, imagined ourselves as impoverished in comparison to countries that can have that kind of highway structure. So this particular provocation is simply saying, well, what if that doesn't matter any more? What if, not being serviced by roads is actually a feature? Because you're using up so much less material, you're not carving giant lines through forests that will disrupt ecosystems, and so on and so forth.

And the list goes on and on. It is not a specific prescription, but a demand that you imagine our needs as a people differently.

PGR: That distinction between the prescription and the provocation. I think that's the interesting thing, isn't it?

KS: Yes.

PGR: If I say the word worldbuilding to you, what does that mean? What are you thinking of when you think of that word? Especially, particularly at first, with regard to your own practice.

KS: Worldbuilding is a word that has a history and that for me was associated specifically with science fiction and fantasy for most of my career. The the term really has traction when we talk about J. R. R. Tolkien, because in his case the novels that he wrote were really to support the worldbuilding exercise that was his hobby, rather than being raw material for novels that he intended as the final product.

There is a vast amount of outsider art out there that no one will see, of people creating personal worlds. And I think that's great, I think we should all be doing it. But from Tolkien, we really get the idea of the writer sitting in, you know, their their garret, feverishly writing down descriptions of places and characters and economic systems, and then applying these in some kind of a literary work. But the term was cheerfully and happily hijacked in the 2000s by foresight practitioners who began at that point to wonder if the presentation of ideas through narrative was not just a reporting mechanism, but in fact could be a form of analysis in its own right.

And here we start to get design fictions as a deliberate end product, and we also begin to get this recognition that when you create narrative, you are banging together ideas in ways that in foresight, we usually call wind-tunneling: narrative is a form of wind-tunneling. So for people who do foresight, the idea that, oh, okay, testing my ideas to destruction by putting them in a story and seeing whether they make sense, suddenly this becomes methodologically free—an acceptable and, even extremely useful way to approach exploring ideas.

And there's also a borrowing that starts to happen about fifteen, twenty years ago from scenario, workshopping and scenario futures, where you would start with trends, with weak signals of change as we call them, and try and derive a set of drivers of current changes. Then you build a set of scenarios based on that information, with alternative futures depending on whether you've dialled up or dialled down a particular drive. And this becomes another input into a broader exercise of worldbuilding that's now seen as kind of running in parallel to literary aims; it's no longer just a reporting mechanism, it's a tool of analysis in its own right

PGR: So the way I would describe what I'm doing with this project to an academic friend is I'd say, well, this is a methodological inquiry about worldbuilding. You know, what are we pointing out when we say that word?

But there's clearly lots of different ways of doing it, and the methodological question is: what knowledges are being accessed or made through the use of that method, or that or whichever one, right? What is it that we are getting at with each of these different methods of worldbuilding?

KS: I've got a really good example of that: Elon Musk, who thinks like an engineer, and is solving all kinds of real world problems—and has decided that the problems he's going to solve are the problems that were defined in the science fiction of the 1970s and 80s and to some degree the 90s. So he is creating rocket ships, he's creating electric cars, he's creating robots, he's creating neural interfaces—all of the imagined wonders from the 1900s. What he is not doing is asking himself, what are the wonders of the twenty-first century? And what are the things that we need right now? Arguably the thing that we need right now the most is a way of extremely rapidly decarbonizing, um, our entire infrastructure. Electric cars are great, but actually e-bikes have had a much bigger impact on the environment than electric cars. We require a new kind of thinking that's appropriate to the age—and that's not engineering thinking. There's this saying, that “the people who know how will always work for the people who know why”. And at this moment in time, we need people who have the power that Elon Musk has to actually be thinking about the why rather than the how.

Getting back to the idea of an entirely twenty-first century science fiction, we want to ground our vision of the future in what our present reality is. And it's not what it was supposed to be fifty years ago! Everything is different. So I'm looking for the ground of all of these changes, in some ways—to say well, here's a firm basis that we can start from, and then build our way up in talking about what the twenty-first century's future has to look like, compared to what the twentieth century thought it would be.

PGR: Building on my digression on methodology a minute ago, I flatter myself that I think we are on the same page with the idea that here's a panoply of different methods here and having some way to select between them, there's some value to that. So imagine a client comes to you with a particular question or or topic or location or whatever it may be, and says, yeah, I hear you do this future stuff, I want to do some futures about this. You have a whole array of different ways of worldbuilding, different methods of futuring, whatever we want to call it; how do you begin that process of thinking, “okay, which of the tools do I go for first?” How do you begin to answer that question?

KS: There is a concept known as foresight maturity, which describes the degree to which the client is able to move out of their comfort zone or their default future, as it were, and the degree to which they're able to use and incorporate methodologies. So, for instance, with a client who's got a very weak level of foresight maturity, what you can propose to them is a trends report; perhaps also a cute little narrative that describes someone in the near future where a particular trend that everyone is seeing has sort of maxed out. If you're dealing with an organization with a very high level of, of foresight maturity, they already may know techniques such as morphological analysis, which are highly sophisticated and can be used to create very complex multidimensional views of the future—in which case, you're able to propose an entirely different category of processes, including branching narratives, that are more appropriate to the audience.

But determining the level of foresight maturity of your client is step number one—because two clients may ask you for exactly the same thing, but expect entirely different things from you depending on how much foresight maturity they have.

PGR: That’s great guidance, but I want to hound you a bit on the question of instinct, here. Say a client brings you a really interesting question, but you feel they aren't ready for the best option, like “oh, it'd be great to do X, but they're not ready for X”. What is it that makes you think “oh, this would be the perfect thing for method X”.

