Embracing speculative storytelling
The best speculative sci-fi isn’t really about the future. Calvin Ross Carl argues it critiques the present, and that brands can do the same while pointing toward a better world.
Summary
Calvin Ross Carl points out that good speculative sci-fi, from Ursula K. Le Guin to Margaret Atwood, is always about critiquing the present. Neuromancer isn’t about computers and drugs, it’s about capitalism, and The Handmaid’s Tale is about the fragility of human rights and democracy. Calvin thinks brands can critique the present too, and that they should. Where sci-fi usually paints the critique in a negative light, a brand can spin it toward something positive.
Highlights
- Good speculative sci-fi is always about critiquing the present.
- Neuromancer is about capitalism, and The Handmaid’s Tale is about the fragility of rights and democracy.
- Brands can make the same critique, then point it toward a better world.
Key insights
Sci-fi is a mirror, not a forecast
The future in speculative fiction is a device. The real subject is the world we live in now, which is why these stories still land decades later.
Flip the critique to a positive
Sci-fi tends toward dystopia. A brand can start from the same honest read on what’s broken and then show the better version it’s working toward.
Detailed analysis
This is a challenge to brands that only talk about features and products. Every speculative story believes the world can be better, and Calvin sees that belief as something a brand can borrow. Naming what’s wrong with the present gives a brand a point of view, and imagining the fix gives it a direction.
Conclusion
The world can always be better. Brands that say so, and show what better looks like, have something worth believing in.
All sci-fi—at least what I think of as good sci-fi, speculative sci-fi, that’s my genre, the Ursula K. Le Guins, the Atwoods—is always about critiquing the present. And I think brands can also critique the present. I think that’s kind of what they should be doing. The world can always be better, and every speculative sci-fi story kind of believes that. They usually paint it in a negative sense, so I think a brand can spin it to a positive sense.
The criticism in cyberpunk, in Neuromancer, isn’t about computers and drugs. It’s about capitalism. Atwood wasn’t really writing about religion in The Handmaid’s Tale. She was writing about the fragility of human rights and democracy.