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While prognoses about the future are as old as human society, this special issue argues that the proliferation of new ways of modelling, planning, and interpolating the future of resources and environments is an increasing feature of contemporary environmental politics. In our introduction, we draw out two dimensions to this prognostic politics: first, the processes of making predictions about the future; and second, the movement of these predictions through the unstable and messy institutions that act upon the future in the present. We argue that new regimes of environmental forecasting and contests over these prognoses are giving rise to new forms of nature, framings of time and space, and modes of politics.

This paper examines a number of French middle-brow novels, usually called at the time romans de murs, from the period 1880–1910. It shows how, in these stories, doctors are shown to foretell the course of narrative through the diagnosis of certain pathologies, especially psychosexual ones. These pathologies are thus represented as implacable narrative programmes. In effect, most of these novels renounce the standard fictional resources of intrigue and suspense in favour of the relentless working out of their initial prognosis. The authority of medical discourse is therefore not just confirmed and disseminated: it is elaborated as fatality in the very terms of the novel.

The overall survival of patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma is extremely low. Although gemcitabine is the standard used chemotherapy for this disease, clinical outcomes do not reflect significant improvements, not even when combined with adjuvant treatments. There is an urgent need for prognosis markers to be found. The aim of this study was to analyze the potential value of serum cytokines to find a profile that can predict the clinical outcome in patients with pancreatic cancer and to establish a practical prognosis index that significantly predicts patients' outcomes. We have conducted an extensive analysis of serum prognosis biomarkers using an antibody array comprising 507 human cytokines. Overall survival was estimated using the Kaplan-Meier method. Univariate and multivariate Cox's proportional hazard models were used to analyze prognosis factors. To determine the extent that survival could be predicted based on this index, we used the leave-one-out cross-validation model. The multivariate model showed a better performance and it could represent a novel panel of serum cytokines that correlates to poor prognosis in pancreatic cancer. B7-1/CD80, EG-VEGF/PK1, IL-29, NRG1-beta1/HRG1-beta1, and PD-ECGF expressions portend a poor prognosis for patients with pancreatic cancer and these cytokines could represent novel therapeutic targets for this disease. ; The study was fully supported by ROCHE FARMA S.A (ref. H/OH-TAR-10/131 and ref. H/OH-TRR-08/59) and Instituto de Salud Carlos III (ISCIII) (Clinical trial ref. EC08/00009), and the Government of Andalusia Project P12-TIC-2082.

In this paper, I explore a prognostic modality of environmental politics I callrisk in retrospect. I do so by examining conflicts that are not just over the ability of state science to know and govern the future, but also its failure to have been able to do so in the past. I begin by discussing the 2009 earthquake that hit the Italian city of L'Aquila and then turn to a similar case in Colombia, both of which reflect the constitutive relationship between political authority and foresight. I then trace the strong historical precedent for this type of political situation in Colombia by discussing a key cultural referent – Gabriel García Márquez's 1981 book,Chronicle of a death foretold –as well as the convergence of two catastrophic events during one week in November 1985 that were both seen, in their aftermath, as 'tragedies foretold'. I conclude by considering what it would mean for prognosis to become the terrain on which citizens engage in political relationships with the state.