Indeed—again as Burrows and I have suggested elsewhere—the production of new and different social imaginaries seems a crucial part of any utopian/liberating project or world building exercise.

After ‘mythopoesis’ comes a section on ‘myth-science’ and science fictioning, where the practices of Sun Ra, a human musician and an alien from Saturn, as well as that of Mundane Afrofuturists and Xenofeminists are, among others, shown to be productive of ‘alternative perspectives and models, [by] revealing habits of thought […] as yet more myth’ (what ‘myth-science’ is about) (1).Het verbeelden van andere opvattingen over comfort betekent het verbeelden van andere sociopolitieke leefregels en manieren om ons tot de wereld te verhouden; het is een handeling met politieke urgentie. Burrows and O’Sullivan’s exemplary commitment to a practice-based approach to art and knowledge, grounded in the sensory experiences of thinking bodies, reminds us of the deep semantic connection, now lost in common English usage, between experience and experiment. As Eileen Myles has declared, biographical writing is ‘of course about me’ as much as it is about the ostensible ‘subject’. The multi-dimensional, trans-disciplinary practice of fictioning, whose geneology and peerage the authors chart over five hundred pages, has important precedents in the work of Gilles Deleuze and his predecessors Bergson, Nietzsche and Spinoza, a philosophical tradition that O’Sullivan is very close to, having published several earlier works on it.

Along the way they have not been afraid to tread on dangerous terrain, which especially seems to be the case with Prometheanism and its potential consequences, but as they state throughout the book, it is rather through affective fictionings and not through rule-bound philosophies that they suggest a people to come can emerge. The question is unpacked in relation to speculative hypotheses about the future of consciousness in a post-biological world. Both exhaustion and ‘comfort’ can be understood as states, performances, landscapes, and conditions that constantly shape our understandings of the world around us – they all influence the ways in which we inhabit, and make space in it. This exhaustion is consequential; we glamorise producing but overlook the exhaustion and even fatigue that might follow it.

Since then, the eldest of them has been hooked and the refrain that I once spoke is now on their lips: Dungeons and Dragons (which is what we were playing) is not simply a game. On the other hand, you could use the book, as I have, as a companion that urges you to delve more deeply into the artists Burrows and O'Sullivan mention and immerse yourself in their fictioning worlds, especially in the case of sound artists. The paper proceeds through analysing four case studies of this fictioning: Patrick Keiller’s Robinson trilogy; Justin Barton and Mark Fisher’s On Vanishing Land; Steve Beard and Victoria Halford’s Voodoo Science Park; and the Otolith trilogy by The Otolith Group. In this sense, Fictioning operates very much in the post-1968 intellectual milieu broadly associated with continental philosophy and critical postmodernism.