The quick version:

• Tuesday 20th January to Thursday 22nd January 2026, Media Evolution City, Malmö, Sweden.
• An intensive three-day foundation course dedicated to writing fiction specifically for futures and foresight outputs.
  • Tailored for practitioners, researchers and scholars in foresight and futures-adjacent roles.
  • Build skills and competence in the translation of futures: opening scenarios up to engagement and collaboration with others.
  • Gain confidence in creating exciting, memorable outputs that bring future challenges and opportunities to life.
• Experienced fiction writer and foresight practitioner as tutor.
• Small group format (min. 5, max. 10 participants); peer-critique learning process; one-on-one mentoring, during and after.
• Full price 15.000SEK plus VAT, concession price 10.000SEK plus VAT. (Coffee, snacks and lunch are included; accommodation is not!)
• This is a training course in specialist professional skills for foresight; if you have a competence development budget, you can use it here. Full VAT invoices will be issued on purchase.

What it’s about:

Written fiction can play a powerful role in deepening foresight work, and achieving greater impact for futures projects. Develop a scenario suite into a set of short stories, and you bring them to life—as well as opening them up to memorable engagement from a far wider audience, both inside your organisation and outside.

This course will help you integrate worldbuilding, and some useful narratological principles, into your own existing foresight practice. In doing so, you’ll come to a richer understanding of not only how foresight works, but also how story works, which is a highly transferrable skill.

This will be a three-day in-person on-site professional training course held at Media Evolution City in Malmö, southern Sweden. It will run from Tuesday 20th January to Thursday 22nd January 2026, 8am to 5pm each day with an hour for lunch.

We will eat lunch at the nearby restaurant Spill, where there will be vegan options available each day; lunch and fika (Swedish-style coffee and pastries) are included in the price. You’ll need to arrange your own accommodations, though!

Who I am:

My name is Paul Graham Raven, and you can learn more about me by clicking around on this website.

My first science fiction story was published in 2011, and I’ve been writing fiction for futures projects since 2016. I have an MA in Creative Writing, and a PhD in infrastructure futures and theory. During my doctoral and postdoctoral research, I pioneered new methods for integrating fictional writing into futures-oriented research, with a particular focus on climate change.

I’ve been a freelance foresight practitioner since 2015, but I went full-time with the launch of my worldbuilding studio, Magrathea Futures AB, in 2023. I’ve written fictions and edited creative projects for NGOs and financial institutions, and brought scenarios to life for clients in academia, business and beyond.

I often say that writing fiction is about as much fun as you can have while sat on your own in a quiet room. I’d love to help you discover that pleasure—and that power!—for yourself.

Who it’s for:

• practicing professionals, embedded or freelance, with roles in
  • futures and foresight
  • innovation
  • strategy
  • brand management
  • change-making and transitions
• students and academic researchers working on similar themes to the above
• freelance technical writers looking to broaden their skills portfolio

What you’ll get:

• three days to develop your futures-fiction craft without distraction
• feedback on your work from other professional practitioners
• direct one-on-one mentorship from an experienced futures-fiction writer
• guidance on integrating fiction into foresight processes and outputs
• a new community of creative colleagues

What you’ll learn:

• how scenarios and stories are similar, and how they are different
• how thinking in terms of worlds opens up possibilities for more interesting and engaging futures work
• how “point of view” shapes what a narrative can (and can’t) do
• how to use a (simplified) version of the morphological scenario-building method
• how to come up with characters and situations that get the reader (and the writer!) right into the corners of a scenario

(See the full course schedule here…)

Before the course, you will:

• get yourself a copy of Ursula Le Guin’s Steering the Craft, and hopefully read at least the first half
• write a short (1 to 3k) story based on a top-down scenario that I will assign to the group
• arrange your own travel and accommodations

When you arrive, you bring:

• your draft story
• two or three “weak signals” or drivers to work with in the group
• a willingness to have your work read and critiqued by the group

The last point is important, and it is non-negotiable. I know it can be a bit scary to show other people your writing, especially when you feel you’re just learning! But it’s also the the best way to improve, which is why it’s a standard feature of many of the most famous fiction-writing workshops and courses. Exposing your own work is the price of getting to see and hear everyone else’s, and it means that the vulnerability is shared: you don’t get to poke at other people’s work unless you’re willing to let them poke at yours in return.

(However, group critique is also in confidence: the first rule of Write Club is that we don’t talk about Write Club.)

What you won’t learn:

Please don’t take this course if you want to learn to write science fiction as literature! This course is strictly about fiction for futures: the means may be similar, but the ends are different. (If you’re already writing science fiction, however, this course might be helpful in understanding how to put those skills to use in a different context.)

If a course on writing science fiction is really what you want, do feel free to email and tell me so; if there’s enough interest, I will gladly put a course together. Alternatively, we could perhaps arrange some sort of one-to-one training and mentorship.