SUBMITTED TO OCAD UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF DESIGN IN STRATEGIC FORESIGHT & INNOVATION TORONTO, ONTARIO, 2020 COPYRIGHT Copyright © 2020 by Kathryn Cramer. A Thousand Futures • Cramer ii ABSTRACT Although both science fiction and professional foresight work both are engaged with what the future might look like, they operate mostly independently from one another. A literature search reveals the characteristics of written science fiction and foresight, seeking ways these practices could be successfully combined. Concepts are explored through the example of agriculture and agricultural technology as well as technologies for constructing narrative semantics. Approaches are outlined for generating foresight scenarios and for creating a semantic tagging system for generating a semantic space for scenarios using intellectual technologies from science fiction. A Thousand Futures • Cramer iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Madeline Ashby and Karl Schroeder persuaded me to apply to OCAD and supported my application. My primary advisor, Professor Suzanne Stein put up with me circling my topic for a long time while I looked for a place to land. My secondary advisor Professor Gamal Mohammed gave me excellent advice on where to dig in deep. Professor Jessica Wyman of the Writing Center provided the time and space for writing and pointed me at good books. Caro Kingston, Sebastian Campos-Möller, Karl Schroeder, Asia Clarke, and Jacquie Shaw discussed drafts and concepts and encouraged me along the way. Leo Korogodski and Gulnar Joshi helped with proofreading. Karl Schroeder, Suzanne Stein, Sebastian Campos-Möller, and Ashok Mathur listened to me complain. My parents John and Pauline Cramer and Ted Cornell listened to me talk as I worked on this project and changed my mind a lot. Past writing collaborations with Ted Cornell have improved my dramatic timing. 1 Thank you to the OCAD Strategic Foresight and Innovation and Digital Futures cohorts of 2018 and 2019 for showing me a good time. People who made OCAD Graduate Studies especially fun, in alphabetical order: Rittika Basu, Claire Brunet, Asia Clarke, Tabitha Fisher, Angie Fleming, Gulnar Joshi, Aneesha Kott, Ashok Mathur, Ali 1 Also referred to as “OCAD SFI.” A Thousand Futures • Cramer iv Milad, Sebastian Campos-Möller, Trisha Nashtaran, Jacquie Shaw, Suzanne Stein, & Lauren Connell-Whitney. My past mentors gave me the intellectual framework to undertake this work: these include science fiction writers Samuel R. Delany and Joanna Russ (who was also my professor at the University of Washington), bibliographer and bookseller Lloyd Currey, literary agent Virginia Kidd, physicist and mathematician Stephen Wolfram, theater director and artist Ted Cornell, and my late husband and main collaborator, David G. Hartwell, a science fiction editor. Mathematician Patrick X. Gallagher, long ago when I was an undergraduate at Columbia University, was patient with my ideas about the relationship between mathematics and metaphor. Heather and Jason Clark have held my Adirondack life together while I went off to join the OCAD Strategic Foresight & Innovation circus. And my children, Peter and Ratio, have been my companions on this strange and fantastic voyage. A Thousand Futures • Cramer v LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I wrote this in Toronto, Ontario and in Westport, New York: in two countries that used to have a very permeable border between them. The fate of that border is unclear, but this remains a liminal document floating between. Figure 1: Kathryn Cramer with Post-It Notes in Westport, NY, July 2019. Photo by Ratio Hartwell. When I arrived in Canada for graduate school in the fall of 2018, I had a hard time understanding what Land Acknowledgements were about. So. The land we are on now belonged to someone else, but now we are here using it? Finders, keepers? I didn’t understand. A Thousand Futures • Cramer vi This summer, at an event held by the organization Decolonize Davenport, I heard a more candid Land Acknowledgement. One of the organizers has graciously provided me with the text, that reads: We acknowledge that we meet, organize, and protest upon the territory of the Mississauga of the Credit First Nation, Anishnawbe, Haudenosaunee, Wendat nations. They are the original stewards of this land, as well as the original social justice activists, whose models of resistance we see reflected in our own activism. Today we meet on Treaty 13 land, which was defined during the Toronto Purchase claim of 1805. The Treaty indicates that Tkaronto is unceded, and has never been sold or agreed to be shared with settlers by the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. The truth is that most of the area this city covers has been settled illegally and