Back to the Future? Towards an Applied Futures Narratology

A global community of futurists and policymakers has responded enthusiastically to the recent “narrative turn” in futures research and practice, embracing the use of storytelling in multiple forms. Narrative modes are increasingly prevalent in the futures scenarios and design fictions represented in the so-called “grey literature” of government, industry, and non-profit-sectors. Critiquing a series of such non-literary case studies, this essay seeks to introduce narratologists to this growing corpus of “future narratives” and to explore the mutual benefits potentially opened up by greater dialogue between narratologists and futurists. It traces the long history both of predictive narration and narrative theories thereof to demonstrate that narratology has, to date, neglected such “foretelling” as a distinctive story form. It suggests that both narratologists and futurists accordingly lack a usable critical toolkit to help parse or develop non-literary foretelling qua narrative practice. In particular, illustrating the affective use of different tenses in futurists’ scenarios and other non-literary future fictions, it highlights the inadequacies of narratology’s tense-based approaches towards theorizing predictive and prospective narration. It shows how scenarios and other future-focused fictions used by futurists in industry and government present a new and distinctive narrative corpus offering a potentially rich study-bed for narratologists to test and refine existing a priori theories of future narration. And, finally, it recommends key areas for reading and further cross-disciplinary work between narratologists and futurists in further research.