From Myth to Metacosmos: Symbolic Orders of Possibility: 9 Speculative Universes: Science Fiction and Simulation Cosmologies

If structuralism mapped symbolic possibility as systemic difference, the speculative imagination of the late modern era extended that logic into the future, the virtual, and the technological. Science fiction became not simply entertainment but a symbolic laboratory: a space in which cosmologies could be tested, inverted, and multiplied. Possibility was no longer confined to the inherited orders of religion, philosophy, or literature—it became the very substance of imagined worlds.

Isaac Asimov’s galactic empires and robot laws exemplify this shift. His narratives extrapolated rationalist and Enlightenment systems into vast symbolic architectures, where ethics, technology, and social order unfolded as thought experiments in cosmic scale. Possibility here was not mythic or divine, but algorithmic: rules and principles codified the horizon of potential action. The symbolic cosmos was refigured as a programmable order.

Ursula K. Le Guin offered a counterpoint, foregrounding relationality, plurality, and lived possibility. Her imagined worlds—of gender fluidity, anarchist collectives, or radically alien lifeworlds—opened symbolic orders to affective and ethical multiplicity. Here the cosmos was not a single system but a constellation of possible worlds, each construal reflecting different ways of being, knowing, and living together. Symbolic architecture became a site of contestation, where cultural logics could be re-imagined and re-aligned.

Parallel to literary speculation, contemporary theorists of the simulation hypothesis reframed possibility itself through digital mediation. The claim that our universe might be a simulation displaces symbolic order into technological recursion: the cosmos as code, consciousness as computational artefact. Whether embraced as hypothesis, allegory, or provocation, this move crystallises a broader shift—the recognition that symbolic architectures may themselves be generative engines, capable of enclosing or proliferating entire orders of possibility.

Science fiction and simulation cosmologies thus represent a double movement. On one hand, they extend symbolic construal into imagined and virtual domains, multiplying potentialities beyond the bounds of the empirically given. On the other, they reveal how technological mediation can itself become a cosmological principle, shaping not just stories but our very imagination of reality.

In these speculative universes, the symbolic cosmos becomes reflexively aware of itself as a construct—capable of being coded, simulated, and endlessly reconfigured. Possibility is no longer only narrated or structured; it is simulated, tested, and iterated. The horizon of construal now includes worlds that may never exist, but whose symbolic architectures transform the way we live in this one.