epic of gilgamesh analysis essay

The Epic of Gilgamesh

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Gilgamesh: Introduction

Gilgamesh: plot summary, gilgamesh: detailed summary & analysis, gilgamesh: themes, gilgamesh: quotes, gilgamesh: characters, gilgamesh: symbols, gilgamesh: theme wheel.

Historical Context of The Epic of Gilgamesh

Other books related to the epic of gilgamesh.

• Full Title: The Epic of Gilgamesh
• When Written: As far back as the Third Dynasty of Ur (around 2100 BCE), stories were written about the legendary king Gilgamesh. These stories, however, were not unified into a single narrative until the 18th century BCE, in what is now known as the Old Babylonian version of the Epic. This version, however, had major gaps, which were largely filled in by what is now known as the Standard Version. The Standard Version dates from between the 10th and 13th century BCE. Still today, the text is considered incomplete.
• Where Written: Ancient Sumer / Mesopotamia
• When Published: The Epic of Gilgamesh was first discovered in 1853, and the first modern translation was published in the 1870s. Since then, various versions have been published.
• Literary Period: Ancient epic
• Genre: Epic Poem
• Setting: Ancient Sumer (modern-day Iraq)
• Climax: Enkidu’s death
• Antagonist: Though the epic does not have a single clearly-defined antagonist, pride is Gilgamesh’s main obstacle throughout.
• Point of View: Third-person omniscient

Extra Credit for The Epic of Gilgamesh

Old School. The Epic of Gilgamesh is the world’s oldest surviving written poem.

Gilgamesh the Boss. In the Final Fantasy series of videogames, a character known as Gilgamesh frequently features as a boss enemy, along with his sidekick Enkidu.

Epic of Gilgamesh

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The Epic of Gilgamesh

By anonymous - gilgamesh, the epic of gilgamesh summary and analysis of tablet i.

The story begins with a prologue introducing us to the main character, Gilgamesh , the Priest-King of Uruk. Gilgamesh’s mother is Ninsun , sometimes referred to as the Lady Wildcow Ninsun. She was a goddess, endowing Gilgamesh with a semi-divine nature. Lugulbanda, a priest, was his father. Gilgamesh constructed the great city of Uruk along the Euphrates River in Mesopotamia, and surrounded it intricately decorated walls. He also built a temple for the goddess Ishtar, the goddess of love, and her father Anu , the father of the gods. Gilgamesh is credited with opening passages through the mountains. He traveled to the Nether World and beyond it, where he met Utnapishtim , the sole survivor of the great flood that almost ended the world, the one who had been given immortality. When he returned to Uruk, he wrote everything down on a tablet of lapis lazuli and locked it in a copper chest.

As the story begins, Gilgamesh is a tyrannical leader who shows little regard for his people. He takes what he wants from them and works them to death constructing the walls of Uruk. He sleeps with brides on their wedding night, before their husbands. It is said that no one can resist his power. The old men of Uruk complain and appeal to the gods for help. The gods hear their cries and instruct Aruru, the goddess of creation, to make someone strong enough to act as a counterforce to Gilgamesh.

Aruru takes some clay, moistens it with her spit, and forms another man, named Enkidu . Enkidu resides in the wilderness with the animals, knowing nothing of the civilized world. He lives as one of the animals, running with them and eating what they eat. One day a trapper sees Enkidu at a watering hole. His appearance is frightening as he is huge and covered in hair. The trapper suspects that Enkidu is the one who has been un-setting his traps and filling the pits he uses to catch animals. The trapper returns home and tells his father he has seen a frightening wild man.

The trapper’s father advises him to go to Uruk and ask Gilgamesh to lend him a prostitute from the temple of Ishtar to tame Enkidu. After doing so, the trapper returns with Shamhat , the prostitute, and they wait by the watering hole for three days.

When Enkidu does appear again, the trapper tells Shamhat to lie down on a blanket and show Enkidu her breasts and her body. Enkidu is enchanted by Shamhat and lies upon her and they copulate for six days and seven nights. After Enkidu is finally satisfied, he leaves Shamhat and attempts to returns to the animals, but they no longer regard him as one of them and run away from him.

Enkidu finds he has become weaker and can no longer run with the animals as he did before. His mind has been awakened. Troubled by this new self-awareness, he asks Shamhat for help. She tells him about life in Uruk and its king, Gilgamesh. As Enkidu hears more about Gilgamesh from Shamhat, he begins to feel a need for a companion and decides he wants to meet Gilgamesh.

