In a time of deep planetary weirding and widespread cultural and personal disorientation speculative thought is no longer just a literary genre or theoretical exercise, but a vital tool for creative adaptation and pragmatic action.

Speculative thinking is first and foremost about possibilities – particularly those beyond what is directly experienced or known. It involves considering and contemplating possibilities, particularly about the future or past, going beyond immediate realities to explore potential outcomes and ideas. It’s a process of imagining what might have been (‘counterfactuals’), and about what could be (‘prefactuals’), even if it’s not currently within reach, and exploring the implications.

The varieties of speculative thinking are many – encompasses a range of approaches for envisioning alternative realities and possible outcomes, including (but not limited to) speculative design, futures studies, speculative realism, and speculative fiction. All of these variations can offer explorations of richly imagined worlds that rehearse and critique possible social, ecological, and technological transformations.

More concretely, despite being most often associated with philosophical inquiry and innovative problem-solving, speculative thinking is also demonstrably capable of exploring the potential implications of different real world scenarios. Speculation can be a form of radical creativity that can inform grounded, collective responses to the contemporary challenges of our times by imagining novel institutional configurations, making critical disctictions that magnify present tensions, or even inventing entirely new ways of framing our lives.

In his book Theory for the World to Come (2020), anthropologist Matthew J. Wolf‑Meyer suggests that speculative fiction (mainly short stories and novels) might offer the most potential of the various modes of speculative thinking. Wolf‑Meyer argues that speculative fiction could serve as a form of social theory that helps people think through catastrophe and crisis without succumbing to paralysis or despair .

Here I’m reminded of the brilliant work of the late Octavia E. Butler. Butler was an Afican-American science fiction writer who won numerous awards for her writing, including the prestigious Hugo, Locus, and Nebula awards. And in 1995, Butler became the first science-fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. Butler’s novels Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) are a masterful example of how speculative fiction can explore important real world scenerios (in this case ecological and societal collapse) and offer readers deep wisdom about how to respond. In these two books, Butler explored the psychological and emotional contures of personal resilience and adpatation, and then offered the “Earthseed” philosophy as a means of reframing collapse not merely as an ending but as an invitation to radical transformation, community-building, and long-term vision.

As Wolf‑Meyer writes, 

“The theory for the world to come lies in these experiments, individual attempts to imagine, to model, to conceive of a future” (Wolf‐Meyer 2019, p.6).

Ultimately, Wolf‑Meyer positions speculative fiction as a site where human and nonhuman futures can be thought beyond linear history and liberal humanist assumptions. He goes on to map three important modes of speculative thought for imagining possible futures drawing on thinkers like Donna Haraway, Walter Benjamin, and Sylvia Wynter: extrapolation, intensification, and mutation.

Let’s unpack these a bit:

Extrapolation is the most familiar mode of speculative thinking, often found in classic science fiction and futures studies. It involves projecting existing trends and institutions into the future under the assumption that present dynamics will continue. In this mode, speculative fiction imagines how current social, political, and economic systems might persist or evolve over time—capitalism becomes more automated, surveillance more invasive, labor more precarious, and inequalities more entrenched.

Wolf-Meyer argues that extrapolation doesn’t necessarily challenge the status quo but can still serve a critical function: it reveals the long-term consequences of today’s ideologies and infrastructures. These futures tend to feel familiar, even bureaucratic or bleak—think of Orwell’s 1984, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, or many cyberpunk dystopias. Extrapolation is not about rupture, but about following the logic of now to its logical (and often disturbing) endpoints.

Intensification begins with real phenomena—climate change, racialized policing, mental health crises, digital dependency—and dials them up to highlight their effects when unmitigated. Rather than imagining new systems, it envisions current dynamics becoming more extreme. This is a speculative strategy rooted in exaggeration, useful for dramatizing the stakes of inaction or denial.

For example, speculative works that portray cities submerged by sea-level rise, or societies ravaged by hyper-pandemics, engage in intensification. It’s less about predicting a future and more about making visible the unsustainable trajectories of the present. In this way, intensification can function like a pressure test—it probes what happens when known variables are pushed to their limits, exposing hidden vulnerabilities in existing systems.

Mutation is the most radical and transformative of the three modes. Rather than extending or amplifying what already exists, mutation introduces discontinuity—it imagines futures where the basic categories of the human, the natural, the technological, or the social have shifted and contaminated each other in fundamental ways. These are worlds that rupture with dominant logics, opening up speculative space for experimenting with novel assemblages and relations.

Wolf-Meyer sees mutation as essential for breaking from Enlightenment ideals of linear progress and anthropocentric exceptionalist thinking. It is often found in speculative fiction that embraces hybridity, posthumanism, or entangled ecologies—where fungi think, AI dream, or bodies and ecosystems become indistinguishable. Mutation allows us to reimagine not only futures but also what counts as life, agency, time, and kinship. It’s a mode that aligns closely with thinkers like Donna Haraway and Sylvia Wynter, who insist that surviving the present requires inventing new stories—and new ways of being.

In different ways, then, speculative thinking can serve as a vital cognitive tool for navigating uncertainty, fostering resilience, and guiding adaptive action in complex environments. By engaging with possibilities rather than predetermined or fixed outcomes, it enables individuals and communities to anticipate challenges, innovate solutions, and remain flexible in the face of unexpected change.

In a rapidly changing world, speculative thinking equips us to convert uncertainty into adaptive action by rehearsing alternative realities, enhancing adaptability, and motivating proactive, ethically grounded action. Its significance lies in transforming mere survival into strategic flourishing, ensuring that we not only respond to reality but also actively shape it. It is therefore an opportunity for radical flights of courage and ingenuity beyond dispair, and for rehearsing new forms of kinship, care, and survival beyond capitalism and colonial modernity– as a way of imagining and working towards becoming otherwise. 

Speculation thinking is not retreat into idle fantasy or personal fancy—it’s radical preparation for the many possible worlds to come. 

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* This post is the first installment in a new series that will have me slowly crawling my towards a final treatment of patchwork theory. Stay tuned.

references:

Escobar, Arturo (2018). Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Duke University Press.

Butler, Octavia. E. (1993). Parable of the Sower. Four Walls Eight Windows.

Butler, Octavia. E. (1998). Parable of the Talents. Seven Stories Press.

Haraway, Donna J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.

Huang, Xie, and Chen (2021). “A Review of Functions of Speculative Thinking.”

Morton, Timothy (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press.

Sardar, Ziauddin (2010). “The Namesake: Futures; Futures Studies; Futurology; Futuristic; Foresight—What’s in a Name?” Futures, 42(3), 177–184.

Tsing, Anna (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press.

Wolf-Meyer, Matthew J. (2020). Theory for the World to Come: Speculative Fiction and Apocalyptic Anthropology. University of Minnesota Press.

Wynter, Sylvia & McKittrick, Katherine (2015). “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future.” In Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, edited by Katherine McKittrick. Duke University Press.