TAKING THE FUTURE AS READ

Is it conceivable that writers can accurately predict the future? Academics at the literature department of the German University of Tübingen certainly thought so when they set up Project Cassandra in 2017.

Taking its name from the Trojan priestess who could foresee the future, the project’s initial aim was to investigate novels from different countries to find pointers to future conflicts. Daunted by the challenge of reading so many works in such a multitude of languages, the academics switched to focusing on what they called the “literary infrastructure” – that is, how the book was received. Did it accumulate awards and state prizes? Or was it banned, and the author made to go into exile? The data was fed into a computer and a conflict risk score developed.

Results were impressive. In 2017, Algerian dystopian fiction and the buzz around it flagged up the country as a region of interest. Two years later, civil protests broke out in Algiers and several other cities, culminating in the fall of the president. Towards the end of 2019, Azerbaijan donated anti-Armenian books to Georgian libraries. A year later, 6,000 soldiers and civilians were killed in a six-week battle over Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave of Azerbaijan populated by ethnic Armenians.

Soon after its foundation, the project received funding from the defence ministry. Due to a government reshuffle and/or the Covid-19 pandemic, this was withdrawn in the winter of 2020. Project Cassandra was no more. Nevertheless, during its brief existence it excited considerable scepticism, even though it was entirely pragmatic in nature and made no claims that writers possessed prophetic powers. Instead, the project’s instigator, Jürgen Wertheimer, a professor of comparative literature, spoke of great writers’ “sensory talent”, an ability to channel