Meanwhile, Gilgamesh has two dreams that trouble him. In the first dream, a meteor lands in a field outside Uruk. Gilgamesh is drawn to the rock “as if it were a woman.” After lifting it, he carries it to his mother, Ninsun. In the second dream, Gilgamesh finds an axe lying in the street. A crowd of people stands around it, admiring it. Gilgamesh is also drawn to the axe, as if it were his wife. He carries it to his mother and lays it at her feet. He tells Ninsun of these dreams. She interprets them to mean that he will soon meet a man, a man who will become his friend and greatest companion.

The narrator introduces Gilgamesh in the past tense—the high walls of the city he built are already ancient. At the same time, he suggests that the story is in Gilgamesh’s own words, and that the legendary king himself wrote it down. Gilgamesh’s story commemorates historical people and deeds, and at the same time, Gilgamesh’s passage through heroism, grief, and wisdom is a perpetual, universal process. The story of Gilgamesh is both timeless and immediate.

Though Gilgamesh’s mother Ninsun plays a significant role in the early parts of the story, we learn very little about his father. The Sin -Leqi-Unninni version of Gilgamesh says his father is Ninsun’s husband, Lugulbanda, but it is not clear if Lugulbanda is actually Gilgamesh’s biological father. Some versions of the poem declare that Gilgamesh’s father is a priest, while others call him a “fool.” Like Gilgamesh, Lugulbanda was a genuine historical figure. He precedes Gilgamesh on Uruk’s king list by two, and he would have more likely been his grandfather, considering the lengths of the recorded reigns. Like Gilgamesh, people worshipped him as a god after his death.

Although Gilgamesh is a king and his story has become legend, the author also includes examples of Gilgamesh’s tyrannical behavior. He has no equal, and no one can stand up to him. Gilgamesh’s lineage establishes him as one-third mortal and two-thirds a god. Therefore, it is appropriate that the people of Uruk appeal to the gods for help.

Enkidu is described as terrifying in appearance, covered in hair and living with the animals. He is also huge and very strong, characteristics that otherwise are only attributed to Gilgamesh. Enkidu is the untamed wild itself. As Gilgamesh represents civilization and the dominion of man over all, Enkidu is the natural counterweight. It is also notable that despite his great strength, Enkidu is helpless in the face of a woman’s sexuality. Shamhat’s power civilizes and tames Enkidu to prepare him for his journey to Uruk and ultimately to Gilgamesh. This speaks to a different view of a prostitute in Gilgamesh’s time. Rather than being seen as a criminal act, Shamhat’s role is revered, even sacred. It is possible that a woman’s sexuality was seen as a necessity to tame a man and make him suitable for civilized life, supporting a family, or raising children. Shamhat’s taming of Enkidu also foreshadows Enkidu’s role in taming Gilgamesh. Shamhat awakens Enkidu. Similarly, Enkidu must awaken Gilgamesh.

Many scholars have seen Biblical parallels in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Enkidu has been compared to Esau and Ishmael, who both exhibited animal-like characteristics, but his story also reflects the civilizing of humankind. As a species, we have moved from a more primal, animal-like existence to one of culture. We educate ourselves and gain insight into our world and ourselves. The biblical motif of Adam and Eve also mirrors Enkidu’s story. Their fall from innocence is a result of becoming aware of their sexuality. After that, they are cast out of Eden and must find their own way in the world, just as Enkidu does.

Though sexuality is presented as an important transformational force, the theme of platonic friendship and love ultimately is the more profound one in the story. Some scholars have seen homoerotic qualities in Gilgamesh and Enkidu’s relationship, and others feel there is no direct evidence of this in the text. Their relationship is based on a very close friendship and it is this type of relationship that the story presents as the most vital. Enkidu and Gilgamesh balance each other and help each other find inner harmony.

The Epic of Gilgamesh Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Epic of Gilgamesh is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

what insults does humbaba throw at gilgamesh and enkidu upon their 1st encounter ?

Are you sure he faces Humbaba in chapter 2? Gilgamesh talks about going to the Cedar Forest but I don't think he gets there in Ch. 2.

How does Enkidu help Gilgamesh before he dies?

