I wrote my book, Speech of the Unknown Future in 2016:
There is today a surfeit of cultural practices, oriented towards the posited future, merely reflecting personal beliefs or desires, or areutopian or, as we know through terrorism, are 
destructive in character … We now need another way to address the future, the future in its character of being always unknown and yet REAL! This future requires a corresponding method; a cultural practice synchronised to the quality of the future as unknown yet real. At the same time this practice must participate in the unknown future’s coming-to-be. My book is an attempt to “spell out” such a method.
This book is another attempt to articulate the style or genre of literature that can best describe this time of crisis and thus navigate us through towards a future other than “ the end of everything”. It seems even more relevant today in 2020 with the corona virus crisis in ascendancy. I later wrote a short essay, A Writing Style for Our Times, based on my book. At the time, the Corona pandemic was clamping on to our imagination like, well, a virulent virus. I began to cast about on the Internet, looking for voices that were offering a different vision. There are quite a few speaking with a voice other than fear and panic. I recently came across two pieces of writing in particular that seem to lend support to my contention that a new genre is emerging to address our dire situation more adequately than any past form has done.
The first is this interesting article posted in Literary Hub: WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO THE NOVEL AFTER THIS? On the Inevitable Post-Pandemic Genre, by Emily Temple.
The author explores various known genres and themes, guessing and predicting what forms of the novel may arise but then she concludes with a startling assertion:
In the end, the true answer to the question I am asking here is that the fate of the novel is tied to our own: that is, it all depends on what happens to us, and we have no idea what is going to happen to us.
When I read this passage I wanted to turn it around to read: “our fate is tied to the fate of the novel!” Putting it this way connects me with the book, RADICAL UNCERTAINTY: Decision Making for the Unknowable Future, by Economists Mervyn King and John Kay. In this book the authors upturn the traditional premises of economic analyses/forecasting in times of radical uncertainty, such as ours right now, in favour of, can you guess, developing an adequate narrative that can tell us “what is going on here?”
Theories, probabilities, axioms, rationality, are to be replaced by the imagination! Who would have thought?
Our fate may well depend on how well we narrate “what is going on here” in this crisis. We need story to open fresh channels into which the imagination may flow in this time of radical uncertainty. So I tremble as the discourse today is narrowing rapidly to a monochromatic, paranoid one of statistics, and graphs. Fears grow like weeds and the flower of the imagination withers even further.
I have given a great deal of thought over many years about a genre of literature suited to our times, one that may open us up to the unknown future in creative, loving ways rather than only as terrifying scenarios. Take a peek at my essay here, and a number of my books that address this critical question that writers Temple and King/Kay also raise.
