This presentation will conceptualize fiction science and the derived potential for the ESE field (Bengtsson & Lysgaard, 2023). Fiction science can be seen as a form of paying homage to realism in science, where we see the acknowledgement of realism as to open up again the facticity of how things are. Fiction science as a genre we would like to introduce plays with this openness of facticity, as acknowledged in the scientific tradition to scepticism, in order to play with potential futures and pasts that can be seen to be partially informed by generally perceived truth(s) and partially informed by fiction, where do not yet/any longer know if that fiction is turning out to be a “truth”. We consider fiction science to engage with the challenges to human exceptionalism that the Anthropocene can be interpreted to impose on us. This rests on the acknowledgement that an empirically founded experience of the world in the “present” focusing on the human senses and self-conception is out of tune with the strange times we live in (Bengtsson & Lysgaard, 2022). To put it simply, we are increasingly becoming aware that the projected facticity of our understanding of ourselves and the world is lacking in “truthiness”, and that what is and has been is apparently different than we thought (Saari & Mullen, 2020). Fiction science relates, in this sense, to the possibility of things existing in the past, present and future at the same time (Bengtsson & Lysgaard, 2023). Fiction science taps into an openness or the intervention of a past and future that we as humans do not have access to. The fictive or imaginative aspects of fiction science can not be “contained” to a imagined and non-factual future or past but rather have a Schrödinger's cat state where the future is open and the fictive aspect of its prediction can turn out to be a seemingly “fact” in the future (cf. Harman, 2012). In our presentation we will engage with the question of what fiction science might mean for the conception of theory in ESE research as well its delineation from data- or practice-driven research.

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