Enkidu helps Gilgamesh to defeat Humbaba before he dies.

Epic of Gilgamesh

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Study Guide for The Epic of Gilgamesh

The Epic of Gilgamesh study guide contains literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, quotes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Epic of Gilgamesh
• The Epic of Gilgamesh Summary
• Character List

Essays for The Epic of Gilgamesh

The Epic of Gilgamesh essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Epic of Gilgamesh.

• Enkidu's Deathbed Realization
• Questions of the Hereafter in Gilgamesh, the Bhagavad-Gita, and the Bible
• Mother, Goddess, Seductress, Harlot: Women in "The Epic of Gilgamesh"
• Fellowship in the Epic of Gilgamesh
• Death and Immortality in the Epic of Gilgamesh

Lesson Plan for The Epic of Gilgamesh

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to The Epic of Gilgamesh
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• The Epic of Gilgamesh Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for The Epic of Gilgamesh

• Introduction
• Later influence

The Epic of Gilgamesh

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Analysis: “The Epic of Gilgamesh”

"The Epic of Gilgamesh" illustrates the transformative experience of human companionship with themes that remain as relevant in the modern day as they were in ancient Babylon. Gilgamesh, the protagonist , is a powerful king who has a transformative relationship with Enkidu, a man crafted by the gods to mirror Gilgamesh’s strength and to push back on his unfettered power. After a brief challenge for superiority, which Gilgamesh wins, the two become inseparable friends and are each influenced by the other: Enkidu changes from wild man to companion and Gilgamesh changes from a brutal and feared king to an equally loyal friend. Together, the two face fears together, resist temptations, battle the unknown, and triumph. At the same time, these celebrated victories are undercut by the inevitability of death, the crippling pain of mourning, and Gilgamesh’s struggle to find meaning in the face of his mortality. Gilgamesh’s story encompasses the spectrum of human experience and is largely shaped by the acquisition and loss of intimate friendship.

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The Epic of Gilgamesh

April 30, 2020 | yalepress | Ancient History , Literature

John Carey —

The oldest surviving literary work is The Epic of Gilgamesh . It was composed nearly 4,000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia (roughly equivalent to where Iraq and eastern Syria are now). No one knows who wrote it, or why, or what readership or audience it was intended for. It is preserved on clay tablets in the earliest known alphabet, which is called cuneiform script because the scribes who wrote it formed the letters by making wedge-shaped (cuneiform) dents in wet clay with bits of reed.

For centuries the secret of how to read cuneiform script was lost. Then, in the 1870s, a self-taught, working-class Londoner called George Smith, studying clay tablets in the British Museum, cracked the code and brought The Epic of Gilgamesh to light.

The epic tells the story of a king, Gilgamesh, whose mother is a goddess. He rules the city of Uruk (now Warka in southern Iraq). He is a great warrior and builds a magnificent city using glazed bricks, a new technique. But he is lustful and tyrannical, seizing and violating brides on their wedding day. So the gods create a wild man called Enkidu to stop Gilgamesh oppressing his people.

Enkidu is made from the clay the mother goddess washes from her hands, and he is an animal rather than a human. He is covered in hair and lives with the gazelles, eating grass as they do. However, a votaress of the temple in Uruk seduces him and after seven days and nights of fervent love-making he becomes human. She teaches him to wear clothes and eat human food.

Gilgamesh falls in love with Enkidu, caressing him like a woman. But when Enkidu tries to stop him violating brides, they fight. They turn out to be equally matched, so they kiss and make friends and embark on heroic adventures. Together they go on a quest to the Cedar Forest and kill the monster Humbaba who lives there. This angers the gods, since Humbaba was their monster. While Gilgamesh is washing after the fight the goddess Ishtar sees him, falls in love, and proposes marriage. But she is the goddess of sex and violence and all her lovers come to a bad end, so Gilgamesh rejects her. She is angry, and calls on her father, the sky god, to send another monster, the Bull of Heaven, to kill Gilgamesh. Instead Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill the Bull, which angers the gods still more, and they sentence Enkidu to death.

