Scenario Fiction

The genre Bratton, Chen Qiufan and Lukáš Likavčan propose in the introduction to Hemispherical Stacks, described by Bratton in SPoC as merging two ways of giving counterfactuals literary form: Cold War scenario planning and science fiction. Each parent is faulted: think tanks protect incumbents; science fiction is hostage to plot and protagonist and polarized into utopia and dystopia. Scenario fiction drops characters for systems, following cause-and-effect chains across supply chains, currencies and geopolitics over decades, and refuses to recommend: the pieces are ambivalent by design (Critical Ambivalence). Its reading instruction: each piece is a tile in a composite metascenario that grows as contributions multiply. In For a General Theory of Simulations, Bratton classes scenario planning as institutionalized reflexive simulation (Reflexive vs. Recursive Simulation) whose telling helps cause or prevent its future; scenario fiction keeps the mechanism while dropping the client's purpose, a tension Iris Carver's Telos Project dramatizes.