How fiction is used to think about the future.
Foresight is not prediction. It is the practice of preparing for several futures instead of betting on one, and for more than half a century its working material has been the story.
Scenarios are stories
Scenario planning took shape in the 1950s, when Herman Kahn and his colleagues at RAND began writing out, step by step, how a crisis might unfold. In the early 1970s Pierre Wack’s planning group at Royal Dutch Shell brought the method into business: a small set of plausible futures, each told as a narrative, against which a decision could be tested. The scenarios were never meant to come true. They were meant to change what the people reading them were able to imagine.
Science-fiction prototyping
Around 2010 Brian David Johnson, then a futurist at Intel, gave a name to something engineers had long done informally. A science-fiction prototype is a short story built on a real piece of research, written to find out what the technology would do to the people living with it. The story plays the part a physical prototype plays in engineering: a cheap way to find problems before anything is built.
Design fiction
Design fiction, a term the novelist Bruce Sterling introduced and the designer Julian Bleecker developed, works with objects instead of plots: a product manual, a news page or a piece of packaging from a world that does not exist yet. Holding an ordinary thing from a possible future makes that future easier to argue with.
Writers in the room
Institutions have asked for this help directly. In the United States a group of science-fiction writers known as SIGMA has advised government agencies since the 1990s. In 2019 the French armed forces formed a “Red Team” of science-fiction authors and illustrators and asked them to imagine the threats that planners had missed.
What fiction adds
A story has to hold together. A writer cannot leave out motive, error, institutions or accident, because a reader will notice the gap. That discipline pushes a scenario past its first consequence to the second and third, which is usually where the surprises are. Fiction also makes a risk felt, and people act on what they can picture.
Where it misleads
The strength is also the hazard. A vivid story feels likelier than it is, and a persuasive one can outrun its evidence. Plausible is not the same as probable. Fiction used for foresight needs readers who will check it against what is known, which is why the method works best with scientists at the same table.
How the salon uses it
The Prism Salon reads fiction beside the science it leans on, experiments with technology and writing, and builds scenarios for exercises of its own. See Racing the Machine, and what a tabletop exercise is, and what it is for.