ABSTRACT

Chapter 1 laid out a partial case for suggesting that the prospects for humanity are currently very bleak and that downbeat Dystopian futures are increasingly likely. This chapter tackles the issue from a different direction. It considers the capacity of human beings to exercise what can be called the ‘speculative imagination’. This is seen as a higher-order human capacity that can productively explore the not-here and the notyet. To some extent, we acknowledge that it is already doing so. These explorations, however, are limited by prevailing cultural assumptions and a lack of what might be called an ‘installed organizational capacity’. This chapter takes a brief look at some of the ways that speculative imagination is currently deployed in futures methods. Also considered here are a couple of well-known Science Fiction (SF) novels and an outstanding film (the first of a trilogy). We then touch briefly on other arenas that may, in time, exert sufficient symbolic ‘pull’ to qualify as desirable images of futures. They could then begin to act as ‘magnets’ for the realization of possibilities that are presently obscured.