It is not every day that legal research becomes the foundation for a work of speculative fiction.

For Dr Annette Hübschle, in the Faculty’s Global Risk Governance Project, a recent collaboration with South African author Nerine Dorman offered precisely that opportunity. The partnership was part of the Applied African Speculative Fiction project, an Imperial College London initiative that pairs writers with researchers to explore pressing questions through storytelling.

“The project responds to a question posed by Wole Talabi,” Hübschle explains, “about where a critical science fiction ecosystem might exist, one where writers, scientists, engineers, and futurists interact and learn from each other.”

The result of this collaboration is A Shadow in the Sun, a striking short story set in a near-future Karoo. In this imagined landscape, Big Tech billionaires have de-extincted the black rhino, reintroducing it onto land once farmed by their families. Nearby, communities displaced from that land queue for water in a resettlement site over the mountain.

The premise is speculative, but its concerns are grounded in real-world debates.

“The story engages with almost everything I have spent twenty years thinking about,” Hübschle notes, pointing to themes such as fortress conservation, the militarisation of protected areas, surveillance in the wild, and the ethics of de-extinction. At its core is a deeper question about what Dr Hübschle describes as “the deeply uneven harmscapes these arrangements produce for people, species, and ecosystems.”

What makes the speculative fiction project distinctive is not only its subject matter, but its method.

Dr Hübschle describes the collaboration as both unusual and deeply rewarding. “Our conversations about rhino horn supply chains, community dispossession, and the political economy of ‘saving nature’ ended up somewhere academic writing cannot quite reach, inside characters, dialogue, and the emotional register only fiction opens up.”

Through narrative, complex legal and ethical questions take on new form. They are no longer confined to analysis or policy debate, but are experienced through perspective, tension, and voice.

The Karoo setting intensifies this effect. Familiar yet reimagined, it becomes a space where past and future collide. Land, memory, and power are layered into the story’s landscape, raising difficult questions about restoration, ownership and justice.

For a Law Faculty, this kind of work signals a willingness to think differently about how knowledge is produced and shared. Storytelling, Hübschle suggests, is not a departure from research but an extension of it. “Storytelling is an amazing method of science communication,” she reflects. “It reaches audiences that researchers often don’t.”

In A Shadow in the Sun, the law is not only analysed. It is felt. And in that shift, new possibilities emerge for how legal scholarship can engage with the world it seeks to understand.

The short story can be read on the Applied African Speculative Fiction Project website.