Paper short abstract:

Exploring speculative fiction and urban creative practices, this panel contribution merges posthumanist theory with auto-ethnographic experience of writing a young adult science fiction novel to showcase speculative theatre's potential to envision urban and technological landscapes in outer space.

Paper long abstract:

The proposed panel contribution explores the convergence of speculative fiction writing, urban creative practices, and speculative theatre's future, particularly as a socio-technological imaginary for the exploration of outer space. Leveraging the Creative Urban Methods group's qualitative methodologies and informed by posthumanist theories, I aim to define speculative theatre through attributes like political engagement, posthuman perspectives, intermediality, nomadism, and ontological inquiry that guide the proposed approach to staging speculative fiction narratives in urban context.

"Harvie: The Commander's Daughter," a Young Adult science fiction novel, serves as a case study for these theoretical frameworks. Set in a technologically advanced, yet catastrophe-scarred future world of near outer space colonies, it follows Harvie, a teenager confronting her father's complex legacy. The narrative weaves together themes of identity, resilience, and urban transformation, reflecting speculative theatre's ability to engage with futuristic space city imaginaries and extend speculative fiction's reach beyond literary boundaries to enrich urban creative practices.

The presentation will interrogate the intersections between speculative fiction writing, speculative theatre research, and STS studies of outer space, aiming to unpack how speculative narratives—such as "Harvie: The Commander's Daughter"—can illuminate and critique the imaginaries and infrastructures shaping human engagement with outer space. By drawing on my work, the proposed contribution seeks to showcase how speculative approaches offer methodological tools for STS scholars to conceptualize and critically engage with the futures of outer space exploration, settlement, and societal organization, both extraterrestrial and terrestrial, and to examine them as a contested domain that refracts fundamental questions about human existence.