Looking Beyond the Ghost Scenario
In “Step Into the Free and Infinite Laboratory of the Mind” (Issues, Fall 2025), Ed Finn reminds us that science fiction can serve as a platform for discussion about changes in the real world, especially in science and technology policy. His useful “rules for speculators” importantly note that “two futures (or three) are better than one.”
Cocreating multiple futures with diverse actors from across institutions and communities can help us to see beyond what my colleagues Rafael Ramírez and Trudi Lang refer to as the ghost scenario. Every strategy or policy comes with a set of expectations held by its creators about the world within which it will play out. The ghost scenario is this often tacitly held bundle of assumptions about the future context on which we base our decisions.
Finn is right to point out that thoughts of future tech and radical change can swiftly and unhelpfully turn to dystopia. His idea of protopia—“a future in which things are not perfect, but keep getting better”—is a useful antidote to all-or-nothing speculative visions, but still implies that the yardstick we currently use to measure “better” will be adequate in times to come.
Every strategy or policy comes with a set of expectations held by its creators about the world within which it will play out.
Foresight work can shed yet more light on present-day uncertainties and their implications when we problematize the question of our own desire, and instead use futures to generate manufactured hindsight: asking not just “What future do I think I want, from the limits of my viewpoint in the here-and-now?” but “How will different futures judge, in retrospect, the choices I think so wise and the values I hold so dear?”
This is not just a philosophical issue, but an urgent policy matter at a time when various governments are exploring Future Generations legislation in the wake of the United Nations Pact for the Future, adopted in late 2024. Such efforts are intended to create advisory positions advocating to policymakers on behalf of generations yet to come. Will officials in such roles be able to serve as anything more than “Ministers for the Ghost Scenario”?
Manufactured hindsight offers a fresh and critical perspective on the concerns of our times, plus an opportunity to embrace epistemic humility without paralysis. This coincides with the American philosopher and psychologist John Dewey’s argument that the best source for new ideas is “reflection on a felt difficulty.” What is difficult for us to imagine or accept need not be dystopian.
Matthew Finch
Associate Fellow, Saïd Business School
University of Oxford
Ed Finn underscores the critical importance of speculative or science fiction for human progress. Finn rightly points out that stories of possible futures uniquely enable readers to “participate in those futures,” unlocking their imagination and their empathy, something that our short-termist, reactive culture makes very difficult.
I work on democracy issues—democracy futures, to be exact—and a report I coauthored for the Democracy Funders Network in 2022, Imagining Better Futures for American Democracy, came to many of the same conclusions that Finn does. It highlighted the centrality of “imagination” as a human superpower to propel us forward, what Finn dubbed in the report “the ignition system for humanity in the 21st century.” Stimulating the imagination permits the formation of societal or collective futures, fostering the development of common visions of better futures. Those visions, in turn, can power collective movements for change.
One of the issues I grapple with in my report is the paucity of bold and creative thinking in the governance space. This deficit impedes our ability to create new modes of governance at a major societal inflection point—some might dub it a global paradigm shift—with democracy in retreat, the need to account for generational impacts, and the growing distrust in democratic institutions. Speculative fiction creates the vital space for imagining what systems could replace our current ones, or improve them dramatically to address the problems our societies will face both in the present and the future.
Stimulating the imagination permits the formation of societal or collective futures, fostering the development of common visions of better futures.
Prescient work by Kim Stanley Robinson (The Ministry for the Future), for example, illuminates a possible way for societies to forestall and recover from climate catastrophe. Robinson’s fictional Ministry for the Future imagines a powerful evolution of an actual institutional role, the Futures Generations Commissioner of Wales. In this way, fiction incorporates signals from around us and builds worlds of possibility, giving readers a tangible possible path forward and activating their sense of agency to push for those changes in the real world. Stories such as these allow us to think through all the details of possible futures, as a rich, holistic tapestry, not just as a technocratic blueprint. That’s why several government heads and policy experts reached out to Robinson for his insights on addressing climate change after his book was published.
I also agree with Finn that speculative fiction forces us to exercise a muscle we use too little, at our peril, in a time of rapid change and disruption—anticipation. By anticipation, I don’t mean contingency planning, although we could all do with more of that, but thinking about and preparing for a range of possible futures in a disciplined way.
Finn concludes by arguing that “building imaginative capacity is an essential collective project if we hope to successfully navigate the tidal waves of change that have already been unleashed, like AI, climate chaos, and the complex global economy.” We need speculators and imagineers to stimulate our atrophied imagination muscles.
Suzette Brooks Masters
Senior Fellow and Director of the Better Futures Project at the Democracy Funders Network
She also cochairs the Federal Foresight Advocacy Alliance and advises The School of International Futures