Gilgamesh mourns him bitterly and sets off to discover the secret of eternal life. He is ferried across the waters of death and finds the immortal man Utnapishtim, who survived the great flood, in which all other humans died, by following the gods’ instructions and building a boat. Gilgamesh dives into the ocean to find a plant that is said to make whoever possesses it young again. Though he finds it, and brings it to the surface, it is stolen by a snake, and Utnapishtim tells him that no one can defeat death. So Gilgamesh returns to Uruk, having learned that, though he is mighty and famous, he will be equal in death with all other human beings.

From A Little History of Poetry by John Carey. Published by Yale University Press in 2020. Reproduced with permission.

John Carey  is emeritus professor at Oxford. His books include  The Essential  “Paradise Lost,”  What Good Are the Arts?,  studies of Donne and Dickens, and a biography of William Golding.  The Unexpected Professor,  his memoir, was a  Sunday Times  best-seller.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Epic of Gilgamesh — Analysis Of Immortality Through The Epic Of Gilgamesh

Analysis of Immortality Through The Epic of Gilgamesh

• Categories: Epic of Gilgamesh Immortality Poetry

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The Epic of Gilgamesh Analysis Essay

Introduction.

The epic of Gilgamesh is one of the oldest poems written from Mesopotamia, a country that is present day Iraq. It is a story of two legends, Gilgamesh and Enkidu who were the greatest of friends. In the story, Enkidu who was created to be wild is meant to counteract the oppression of King Gilgamesh on the inhabitants of the Uruk territory.

They become legends while working together and the number of dangerous encounters they conquer causes the gods to be unhappy with them. Together they make a sojourn to the wild mountains of Cedar and concertedly kill Humbaba who was the monster guarding the mountains. The wrath of the gods becomes evident when the two comrades put the Bull of Heaven to death; goddess Ishtar had sent this bull to check the excesses of Gilgamesh. It was an abomination to kill the messenger of the gods.

Displeased by their actions the gods in turn kill Enkidu and this incident marks a turning point in the life of Gilgamesh. The death of his close confidant sends him to embark on a quest to discover immortality. The remaining part of his life, he spends trying to seek the solution to cheat death.

The concept of immortality comes out more clearly when he sets out to meet Utnapishti who is considered an immortal hero but he breaks his heart when he announces that the gods during creation give only death but retain with them eternal life. This ideally ends his perilous search for eternity and indeed justifies the preposition that it would have been difficult for Gilgamesh to change if Enkidu would have remained alive. Enkidu’s death therefore changed the life of Gilgamesh.

The entire epic can be rightly divided in two halves, the beginning essentially exploring the exploits of the two legends working together. Heroism is explicated from their conquests of the giant Humbaba and the messenger of the gods (the Bull of Heaven).

Their friendship and togetherness (unity of purpose) is fundamental as they support each other to destroy a common enemy (Humbaba and the Bull). In this except “Hurry up, step up to him, do not let him go. Climb to the woods, do not be afraid.” (Tablet IV, Column V, 43-44). We see how the two collaborate and “They cut off the head of Humbaba” (Sandars, 47).

This death infuriates the gods who now vow to destroy Enkidu. Enkidu finally dies and this marks the turning point in the life of Gilgamesh, he is worried and is forced to change his antics, his lifestyle and convictions, he now realizes that he was mistaken to imagine that he would live forever.

The gods intentionally decide to take away his closest companion in order to warn him that one day soon, he too shall die. Confused and worried by the truth, Gilgamesh is in a state of denial. With the corpse of his colleague before him as per (Tablet VIII, Column II, 15-16) it says, “I touched his heart, it does not beat”

He embarks on a quest to find immortality and reverse death, “me! Will I too not die like Enkidu? Sorrow was come into my belly. I fear death; I roam over the hills. I will seize the road; quickly I will go to the house of Utnapishiti offspring of Ubaratutu. I approach the entrance of the mountain at night. Lions I see, and am terrified. I lift my head to pray to the mood god sin: For a dream I go to the gods in prayer… preserve me!” (Tablet IX, Column I, 3-12).

Death is permanently inevitable and man can never attain eternity. Gilgamesh finally realizes this though late in the epic. A legend previously portrayed as a hero and conqueror of many now cannot conquer immortality, his entire lifestyle changes from a brave and confident warrior to a fearful personality in complete denial of the facts of life.

His initial life of bravery was useless as he finally discovers in the final sections of the text. The response he receives from Utnapishitim deflates his ambition and brings him back to earth. “Never has a mortal man done that Gilgamesh” (Tablet IX Column III, 8).

