For several years I have been working on Nostalgia del Futuro (NDF), a novel built through a series of narrative and conceptual kernels. Through characters, places, and dialogues, the book traverses different themes — from science to politics, from memory to love, from technology to the search for meaning — without sacrificing an internal coherence of tone, vision, and questioning of the future.
In NDF, these kernels are born from the meeting of personal experience, readings, places, relationships, and questions left open. They do not interrupt the story with a theoretical reflection, but transform an intuition, a memory, or an anxiety into narrative material. The NDF-Offshoots will continue this logic with greater temporal and thematic freedom: they may arise from new readings, subsequent experiences, or reflections matured beyond the drafting of the novel, but they will remain recognizable as offshoots of Nostalgia del Futuro because they will preserve its pace, some characteristics of the characters, the tension between thought and story, and that forward-looking nostalgia from which the entire project takes its name.
After a long phase of writing and revision, the manuscript is currently under editorial review. If the process continues as expected, the novel could see the light of day by the end of the year.
During this work I realized that some questions contained in NDF continued to generate new stories. Some were only hinted at in the novel, others led towards futures too distant or towards scenarios that would have required an autonomous path. Still others arose from articles published in the meantime on the blog and ended up intertwining with the themes of the book.
Thus were born the NDF-Offshoots.
The English term offshoot indicates a branch that grows from a common trunk. These stories are not previews of the novel, nor simple appendices to the main plot. They are autonomous explorations that share the same horizon of questions with Nostalgia del Futuro and, when necessary, resume the path of its characters, observing them in other times, under other conditions, or along developments only hinted at in the book.
However, the offshoots may also move freely with respect to the chronology of the main story: some will take place after the events narrated in the novel; others will develop in parallel, outside its field of vision; still others will go back in time, towards earlier episodes, characters who remained on the sidelines, or generations prior to those recounted in NDF.
They will thus be able to follow not only the protagonists, but also people who preceded, met, or influenced them, reconstructing the invisible trajectories through which a gesture, a phrase, a way of looking, or an unresolved question is transmitted from one life to another.
This will not, however, be a matter of prequels built to retrospectively explain the novel. Each Offshoot must preserve its own narrative autonomy and be readable even by those who do not know NDF. The link with the book may be explicit, through the return of a character or a place, but also much more subtle: an object, a habit, an inherited sensitivity, a thought that reappears elsewhere without its origin being immediately known. For those who have read the novel, these references will be able to illuminate a choice or a trait of a character; for everyone else, they will remain self-contained elements of the story told.
Sometimes the Offshoots will deepen an already present kernel; other times they will connect several of them together; still other times they will introduce new perspectives, capable of expanding the universe of NDF without betraying its identity. They will not, therefore, have the task of completing a plot left unfinished, but of showing how, around every story, many others exist: those that preceded it, those that developed at its margins, and those that could have taken shape along a different trajectory of time.
In a sense, they also represent a way to accompany the novel towards publication. While the manuscript follows its own editorial path, the Offshoots allow us to share with readers some of the ideas that constitute its breeding ground, transforming them into short stories, thought experiments, and possible futures. Some may become the core of new novels; others will remain as traces of possible novels, stories that could have been written and that will continue to exist in their unfinished form.