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… nor, perhaps, as widely read as it should be. “Urubos” is here to help…

The Extrapolated Futures Archive is a reverse-lookup for speculative fiction. Describe a situation you are facing, and find the SF stories that already worked through the implications.

The catalog connects stories (novels, novellas, short stories, films) to the speculative ideas they explore: thought experiments about technology, governance, biology, society, and more. Every idea is tagged with domains, scenario types, and outcome types so you can filter by the kind of future you are thinking about.

How to use it:

• Search by title, author, synopsis keywords, or idea descriptions
• Filter by domain (AI, biotech, climate, space, governance…), scenario type, outcome, decade, or series
• Browse ideas to find transferable thought experiments, then follow links to the stories that explore them
• Browse stories to see what speculative ideas a particular work contains
• Book Club discussions (marked with 📖) offer section-by-section roundtable analyses by AI personas modeled on SF authors
• What-If Query (via the What-If Query page/link) lets you describe a real-world scenario in plain text and get ranked matching ideas

The archive is designed for decision-makers in government, industry, and NGOs who want to widen their thinking by surfacing fictional precedents for novel real-world challenges…

Over 275 ideas, which cluster into 20 different “domains,” explored in over 1,900 stories, via over 3,500 links…

Mapping real-world scenarios to the science fiction stories that explored them first: “Extrapolated Futures Archive“

* William Gibson

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As we ponder prescience, we might spare a thought for Charles Hoy Fort, the prolific chronicler of paranormal phenomena; he died on this date in 1932.  Fort collected accounts of frogs and other strange objects raining from the sky, UFOs, ghosts, spontaneous human combustion, stigmata, psychic abilities, and the like, publishing four collections of weird tales and anomalies during his lifetime: Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931), and Wild Talents (1932).  So influential was Fort among fellow-questers that his name has become an adjective, “Fortean,” often applied to unexplained events… The Truth is Out There…

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