These are the creative movements and philosophical frameworks that inform the SFSF Salon. They're not prescriptions — they're starting points, provocations, lenses for thinking about the fiction we want to make.
Genres and aesthetics that are shaping the kind of science fiction we think matters right now. These aren't just labels — they represent different answers to the question: what kind of future do we want to imagine?
Science fiction doesn't have to be a warning. Hopecore is the deliberate choice to imagine futures worth living in — not naive utopias, but worlds where people have figured some things out. Where technology serves human flourishing. Where the default narrative isn't collapse. In a media landscape saturated with dystopia, choosing to write hope is a radical act.
Where cyberpunk gave us neon-lit corporate dystopias, solarpunk imagines communities that have integrated technology with ecology. Think vertical gardens on communal housing, open-source energy grids, cities designed around human and non-human life alike. It's not anti-tech — it's tech in service of sustainability, community, and beauty.
Afrofuturism reclaims the future for the African diaspora — blending technology, mythology, and liberation into visions of tomorrow that center Black experience and imagination. From Sun Ra to Octavia Butler to Black Panther, it insists that the future isn't just one culture's to imagine. It challenges who gets to be the protagonist of the future and whose past is woven into it.
What happens when material needs are met — when energy is abundant, production is automated, and the basic economics of survival are solved? Post-scarcity fiction explores the harder questions that come after: What do people do with their time? What new hierarchies emerge? What does meaning look like when survival isn't the story? AI is accelerating us toward some version of this, and almost no fiction is wrestling with it honestly.
Stories told from genuinely non-human perspectives — not anthropomorphized animals, but truly alien cognition. As AI systems become more capable, xenofiction becomes less speculative and more urgent. What does it mean to share a world with minds that think differently from us? Not better or worse — just different in ways we can barely conceptualize.
The futures that never arrived haunt the present. Retrofuturism looks at the gap between what was promised and what was delivered — space colonies that became surveillance capitalism, flying cars that became food delivery drones. There's creative power in mourning lost futures and asking why they were lost. Sometimes the most radical sci-fi imagines the future we were supposed to get.
The philosophical frameworks that underpin and inspire the salon's conversations. These are the thinkers and movements that have shaped how we think about technology, society, and the future — and that give us language for the science fiction we're trying to write.
A technomaterialist feminism that embraces alienation and repurposes technology as a tool for liberation. Xenofeminism refuses to naturalize oppression — if nature is unjust, change nature. It sees technology not as inherently patriarchal but as a terrain of political struggle that can be seized and redirected toward emancipation.
Instead of resisting technological acceleration, left accelerationism argues we should push through it — redirecting capitalism's technological momentum toward post-work, post-scarcity, and collective liberation. The problem isn't that technology is moving too fast. The problem is that the wrong people are steering.
A philosophical movement that rejects the idea that reality is always filtered through human consciousness. The world exists independent of our perception of it — and thinking seriously about that opens up radical new ways of imagining non-human perspectives, alien objects, and timescales that dwarf human experience.
The Russian philosophical tradition that sees humanity's purpose as cosmic — resurrecting the dead, conquering aging, spreading consciousness throughout the universe. It's simultaneously spiritual and technological, ancient and futuristic. Cosmism treats the expansion of intelligence as a moral imperative, not just a commercial opportunity.
An oscillation between modernist sincerity and postmodern irony — a cultural logic that allows us to be earnest and self-aware at the same time. Metamodernism gives us permission to take big ideas seriously again without being naive about them. It's the philosophical basis for caring about the future while knowing the future is unknowable.
"I am because we are." Ubuntu centers relational identity and communal wellbeing over individualism. In a tech landscape obsessed with individual disruption and personal optimization, Ubuntu offers a fundamentally different frame: intelligence, creativity, and progress as inherently collective.
A political-economic framework that challenges the assumption that growth is always good. Degrowth asks: what if the goal isn't more, but enough? What if we deliberately scaled down production and consumption to live within planetary limits — and used technology to make that life richer, not poorer?
The view that improving the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time. Longtermism takes seriously the idea that billions of future people matter — and that decisions we make now about AI, existential risk, and civilization design ripple forward across millennia. It reframes the present as a hinge point in the human story.