PROJECT: Time Horizons of Futuristic Fiction

The Post45 Data Collective announces a new dataset, “Time Horizons of Futuristic Fiction.” According to the website, “this dataset contains metadata for 2.5k English-language narrative works set in the future, each marked with the year it was released and the year it takes place.” From the website:

The Time Horizons of Futuristic Fiction dataset collects 2,552 English-language narrative works set in the future, each marked with the year it was released and the year it takes place. These works include films (960), prose fiction (761), television series and episodes (377), video games (325), comics (75), radio drama (36), and other media. The works were published between 1733 and 2024, with ~94% published after 1945. The futures they depict range from 1840 CE to 100 trillion CE, though most depict near futures; a quarter of the works are set within a decade of their release date, 58% within fifty years, and 69% within a century.

To our knowledge, this is the first project that systematically measures the depiction of the future in fiction. Despite SF’s [speculative fiction’s] rich history of fan-led bibliographic data collection projects almost since the inception of the genre (Forlini et al. 2016) and a growing number of data curation projects in academic SF studies (Boswell 2021), a dataset of future narrative dates across authors and narrative universes hasn’t been collected until now.

This dataset will be of interest to researchers in SF studies, as well to scholars interested more broadly in the history of cultural attitudes toward the future and in ways of conceptualizing narrative time. Analyzing and visualizing the data could suggest trends in the evolution of how speculative fiction has imagined the future. This dataset could also be productively compared with data tracking the depiction of the past in works of historical fiction (English 2016; Manshel 2023). Possible research questions this dataset could support include:

• Does critical acclaim within literary or genre-specific communities correlate with near- or far-futures?
• Are works of climate fiction now set closer to the present as the effects of global warming are felt more acutely in daily life?
• Do near- versus far-future settings correlate with stylistic differences in the texts? Are far-future settings de facto less realist, less concrete?
• How does future-orientation correlate with the artificial delineation between so-called “soft” and “hard” science fiction?
• There’s an assumption in SF studies that the past twenty years have seen the genre shift toward nearer-future visions, in part because accelerating technological change makes it difficult to project beyond a decade or two from now (Hollinger 2006). Is this true?

The website includes:

• A data table that can be fully downloaded (CSV, JSON, Excel)
• Interactive data visualizations made by Grant Wythoff with additional help from Melanie Walsh.
• A detailed description of the data
• Discussion of the selection process & ethical Considerations
• An overview of the data collection process, including how the data were cleaned and standardized
• Statement of reuse potential

Not only is this a rich dataset that can support a wide range of research questions, it also models how data can be shared in context, describing and making transparent the way data were collected, and the complex choices the creators made in standardizing the data. Digital humanities library workers will surely find the content of the dataset as fascinating as the description of the process.