Immerse issue #3: On telling better stories about the future
See more gifs from TVERDBy Jessica Clark
This issue of Immerse is designed to help you craft more sanguine stories about the future across any platform. Here’s a range of related inspirations—and provocations.
The social implications of speculative fiction
Given the continuous feedback loop between sci fi and our hyperconnected media sphere, it’s gotten much harder to distinguish invention from reality. Here are just a few pieces and projects that examine the porous boundary between fiction, documentary, and social change.
- Fake news (what else?) is the topic for the December episode of the Flash Forward podcast, which each month combines an audio immersion in one future reality along with expert interviews about how that future might come to pass. Scout also mashes up sci fi and journalism and adds in community building to help users “play through possibility.”
- Kernel panic: while all hell has broken loose on Westworld’s Delos corporate site, Black Mirror is freaking us the eff out. “What makes Black Mirror so chilling isn’t just its technologies,” writes Miranda Katz of Backchannel, “but their uncanny interplay with human behavior.” In Quartz, see why the funhouse mirror of dystopian narratives is so very en vogue.
- Fear of a Feminist Future? In The Baffler, Laurie Penny tracks the rise of the alt-right through the lens of attacks on sci fi by women and people of color: “The net-patriarchal internet feels itself deeply wronged by the emergence and inexplicable popularity of stories where straight boys with guns aren’t the only heroes who matter, and the backlash has been staggering,” she writes.
- Thankfully, shows such as Halt and Catch Fire continue to normalize the participation of women in tech. And out here in reality, women have been taking VR by storm.
From the department of “sounds like sci fi, but it’s real”
Spotify smears
users’ personal listening habits across billboards around the globe.Shake up your assumptions with these stories from unusual suspects
- Love Beyond Body, Space and Time: An LGBT and Two-Spirit Sci Fi Anthology, 2016
- Queers Destroy Fantasy! Special issue, Fantasy Magazine #59, 2016
- Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, 2014
- Women Destroy Science Fiction! Special issue, Lightspeed Magazine, 2014
- Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond, 2013
- Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction, 2012
- AfroSF: Science Fiction by African Writers, 2012
- So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2004
Plus, a bit of backstory:
Immerse is an initiative of Tribeca Film Institute, MIT Open DocLab and The Fledgling Fund. Learn more about our vision for the project here.