The death of his colleague humbles him as he had initially placed himself on the same status with the gods not knowing that he was a mortal man. “The fate of mankind overtook him… in fear of death I roam the wilderness…. Me shall not lie down like him, never to move?” (Tablet X Column II, 3, 8, 13-14) it finally dawns on him that “From the beginning, there is no permanence” (Tablet X, Column VII, 32).

In the beginning, the great warrior king Gilgamesh had acquired great amount of wisdom and experience s in combat. In the end however, he is unable to translate his prowess in war and battle to conquer immortality, this indicates a significant shift in his life from a hero to a defeated warrior, it illustrates that however strong, one cannot conquer himself

In the beginning also Gilgamesh was seen as a king who put his subjects under an oppressive regime, that is the reason the gods sent Enkidu to help counter his oppressive regime but instead they collaborate with Enkidu to destroy and kill the messenger of the gods, the gods are unhappy and want to communicate to him that he cannot conquer immortality; they however do this indirectly by killing Enkidu and this manages to instill fear in his life. Thus his oppressive regime on the outset finally comes to haunt him in his latter years.

He was oppressive to his subjects but now the thought that he too shall finally die oppresses him too and puts him at the same level with the people he ruled. No one is special in life; death is for everyone and makes all people equal, king or servant, warrior or subject.

From the beginning, the warrior king is seen as being adventurous, self righteous and one who is motivated by fame. Had the partnership between him and his comrade Enkidu persisted, he would never have changed his lifestyle and convictions; however the death of his accomplice makes to seriously contemplate his purpose for living.

He begins to ask questions about his own morality, he fails to accept the truth and tries to disapprove it but realizes that his efforts to justify himself are futile, this is what caused the king’s wander dangerously in search for morality and personal growth (Sparknotes, 45).

In essence the epic of Gilgamesh emphasizes the significance of a simple life. It is important for one to live within their means without struggling to achieve what is impossible or unachievable. Life itself is limited to mortality and an understanding of this fact shall lead to living it honestly and morally.

It teaches us the importance of humility and demonstrates how difficult it is for one to achieve greatness and fame with humility. Human beings are encouraged to strike a balance between greatness and humility in as much the two are in opposition to each other. King Gilgamesh by being a great legend in battle lost his human perspective of morality and humility. He was too full of himself and wanted to place himself next to the gods because he had forgotten that he was a mortal being.

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This Is the Way the World Ends (According to Novelists)

A new kind of disaster fiction is serving as scenario planning for real global crises. Call it the apocalyptic systems thriller.

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By Hari Kunzru

Hari Kunzru’s next novel, “Blue Ruin,” will be published in May.

• March 29, 2024

In the opening chapters of “2054,” a new thriller co-written by Elliot Ackerman and Adm. James Stavridis, the action shifts every page or two — from a private jet, to the White House, to a Ritz-Carlton hotel, to Capitol Hill and elsewhere. The short sections are titled with locations and time stamps (including time zones) to signify global scope and high stakes. We understand at once that this is a story too big to be told from one perspective.

It’s a familiar technique; in movies, such titles are often given extra technical sheen with a flashing cursor that prints them out across the screen, a skeuomorphic legacy of teletype and early command-line interfaces. The implication is that diverse situations are being monitored in some way, logged and recorded by a technically proficient authority that sees them as part of a coherent whole.

“2054” is a sequel to “2034,” “a novel of the next world war” that meticulously laid out a sequence of events starting with a naval confrontation in the South China Sea and ending in nuclear conflict. Twenty years afterward, Sandy Chowdhury, a character in the first novel, asks the pilot of his Gulfstream to divert so he can view the reconstruction of Galveston, Texas, which was leveled by a Chinese warhead. The physical consequences of the devastation are being repaired, but the social and political divisions remain.

The geopolitical epic is at least as old as “War and Peace,” but there’s a particular kind of novel that came into its own with globalization, taking on new life in recent years. Call it the apocalyptic systems thriller, or, because abbreviations and acronyms are crucial to its aesthetic, the A.S.T.

Multi-stranded, terse, often anchored in character just enough to drive the action forward, these books invite us to take an elevated, panoramic view of events that extend too far in space and time to be grasped by a single narrative consciousness. Conflict, climate change, pandemics and natural disasters offer ways to contemplate our interconnection and interdependence. At its best, this kind of fiction can induce a kind of sublime awe at the complexity of the global networks in which we’re enmeshed: A butterfly flaps its wings in Seoul and the Dow crashes; a hacker steals a password and war breaks out.

