At IAW, when we search for poetic, mundane but still creative visions of the future, we usually start with paper versus movies. The reason being that we tend to find this medium to be a bit more creative (no science here, just gut feeling). And there are amazing works to be found in the comics realm and Tillie Walden’s “on a sunbeam” is clearly one of them.
So, welcome into a women only world where humankind is spreading all over the universe. And in order to do so, you can use fairly poetic means fo transportation :
Using animals as a means of travel is perhaps one of the major trends in science fiction, something we find from time to time as a means of expressing social criticism about our fast-paced way of life, but perhaps to be also an attempt to offer radically new ways of traveling. So, here is the question: how to deal with these hidden tendencies, something that repeats itself but remains difficult to find in real life except the old fashioned way? A future that is not too obvious in the same vein as the flying cars? How do we handle these recurring fantasies that do not extend the technical work (like flying cars that are cars plus something), but show a rather counter-intuitive direction? We suggest that these approaches are good for counter-future thinking.
In Tillie Walden’s comic, the approach to space travel one is fairly is fairly nice. We have already seen animals like spaceships such as the ones in the avengers , but not something that peaceful, calm and stil full of tech (as we can see a bit further in the book).
Animal like metal space ships
The amazing thing in that comic is the way the author depicts very mundane aspects of the future, from people just sitting in big spaces staring at the stars (with a cat close to them…) :
Or people sleeping with teddy bears :
That spaceship is so mundane in the heroes’ lifes that using it to dry one’s clothes is a mundane as ourselves doing it in our dining room. Big ups for the author for injecting that kind of everyday life in a story that is otherwise really futuristic.
The reason why we are showing these extracts in particular, is that we have been doing a one year design fiction research on spaceflights for mars. And one of the key learning was that you can prototype and talk about something that is highly technological without using tech at all. And here, the author is sharing with us a deep experience of spacetravel in a extremely mundane way, and while still managing to make it poetic. So you do not need super transducer inverter gizmo technology to make believe about a very distant future. « Just » drawing something and share the feeling of it.