Measuring Futurity; the Future of Modeling; and the Risks of Synthetic Data in SF Studies

In this talk, I will share findings from the Speculative Fiction Observatory (SFO), a collective of researchers based at the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton. Over the past two years, we have devised data-intensive methods for observing what’s out there in the vast history of sf. SFO members are exploring the unique shape of contemporary space opera, digitizing and cataloguing thousands of 1920s pulp reader letters, curating a dataset of all works in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB) accessible in the HathiTrust Digital Library, and measuring how far a future sf has imagined in works of fiction, film, TV, comics, and video games from 1733 to the present.

The second part of my talk will share findings from this latter project, a peer-reviewed dataset called “Time Horizons of Futuristic Fiction,” published last summer by the *Post-45 Data Collective.* Viewing sf as a mega-franchise of future histories in conversation with one another, strung out along a single, linear timeline, severely limits the true temporal horizons of the genre. I will use the data I have curated to gesture toward more fluid time scales, including those suggested by the natural world (like Alaska River Time, a project of the Anchorage Museum’s SEED Lab that calibrates a clock according to the pace of glacial melt) and zoefuturist works of sf inspired by ecological and nonhuman time scales.