KS: That's a really interesting question. We're often dealing with organizational transformation; foresight is often a exercise that companies engage in when they're looking for new products, but just as often, that search for new products or services hides a deeper need for something else. So the question is, what does your client really need? And this always is the issue with design of any kind: the client will come to you with what they think they want, and your job is to find out what they need, which is often entirely different. This is just as true in foresight as it is in product design

I guess I'm trying to be encouraging in the sense that I'm saying this is par for the course. It's normal for the first part of the engagement, or even a large part of the engagement, to be a mutual figuring-out between the consultant and the client of what the client's real need is. And this is just as true when you're doing fictional explorations. Do they really need a narrative of the future? Or do they need, um, uh, some other means of expression, like a gamification or a design fiction, an object.

PGR: So it's always determined on a case by case basis, then.

KS: Yeah, you do have tools like foresight maturity that you can deploy while doing it, and there is a literature out there. But you will always be starting from scratch with each client when you go to determine what their need is.

PGR: Okay. So in the context of fiction writing, I think I have a decent sense now—though I can't always execute on it!—that when I come up with an idea, I have an idea of what sort of story will get me in there. That sense of: here's a question, how can I go at it? Well, maybe this approach, maybe that approach, maybe not that one... I've got some sense of the toolkit and which facets and lugs I can grab with the toolkit on the particular thing I'm looking at.

What's interesting about what you're saying here is that when you put this work in a futures context, you cannot separate the question from the client. The question and the client are inextricable.

KS: I also get a very strong sense of the narrative need, or the narrative possibilities of a particular idea. But if they don't communicate what the client needs, be it internally or externally, then you're doing them a strong disservice by following your muse. For my master's thesis, I used the idea of classical memory systems and mnemonics to elaborate a technique, under the general methodology of design fictions, for writing stories in which you can establish a one to one relationship between an element of the story and one of the ideas that the project wants to convey using that story

So, when we treat storytelling or narrative as a reporting device in foresight, you can basically build a chart of these one to one relationships: we're going to represent idea X with this character, who embodies that idea; we're going to embody idea Y with the setting, and so on and so forth. So that what you have at the end is a possibly simple but carefully constructed narrative, all of whose elements correspond to elements of the brief, or the output from the foresight exercise

Introducing your own ideas would constitute a further analysis. So first of all, just letting the plot or the characters run away with the story is bad, because then you may discard some of these ideas that you need to convey for the client… but coming up with new ideas of your own at that point does just as much of a disservice to the client, because now you're doing a post facto reanalysis. To serve the client, you have to rather modestly embody the concepts that have come out of your consultation with them—and only those, in this kind of design fiction. And I stress that that's only one kind of design fiction, but it was the one that I did my thesis on.

PGR: I think one of the variables would be the question of who is the final audience of the the fiction or the artifact or whatever you're producing—you know, is it internal only? Is it something that's being shared with the client's own customer base or, or is it something that's being sort of put out under their imprimatur, if you will: like, we want something that we can put out in the world that expresses where we're at with this stuff.

As a writer, the sense of who we're writing to is, for me at least, that's the first question, right? It doesn't matter whether I'm writing fiction or non—the question of who is my audience, who am I speaking to here? That shapes, to a huge extent, what your possibilities of representation and reach are. Like, how far can I push this? How close to the bone or not should I be

KS: True. I did a piece for the International Libraries Association a few years back. I gave a talk in Athens, and then I wrote a short story about deep fakes. There were two faces to this communication, and the inward-turned face to the library association was the message that we need to start emphasizing that information wants to be expensive. Remember the old adage, “information wants to be free”? Well, that's part of a sentence; the full sentence is “information wants to be free and information wants to be expensive”. We need to make the truth expensive, in the sense of committing money to stating it, and we do that already in the form of printed books, buildings, libraries, and professionals whose careers are devoted to the maintenance and preservation of knowledge in that tangible and deliberately expensive medium.

So my message to the libraries association was that they're needed in the age of deepfakes more than ever—because the singular fact about deepfaking and propaganda is that they have to be cheap, they are disposable. Or to put it another way, uh, if you're gonna spend a lot of money on them and build your own libraries, well, you have to actually build the culture and society around them that makes them real in some way.

But the outward-facing, published story had a different message, and it was just specifically to scare the pants off everybody by pointing out that within a few years—and this was written back in 2017 or so—that with within a few years, it would be possible to instantly fake up entire books, authors, citations, disciplines, libraries, and eventually entire internets.

PGR: And aren't we lucky, Karl, that this has not yet come to pass?

KS: [laughs]

PGR: Would you say—and if you did, to what extent—that both of those works started in the same act of world building?

KS: I think in that particular case they both did start from exactly the same place. But I was faced with different media, different audiences, and the question of how to communicate appropriately to each. I don't remember which came first, but the notion was the same. And it's it's a design technique that I use a lot: rather than thinking of the future in terms of linear time, try thinking of it in terms of constraints. Deepfake technology is a new constraint on the degrees of freedom that we have in society… so the question is not, you know, “how do we fight this new evil”, it is how do we design around this constraint.

A few years ago wrote a book called Lockstep, which was an adventurous romp in the far future. But I set myself a set of constraints: I wanted to write a classic Star Trek or Star Wars type space opera, where people visit different worlds around different suns and have adventures and then come home for tea, and I wanted to do it in the real world, where faster than light travel is not possible. So completely impossible, contradictory requirements—that's the perfect kind of design constraint. And I came up with a universe in which I was able to do all of those things, but it was because I placed this wrong and then fought against it.

And again, with the deep fakes, it's not a question of fighting, although you can do that in the courts and with the technology itself, but it's really about design—designing our way around the problem, so that maybe deepfakes are still there and maybe we just don't care, because they don't impact us. So, worldbuilding and design are inextricable in a lot of ways—but the idea of the design constraint, for me, is often the starting point for the worldbuilding process.

Station ID

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