The currency of the A.S.T. is plausibility. It can be counterfactual, but never fantastical. It differs from other kinds of thrillers in its willingness to indulge in essayistic digressions about technology or policy. In some cases, the story may even take second place to these ideas, a mere vehicle for the delivery of an info-payload. In this, the A.S.T. is essentially a subgenre of SF, or at least the kind of science fiction that prioritizes world-building over other kinds of narrative pleasure. Indeed, many A.S.T.s, like “2034” and “2054,” are near-future tales, extrapolating from the present to a carefully imagined next five minutes, designed to elicit a little spark of recognition, the feeling of being shown a possible path from “here” to a utopian or dystopian “there.”

“The End of October,” Lawrence Wright’s eerily prescient novel about a global influenza pandemic, was written before Covid and published in the early days of the 2020 lockdown. Like Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 pandemic drama, “Contagion,” which experienced a boom in streaming in early 2020, Wright’s book generated a lot of affect, at least in that moment, from its power of extrapolation. We were in the early days of something; we didn’t know what. Here were narratives that showed what we could be facing if the pandemic intensified to the point of mass death and social breakdown. Naturally, we could not look away.

To succeed, this kind of story has to feel true. Even as the A.S.T. indulges in thriller tropes, the chases and explosions must be anchored by a kind of epistemological authority. We must believe that what we’re reading is something more than a product of the writer’s fevered imagination. Wright, who won a Pulitzer for “The Looming Tower,” his account of 9/11, derives his authority from extensive and rigorous research. In the acknowledgments (always an important part of an A.S.T.) he credits virologists and public health officials, as well as a number of submariners, who helped with an extended sequence that takes place aboard one of the U.S. Navy’s long-range underwater vessels.

Ackerman and Stavridis derive their authority from their military experience. Ackerman served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan as a Marine. Stavridis retired as a four-star admiral and served as NATO’s supreme allied commander for Europe. When they’re describing the buildup to war in “2034,” their procedural knowledge gives their story a verisimilitude that elevates its workmanlike telling. As Navy men, they are not above a little light trolling of the other branches of the armed forces: How else are we to understand a novel about World War III without a single mention (as far as I’m able to tell) of the Army?

The interwoven character arcs of “2034” convey what really seems to interest the authors — a set of warnings and predictions aimed at their peers in what used to be called the military-industrial complex. The ladder of escalation begins with a Chinese demonstration of decisive cyberwar superiority, a capability gap that leads to disaster. The vulnerability of global communications systems is a preoccupation, as is the rise of India as a military power. The important theaters of war are naval ones — the South China Sea and the Strait of Hormuz. So maybe that’s where military spending ought to be directed? Just a thought from the admiral.

The sequel, however, turns its attention to biotechnology and American domestic partisanship. The president dies suddenly from a mysterious growth on his heart, raising fears of a new kind of bioweapon based on “remote gene editing” technology. His death leads to civil unrest, and takes a motley crew of characters, including Chowdhury, a genetics researcher and a seductive diving instructor, through an eccentric riff on “Heart of Darkness.” They head upriver to find a reclusive figure — not Kurtz, but a centenarian Ray Kurzweil, the ebullient (and real) Silicon Valley futurist and promoter of transhumanism. The future of humanity will be decided in the lab, the authors caution, and we are sorely unprepared.

Experts on military matters, Ackerman and Stavridis are much less secure on scientific terrain. Their notion of the world-changing “singularity,” drawn from Kurzweil, is little more than metaphysical hand-waving, and their descriptions of biotechnology lack substance, which drains their tale of the most important quality of any A.S.T.: procedural plausibility.

The most celebrated example of the A.S.T. in recent years — and the book that, in its breadth of speculation, sets the standard for the genre — is Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Ministry for the Future,” which attempts the enormous task of imagining a coordinated global response to another grave threat to humanity, climate change. From its terrifying opening set piece, which portrays a lethal heat event in north India, it expands across the globe and through decades, laying out strategies for alleviating the crisis. Along the way, the story is studded by capsule essays on a range of technical topics, from the Gini Coefficient and tax policy to carbon sequestration and the Jevons Paradox .

