Waiting for geography

The editors of this issue of the journal called for a response to the question: 'What next?' Instead of offering a programmatic or visionary statement, I endeavour to amplify the sense of suspense that would ordinarily be foreclosed by answering the question directly. This is achieved by playing off the literal and colloquial meanings of the question: 'What next?', 'What more absurd, shocking, or surprising thing is possible?' The upshot of this encounter is an undecidable vacillation between the probable and the improbable, the rational and the irrational, and the expected and the unexpected. By alluding to both realism and surrealism, and drawing on programmation, speculation, and tabulation, I deploy some poststructuralist and materialist motifs in order to ensure that the future of human geography will remain in perpetual suspense and thereby open to those aleatory encounters that come from who knows where.