Future Narratives. Theory, poetics, and media-historical moment by Christoph Bode and Rainer Dietrich

Future Narratives. Theory, poetics, and media-historical moment by Christoph Bode and Rainer Dietrich

1 The Theory and Poetics of Future Narratives: 
A Narrative
The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.
William Gibson
1.1 Future Narratives: A New Kind of Narrative 
‘Narrating Futures’ is about a new, hitherto unidentified kind of narrative. The 
fact of its discovery is exciting in itself, but no less exciting is the key feature this 
new kind of narrative displays: it does not only thematize openness, indetermi-

nacy, virtuality, and the idea that every ‘now’ contains a multitude of possible 
continuations. No, it goes beyond this by actually staging the fact that the future 
is a space of yet unrealized potentiality, or, technically speaking, a ‘possibility 
space’ (cf. Boyd 122) – and by allowing the reader/player to enter situations that 
fork into different branches and to actually experience that ‘what happens next’ 
may well depend upon us, upon our decisions, our actions, our values and moti-

vations.
It might therefore be said that these narratives preserve and contain what can 
be regarded as defining features of future time, namely that it is yet undecided, 
open, and multiple, and that it has not yet crystallized into actuality. It is by virtue 
of their capability to do exactly this – to preserve the future as future – that these 
narratives are here called ‘Future Narratives’.
It is clear from the above that Future Narratives mark a fundamental and 
radical break away from traditional narratives. Most, though not all, narratives 
we know are concerned with past events, with something that has already hap-

pened  – whether in reality or purportedly, i.e. in fiction. Such past narratives 
endow events with meaning by discursively aligning them with other events, 
thereby suggesting a meaningful story. It could be argued, and indeed it has been 
argued, that this is actually the main reason why humanity has narratives in the 
first place: they are meaning-creating devices, they make sense out of life, the uni-

verse, and everything. Past narratives are backward-looking processing practices 
(or pretend to be) and they mostly aim at a reduction of otherwise worrying or 
confusing complexity (although there is a fascinating sub-class of past narratives 
that aims at exactly the opposite).
By way of contrast, Future Narratives do not operate with ‘events’ as their 
minimal units. Rather, their minimal unit is at least one situation that allows for 
more than one continuation. We call this a ‘nodal situation’, or a ‘node’, for short. 

Between these nodes (if a Future Narrative has more than one node) or before 
and after a node we still find events, linked with each other in normal narrative 
procedure (whatever may be called ‘normal’), but they are not what defines a 
Future Narrative as Future Narrative. That is the node. The node is what Future 
Narratives have – and other kinds of narrative do not have. If they can produce a 
node, they’re welcome to the club. But only if. A node is the differentia specifica
of a Future Narrative.
The break away from past narratives that Future Narratives constitute is so 
radical that it might well be asked whether Future Narratives are still narratives. 
This question will be addressed in due time and it will be discussed with great 
seriousness, because it is a legitimate question. But the answer – and this will not 
surprise you since you know the title of this volume and the title of this series – 
will be in the affirmative. Our idea of ‘narrative’ in general is largely based on 
our knowledge of past narratives – understandably so, since that is the kind of 
narrative most familiar to us. But they are not the only ones. There’s a new kid 
in town. And what is more: this kid has been lurking there for quite a while now. 
The kid’s no stranger.
Why then do I say that this is a new, hitherto unidentified kind of narrative? 
Because, up until now, Future Narratives have never been identified as a corpus in 
its own right, as a class of narratives that is constituted and defined by one feature 
that, in contrast to all other kinds of narrative, they hold in common and that 
pertains to them alone: nodes. They contain situations that allow for more than 
one continuation; and by ‘contain’ we mean: they do not only mention such situa-

tions, but they present them, they stage them, so that you can enter them and act
(except for in an interesting borderline case, which later on will help us hone our 
concepts and terminology).
You can find such narratives in print, you can find them in movies, you can 
find them in computer and online games, you find them in sophisticated simula-

tions of complex real-life processes, in scenarios used by insurance companies 
and world climate change experts, by peak oil aficionados, politicians, and com-

municators. They are everywhere. They cut across all media and genre bounda-

ries, they cut across the dividing line between fact and fiction, between the actual 
and the virtual. As I said: they are everywhere. 
Why then is it that they have never been identified, up until now? One 
reason may well be that, exactly because they can be found practically every-

where, we have not seen them as one corpus, but only in their different mani-

festations. Fooled by their protean forms, deluded by conventional media and 
genre demarcations, stuck with the fiction-/non-fiction divide, we have not seen 
the enormous spread of Future Narratives, their awesome ubiquity. Our compart-

mentalisation of reality has backfired on us and we haven’t seen the wood for all 

Future Narratives. Theory, poetics, and media-historical moment by Christoph Bode and Rainer Dietrich