This talk argues that understanding the emotion of awe is key to understanding the affective propulsion of science/speculative fiction (SF), and that understanding the awe produced by SF is consequently key to understanding our current cultural relationship with the future.

Awe is an epistemic emotion, meaning that it regulates our attitude to knowledge. Whereas curiosity, for example, directs our attention to a local gap in knowledge, awe is stirred by something much larger. Typically triggered by encounters with vastness, complexity, and conceptual novelty, awe experiences do not simply highlight an epistemic gap, they draw attention to our very epistemologies. Powerful experiences of awe thus have the potential to disrupt our knowledge frameworks: our sense of what the world is and can be. That is, awe emotionally embeds us in possibility.

Science fiction is similarly distinguished by a concern with possibility. SF’s creation and exploration of altered worlds awaken our attention to the larger possibility space of humanity’s past, present, and future. Accordingly, awe is central to SF, whose narratives map and explore this space, and thus have the power to shape both wonder-filled and dread-laden responses to change and newness. Take, for example, the genre’s narratives that span the planetary, generational, and cosmic, and which further connect characters, actions and ideas across such scales to see how the dominoes of change fall.

This talk argues that SF and awe are connected by their emotional embedding in the future as a site of possibility and change, and that attending to the futures imagined in SF—particularly the texture of the awe experiences they offer—can serve as a barometer for a wider cultural feeling toward the future, one that may be changing due to the foreclosing of futural possibility space by the entwined crises of the Anthropocene.