‘The future has become problematic’, wrote the editors of a volume on Speculative Research in 2017 (Wilkie et al, 2017: 2). In this special issue on ‘Staying with Speculation’, authors take up the call to engage critically and creatively with questions around futures, speculations and anticipations of other possible but perhaps still improbable worlds. A deeper understanding of the ways in which futures are projected, shaped, appropriated, experienced, resisted and reimagined is necessary in order to support and scaffold debates about ‘the’ [so- called] ‘future’ [singular] and this begins with the discussions engaged in the chapters presented in the first section of this special issue.

To start, it is perhaps useful to develop a literacy around various modes of speculation that are presented in these chapters, ranging from the imaginaries of corporate visions presented through advertisements to mundane legal documents such as patents to physical prototypes for new products or, even, more experiential and/ or performative real or fictional or engagements in everyday life. For it is in these ‘things’ – whether as critiques or generative interventions – that futures are made durable.

In the field of science and technology studies (STS), the ‘socio- technical imaginary’, defined as ‘as collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology’ (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015: 4), is a useful concept for thinking through critiques around the ways in which futures are invented, created and sustained over time. For example, analysing the highly speculative fields of space colonies and nanotechnology, Patrick McCray describes the ways in which ‘visioneers’ as he calls them ‘existed at the blurry border between scientific fact, technological possibility, and optimistic speculation’ (2012: 17). As we can see, making futures is not only what is said to be invented in the lab as the product of scientific knowledge (as well as its social context) but also the work of metaphors, imaginaries and communities. McCray writes that ‘visioneering also involves the popularization of ideas, the construction of networks of supporters, and

the cultivation of patrons.