I said I had announcements, and I wasn’t kidding. I’m doing a bunch of public stuff this month, which is nice—not least because it gets me out of the house.

The first of these is on the afternoon of Tuesday 16th April, and this talk will take me further north than I have ever been before, all the way to the Humanities Lab of the university of Umeå—which, for those confused by the bonus vowels of Swedish, is pronounced “Oo-may-oar”.

(At least that’s how it’s pronounced by Swedes down here, at the other end of the country. Hell only knows how the locals say it; I guess I’ll find out soon enough! If you’re wondering just how far north it actually is, I believe the latitude is comparable to Reykjavik.)

The talk is titled “Same planet, different worlds: fictions, futures, fandoms, and the practice of worldbuilding“. Here’s the pitch:

This lecture will begin with the notion that all futures may be considered as narratives. By borrowing some basic concepts and models from narratology—and applying some decidedly un-academic metaphors—we can then come to see futures as worlds.

Understanding futures as worlds allows us to understand that every future is plural: that a world can be (re)written from multiple perspectives, for good and for ill. This in turn offers us a new model for understanding politics in a hypermediated age, from a perhaps unexpected direction: fandom.

Understanding futures as worlds and politics as fandoms may not be an optimistic understanding, but I will argue that it is a hopeful one—an understanding that returns to each and every one of us the freedom and the responsibility to (re)imagine our futures, together.

This is an opportunity to bring together a whole bunch of ideas that I’ve been messing around with for close to a decade. I was supposed to keep them separate because the key to academic success is (so I was told) to keep as ruthless a focus on one particular topic or method as you possibly can. This was very hard for me because I get bored easily, and what really interests me about learning things is finding ways to fit them together or connect them with other things!

(Which may explain why I didn’t do a very good job of it?)

The same logic probably applies to freelancing, but at this point in my life I’m done with trying to be the version of me that other people think might be more successful. Hence my happily getting on a train to Västerbotten to do a whole week of narratological futures-y worldbuilding stuff, which in addition to this talk will include a whole bunch of workshops with games designers and design researchers, all of whom are interested in finding out how a little bit of narratology might help them with their projects.

I’m guessing there’s very little chance that (m)any readers of VCTB will just happen to be in the neighbourhood for this talk; with no slight intended to the good people of Umeå, it’s a fairly a long way from anywhere that isn’t even further. The good news is that apparently this talk will be videoed and shared some time afterwards… so keep an eye out here, if that’s a thing you might want to watch.

Meanwhile, those who would really prefer the live show should also stay tuned, as I’ll be speaking rather closer to home not long after…

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(And because shameless repetition is supposedly the key to business success, I will also note that if you’re thinking to yourself “hmm, you know, my organisation could do with someone coming and talking to us about that sort of thing”, then you should drop me a line, because that’s my job, and apparently I’m pretty good at it.)