Writing is a way to sustain and to animate speculation and – in doing so – open us up to alternatives, to parallels, to new and various ways of contemplating and understanding the spaces and places that we inhabit, might inhabit, or cannot inhabit. And these alternative pathways might prove more illuminating and give us something else that the immediate realm of architecture (the plans, blueprints, bricks and mortar) cannot. Other medium can of course, also speculate; the mediums of drawing, or film, or algorithmic projections, statistics, music. But I want to think about writing today, as it has a wonderful habit of capturing the processes and mechanisms of speculation as it unfolds or falls in and out of itself and touches other ideas along the way. It is a way to turn an object in the mind and view it according to its different aspects and relations.

So even looking about what happens to language, to the form of the book, and to textual construction, can reveal a lot about speculations on space. These books are highly speculative in their form and intention, and call upon language to fuel and animate and record their speculation. They resist linearity; are dense and epigraphic in their offerings, are punctuated by silences and splits and changes of direction.

The novel is a literary form that is particularly alert to questions of tense, temporality, and futurity. Novels explicitly or covertly tussle with a concept of narrative, of how to tell and to structure a story, dealing with concepts as seemingly simple as beginning, ending, cause and effect. These questions often enter the minds and dialogues of their characters. To rephrase Perec: this is how time begins: ‘signs traced on the blank page’. Novels are therefore fertile ground for thinking about the construction of a future realm and all its related affects – utopia, dystopia, compromise, boredom, inconvenience, hope, haunting.