The Mythurgic Age

We seem to be living through the eerie collapse of science fiction into daily news. Not because the future has “arrived” in some clean, utopian sense, but because the imaginative machinery of the twentieth century — artificial minds, alien visitors, planetary engineering, genetic resurrection, moon bases, quantum machines, megastructures of computation — has become the atmosphere of ordinary life. We wake up, check the headlines, and find another announcement that feels less like policy, science, or business than like a transmission from a paperback cover.

This is the Mythurgic Age: an age in which fiction does not merely predict reality, but trains, funds, names, directs, and accelerates it. Mythurgy — from mythos, story, and -ourgia, work, the root that gives us metallurgy, dramaturgy, and liturgy, from leitourgia, public work — is story as labour: fiction that does not describe worlds so much as work on this one. Not myths as beliefs to be held, but myths as engines to be run — pouring concrete, routing capital, naming machines. Science fiction gave us not just images of the future, but operating myths: the thinking machine, the alien encounter, the space colony, the resurrected species, the godlike superintelligence, the planetary computer. These were once speculative devices. Now they function as investment theses, corporate roadmaps, military doctrines, recruitment posters, memes, and spiritual anxieties.

The central mythurgy

Artificial intelligence is the central mythurgy of the moment. Since 2023, the old science-fiction trope of the Turing Test has returned from the museum of cybernetics into the news cycle. GPT-4 did not simply “think”; it performed humanlike conversation so well that researchers found people could not reliably distinguish it from a person under some test conditions¹. The point is not whether the Turing Test proves intelligence. It almost certainly does not. The point is that a cultural myth from the dawn of computing has become a social fact. We now live among entities that speak in the register of persons, tutors, friends, workers, prophets, bureaucrats, therapists, ghosts. The science-fictional question “Can machines pass as human?” has become less important than the social question “What happens when human institutions can no longer assume they are dealing with humans?”

Around AI, the language has become openly theological. AGI, ASI, alignment, control, emergence, agency, doom, salvation: these are not neutral engineering terms. They are apocalyptic terms smuggled into product launches and research labs. Companies call themselves Anthropic, invoking the Anthropic Principle; Palantir, after Tolkien’s dangerous seeing-stones; Anduril, after the reforged sword of kings. Datacenters and AI projects acquire names like Colossus, Hyperion, Prometheus, and Stargate. xAI’s Colossus is described by the company as one of its largest AI compute clusters². Stargate has been reported as part of a planned multi-gigawatt AI datacenter complex in Abu Dhabi³. Meta’s Hyperion has been described as a future multi-gigawatt AI cluster⁴. These names matter. They are not decoration. They reveal the imaginary scale at which the builders understand themselves: titan, portal, godfire, oracle, world-machine.

Folk-philosophies of the sublime

Even memes now operate as miniature mythurgies. To be “red-pilled” once meant to awaken from a simulation in The Matrix; now it names a whole political, psychological, and conspiratorial posture. “NPC” escaped video-game logic to become a way of describing supposedly unconscious citizens. “The simulation” moved from metaphysics and cyberpunk into casual speech. “Skynet” became shorthand for autonomous AI catastrophe. “Paperclip maximizer” became a comic nightmare of misaligned optimization. “Doomer,” “accelerationist,” “based,” “blackpilled,” “AI waifu,” “uploading consciousness,” “living in a timeline”: these are not just internet jokes. They are folk-philosophies of the technological sublime, compressed into shareable code. Memes are how the masses metabolize the impossible before institutions know what to do with it.

Meanwhile, the UFO has returned from pulp culture and conspiracy into official language as the UAP. Hearings, Pentagon offices, NASA reports, military videos, whistleblowers, and public archives have not proven extraterrestrial visitation. But they have institutionalized the possibility-space. The U.S. government now maintains official UAP case materials, including unresolved cases and many mundane resolutions⁵. NASA has also published a UAP independent study report⁶. The strange thing is not that aliens are confirmed — they are not — but that the alien imaginary has moved from the fringe into bureaucracy. The saucer has become paperwork.

The pattern repeats

The same pattern repeats everywhere. Fusion energy, long the white whale of techno-optimism, now advances through national ignition experiments, private startups, superconducting magnets, and reactor prototypes⁷. Quantum computers remain far from universal magic machines, yet their promise keeps alive the dream of computation beyond classical intuition⁸: Google’s Willow chip performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers ten septillion (10²⁵) years — a number that vastly exceeds the age of the Universe⁹. CRISPR has turned genetic editing from a cyberpunk motif into a clinical and agricultural reality¹⁰. De-extinction, once safely contained in Jurassic Park, now appears in serious synthetic biology debates¹¹.