unjustly. We acknowledge that we do community organizing on unceded territory, at the expense of the displacement of Indigenous peoples. As settlers and activists, we must recognize the existence of this space and its violent and ongoing colonial history. We are grateful for the privilege and opportunity to come together today and act in solidarity with land and water defenders all across this land. The sentence, “We acknowledge that we do community organizing on unceded territory, at the expense of the displacement of Indigenous peoples” made me understand what Land Acknowledgements should be about. Judging by what I know, my farm is on land that was part of the traditional territory of the Mohawk, most likely the Akwesasne. But Lake Champlain was a transportation A Thousand Futures • Cramer vii corridor, so various peoples, including Iroquois and Abenaki, passed through the area 2 frequently, using it in common. Although Samuel de Champlain, “Father of New France,” is often credited with having “discovered” Lake Champlain, in 1609 when he sailed south down the lake, 3 Champlain and his party “traveled only at night to avoid discovery.” The early recorded history of the area is violent. In the Conclusion to The French Occupation of the Champlain Valley, 1609 to 1759—a book I bought in the gift shop at Ft. Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain in the summer of 2019—Guy Omeron Coolidge writes: From the arrival of Samuel de Champlain in 1609 until the conquest of the English in 1759 the only permanent inhabitants of the valley of Lake Champlain were French. It is true that the Iroquois exercised a sort of indeterminate sovereignty over this valley for some centuries; they did not, however, have permanent villages because of ease of attack by way of the lake; for them it was only a hunting ground. … After 1650 when the Algonquins were driven out of New England and began to look for a new home, Vermont became a no-man’s land in which neither 2 Preston, David L. The Texture of Contact: European and Indian Settler Communities on the Frontiers of Iroquoia, 1667 – 1783. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2009, pp.58 – 59. 3 Bellico, Russell P. Chronicles of Lake Champlain: Journeys in War and Peace. Fleischmanns, NY: Purple Mountain Press, 1999, p. 28 – 30. A Thousand Futures • Cramer viii Iroquois nor Algonquin wished to remain … By right of discovery and exploration by Champlain 4 the valley of the lake belonged to France and formed an integral part of New France. This is a peculiar argument about sovereignty that I don’t think I’ve seen before: They were part-timers so their sovereignty didn’t count? Cole’s Island in Lake Champlain, which can be seen from my farm, is the location where Isaac Jogues, one of the Catholic Church’s “North American Martyrs,” was allegedly tortured. From the 17th century to the present day, the story of his torture has been used to justify the disenfranchisement and maltreatment of the Mohawk, the Iroquois, and other Indigenous peoples. More on this later. My apple orchard is on land which holds a community resource. Colonization involves enclosure of the commons. That it was once a Commons appears, from Coolidge’s reasoning, to have been a justification for its appropriation. When we acknowledge the Land, we should not only acknowledge historical possession and occupation, but also how the land has been used to do people wrong— now and in the past—and how that land might better serve those alive now were the 4 Coolidge, Guy Omeron. The French Occupation of the Champlain Valley from 1609 to 1759. [1938, 1979] Fleischmanns, NY: Purple Mountain Press, 1999, p. 170. Originally published by the Proceedings of the Vermont Historical Society, Vol. VI, No. 3, 1938. A Thousand Futures • Cramer ix bounds of colonization not still in force. Therefore, I also acknowledge that our farm is 5 6 in the Adirondack Park, indirectly subsidized by American mass incarceration. 5 Hall, Clarence Jefferson, Jr. “Toward an Environmental History of American Prisons.” June 22, 2017. http://www.processhistory.org/environment-prisons/ 6 Our taxes are reduced because various local governmental entities at the town, school district, and county level use prison labor. A Thousand Futures • Cramer x DEDICATION For Karl Schroeder an enactment of what we wished existed. And for Asia Clarke Jacqueline Shaw & Sebastian Campos-Möller in hopes that I have given you tools you can use. And for Judith Merril (1923 – 1997) for teaching me through conversation & her anthologies that any genre worth working in is worth bending. A Thousand Futures • Cramer xi TABLE OF CONTENTS TABLE OF CONTENTS Copyright ii Abstract iii Acknowledgments iv Land Acknowledgement vi Dedication xi Table of Contents xii Figures xvi Epigraph 1 Preface 2 Farming as Metaphor