Here’s the word cloud voyant came up with when I gave it all of the websites I visited this semester.

I’m not terribly surprised by my word cloud. As one would expect for a SF class, words like “space,” and “future” are some of the most frequent terms across all the articles I read and websites I visited. My journey was an exploration of what life might look like in the future, and there are very few visualizations of things that do not (yet) exist that don’t involve an artist in some way. I looked at concept art for movies, TV shows, books, and video games (if you’re wondering why “borderlands” of all things is a term in my word cloud) and found that the most aesthetically pleasing renderings of the future were sometimes the ones that I found the least plausible. As evidenced by the frequency of “energy,” “weapon(s),” and “ships,” when people think about the future, they think of energy concerns, space travel, and violence. I anticipate that these powerful forces will have a large role in ensuring that design and intentional beauty in the future will take a secondary role to more pressing interests, as should probably be the case. Still, I am happy to see that “artist” and “art” are visible on my word cloud, as I do not think science fiction would be nearly as fascinating without its visual visionaries, in addition to its writers.