The dire wolf is perhaps the perfect emblem. Colossal Biosciences presented its gene-edited “dire wolf” pups as a breakthrough in de-extinction, while critics stressed that the animals are not literal resurrected dire wolves but gray wolves edited to express selected dire-wolf-like traits¹². One of the pups was named Khaleesi, and Colossal explicitly leaned into the cultural aura of Game of Thrones, where direwolves are the mythic companions of the Stark children of Westeros¹³. This is mythurgy in almost laboratory form: an extinct Pleistocene predator becomes famous through fantasy; fantasy creates mass fascination; fascination attracts capital, narrative, investors, and public attention; biotechnology then produces an animal whose meaning is inseparable from both ancient DNA and HBO mythology. The creature is not simply biological. It is genomic, cinematic, financial, symbolic.

Space has re-entered the same feedback loop. The Moon is again a destination through programs such as Artemis¹⁴; Mars remains both scientific target and civilizational fantasy¹⁵. Exoplanets multiply in catalogues, giving statistical weight to old dreams of other Earths¹⁶. The hypothetical Planet Nine remains unconfirmed, yet the search itself feels like a mythic residue: the hidden planet, the unseen body shaping the edge of the known¹⁷. Even the Vera C. Rubin Observatory¹⁸ and the coming Habitable Worlds Observatory¹⁹ sound less like instruments than like chapters in a cosmic epic.

Fictions as coordination mechanisms

What makes this age so uncanny is not simply technological progress. It is the fusion of progress with narrative. We do not only build tools; we build toward stories we have already told ourselves. The AI lab is haunted by 2001, Neuromancer, Her, Ex Machina, Terminator, Dune, The Culture, and I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. The space industry is haunted by Clarke, Heinlein, Asimov, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Star Trek. Synthetic biology is haunted by Jurassic Park, Frankenstein, Brave New World, Oryx and Crake, and now Game of Thrones. Datacenter landscapes increasingly look like Simon Stålenhag paintings: quiet fields, power lines, childhood roads, and behind them vast mute machines metabolizing the future.

Every age has been mythurgic. Every people has worked its stories into the world — pouring them into cathedrals, empires, and constitutions, living inside fictions it mistook for the given order. What sets ours apart is not that we make myths but how we run them: industrially, ambiently, and at planetary scale, faster than we can tell whether they are true. The Mythurgic Age is therefore not “the future becoming real.” It is more specific and more troubling: it is the age in which fictional futures become coordination mechanisms. A science-fiction idea attracts talent, capital, fear, regulation, resistance, and imitation. Those reactions make the idea more real. The myth of AGI brings more money into AGI labs. The myth of space settlement justifies rockets, contracts, lunar infrastructure, and Mars simulations. The myth of alien disclosure sustains hearings, archives, podcasts, and sensor programs. The myth of de-extinction builds companies, patents, edited animals, and ecological arguments. The story does not have to be true at the beginning. It only has to be compelling enough to organize behaviour.

This is why our time feels enchanted and exhausted at once. We are surrounded by miracles, but they arrive as platforms. We are offered transcendence, but in subscription form. We hear about godlike AI while watching schools, hospitals, ecosystems, and democracies strain under ordinary failures. We speak of lunar bases while failing to protect old-growth forests. We dream of resurrecting mammoths and dire wolves while driving living species toward extinction. We build planetary-scale computation while the actual planet overheats. The Mythurgic Age is not only an age of imagination made real; it is also an age in which imagination is captured by power before it can become wisdom.

Better mythurgies

The task, then, is not to reject science fiction. Science fiction remains one of the great tools for thinking beyond the present. The task is to notice which fictions are becoming infrastructural, who benefits from their realization, and what other futures are being crowded out.

There is an older, darker name for this feedback loop: hyperstition — fiction that makes itself real — coined in the 1990s by the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, a renegade theory collective at the University of Warwick whose members included Sadie Plant, Mark Fisher, and Nick Land. The lineage is not innocent. Land drifted into the anti-democratic politics of the “Dark Enlightenment”, and hyperstition remains a cherished tool of accelerationists who want the feedback loop spun faster, whatever it runs over. The word is worth keeping anyway, precisely because of who has carried it: it names the mechanism our most powerful builders actually believe in. If hyperstitions make worlds, then the answer to bad hyperstitions is not disbelief. It is better hyperstitions — worldlier ones.

The escape-fantasies all share a buried premise: that mind can outrun the planet that made it. The truer and stranger story is that we are inside it — our cultures and our machines woven into the living world, shaping it and shaped by it, never once standing apart. In that story we are one part of a living community of animals, plants, soils, waters, and weather, not its author. Its politics is fairness carried across every line we usually stop at — between peoples, between species, between the generations who will inherit the timeline we are writing now. Its measure of success is not escape velocity but a world left with more life than it found. These are not the softer dreams. They are the harder ones, because they ask us to stay.

The future is no longer ahead of us. It is circulating through us, recruiting us, naming our machines, shaping our fears, filling our memes, editing our animals, and asking to be built. The question is not whether we live in a science-fictional age. We do. The question is whose science fiction we are living inside — and whether we can still write another one.