This is fiction as simulation, running versions of events, trying to imagine how things might be if the pieces on the board were arranged in a certain way, rather than playing the other games novelists play, imagining what could never be or simply never was. One ancestor of this kind of work is the 19th-century social novel: Think of Zola’s meticulously researched Rougon-Macquart sequence, a 20-book panorama of life under the French Second Empire. A more recent predecessor is the near-future cyberpunk narrative exemplified by Neal Stephenson and William Gibson. Still another would be the kind of techno-thriller pioneered by Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton, particularly the spate of novels published late in the Cold War, including Clancy’s “Red Storm Rising” and Gen. Sir John Hackett’s “The Third World War,” which imagined hostilities between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. But there’s a different tradition behind the A.S.T., one outside conventional literary history — corporate scenario planning.

During the Cold War, one think tank was central to the business of imagining the American future. The RAND Corporation had been spun out of the Department of War to produce policy proposals for the U.S. government. It used game theory to model nuclear escalation and collected what would now be called “big data” (in retrospect, woefully small) to guide the conduct of the Vietnam War. A RAND futurist called Herman Kahn began to supplement mathematical models with what he termed “scenarios,” war-game narratives illustrating “rungs of the escalation ladder” of nuclear conflict, from “ostensible crisis” through “justifiable counterforce attack” to “spasm or insensate war.” The storytelling element was a daring innovation in an organizational culture that valued quantitative analysis.

In the early 1970s, the oil company Royal Dutch Shell hired the Frenchman Pierre Wack to run its strategic planning department. A disciple of Kahn, Wack was also an early corporate adopter of “mindfulness” and a student of the Caucasian mystic George Gurdjieff. Wack made scenario planning a kind of structured science fiction, producing not a single forecast but several competing images of the future. Participants were encouraged to step away from the “official future” — whatever the orthodoxy might be in their organization.

Wack’s scenario planning was credited with helping Shell weather the oil shocks of the ’70s, and this style of “possible future” storytelling gradually spread beyond the company, finding fertile ground in the emerging Bay Area tech scene. By the 1990s, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand, was a partner in a scenario planning consultancy. Wired magazine ran a “scenarios” issue in 1995, detailing possible futures imagined by writers of speculative fiction like Stephenson, Bruce Sterling and Douglas Coupland, completing the fusion of scenario planning with more traditional literary pursuits.

So, while the A.S.T. is a form of entertainment, it’s also meant to enlighten the planners and decision makers who might grab a hardcover off the shelf at an airport bookstore. Bill Gates and Barack Obama have recommended “The Ministry for the Future.” Robinson spoke at the 2022 World Economic Forum in Davos. Stavridis and Ackerman have spoken at think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, the Atlantic Council and the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. As fiction for the Davos set, the A.S.T. is a tool for both forecasting and navigating the troubles to come.

This dual purpose is made particularly clear in “AI 2041,” a recent book by Kai-Fu Lee, the former president of Google China, and Chen Qiufan, one of China’s most celebrated SF writers. In it, Chen writes 10 short stories, each illustrating a scenario that Lee wants to discuss. Lee introduces the stories and writes an extensive commentary after each one, detailing the technological possibilities and social issues that it raises. Chen’s fictions are rather swamped by Lee’s context, which makes them into something like moral fables, mere illustrations of his points.

Why is the A.S.T. so salient right now? What itch is it scratching? One of the most astute thinkers about the emergent networked future is the design theorist Benjamin Bratton. In “The Revenge of the Real,” a work of nonfiction published in 2021, he proposes a “politics for a post-pandemic world,” suggesting that Covid has trained us to see ourselves in an “epidemiological” way: Like it or not, we are, inescapably, a population as well as individuals. We have undergone a kind of crash course in systems thinking that will, Bratton hopes, force us to approach our problems at global scale. “It is necessary,” he writes, “for a society to be able to sense, model and act back upon itself, and it is necessary for it to plan and provide for the care of its people.”

The aesthetic of the A.S.T., with its flaunting of globalization, its pleasure in technical advances and its refusal of the “single window” into its stories, does have a utopian dimension — the imagination of what Bratton calls “planetary competency.” The message is one of resilience, of human beings acting in concert, muddling through problems in the hope of navigating what Pierre Wack called “the rapids” of the near future, into calmer waters beyond.

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