Season: Future Polities organised by Living In The Future magazine

November 2014 – January 2015

Science Fiction has long provided writers and readers with the means to conduct thought experiments and to model scenarios different from the ones we currently experience. As a generation raised on Science Fiction moves into positions of power and influence in the world, the lines between fiction and fact become increasingly blurred. Science Fiction also offers means with which to critique and reimagine the present.

In this series of readings and workshops, we discuss future polities and social structures as imagined by Science Fiction writers, hear from cultural theorists and those currently engaged in living experiments.

Three of the five sessions will be reading groups, for which participants will be asked to have read the text under discussion prior to the session. Two sessions will be group discussions with guest speakers. The series is open to everyone. It’s a modular series, so you pick and choose which to come to; you’re also very welcome to come to all. If you come to a reading group session, please do read the book beforehand. All books for the reading groups are widely available in libraries and bookshops.

Living In The Future is a new journal of Science Fiction and future-oriented art and writing. Issue 3, forthcoming, is themed on “New Lands”. www.litfmag.net

Future Polities reading group: Oryx and Crake (2003) by Margaret Atwood

5th January 2015

Oryx And Crake projects our world of unchecked corporate power and huge economic divisions into the near future, and catalogues the cataclysmic fallout that occurs through the eyes of a small group of characters – some privileged, some not. Atwood updates the Frankenstein narrative to include a panoply of plausible genetic horrors, in a dismaying vision of the world to come.

Future Polities group discussion with Helen Hester: The Imagined Futures of Gendered Technologies

15th December 2014

The ways in which we imagine the technologies of the future can speak volumes about the concerns of the present. What changes and what stays the same in the representation of prospective technoscientific advances gives us some insight into the perceived horizons of political possibility at a given historical moment. In this presentation, I will consider how we might intervene within this discourse in order to shift the debates around gender and sexuality and articulate visions of a more emancipatory future.

Future Polities reading group: The Dispossessed (1974) by Ursula K. Le Guin

8th December 2014

The Dispossessed begins on Annares, a barren but mineral-rich moon to which the planet Urrastes’ anarcho-syndicalist rebels have accepted their banishment. In the 200 years since, doctrines of freedom have begun to harden into orthodoxies. Thus, although not forbidden, a physicist’s journey to work in cooperation with his peers and colleagues on the verdant, highly unequal planet-of-origin is treated with hostility. He arrives just as a revolution is brewing; we see, from his perspective, the imperfections of his own ‘ambiguous utopia’; explore comparative freedoms; gender roles, approaches to the needs of the one and the many. Winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, The Dispossessed is Le Guin’s fictional working-through of how an anarchist society might work for real.

if you can’t get hold of a copy, the whole book has, rather fittingly, been transcribed and uploaded here: http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ursula-k-le-guin-the-dispossessed

Future Polities group discussion with Ben Vickers: unMonastery

1st December 2014

Ben Vickers (Serpentine, Lima Zulu) leads a discussion about his involvement with unMonastery, an experimental neo-monastic community based in Italy and Greece. Their engagement with the monastic tradition, and other, similar projects will be also discussed.