A call to arms for bold, utopian social dreaming.
Science fictions are often taken for pure fantasy; strange simulations and parallel universes created for our entertainment, only remotely connected to reality. We make and enjoy them for enjoyment’s sake, and they work well. But sci-fi doesn’t only fantasise with the unreal. Throughout the years, science fiction writers have also been building their imaginary worlds as provocative tools to speculate on new ways of living and existing in this world. They imagine social and technological futures not to escape reality, but to carefully experiment with different methods of understanding, criticising and even changing it.
In 1905, with one of the earliest pieces of feminist science fiction, Rokeya Sakhawar Hossain envisioned a gender-inverted, geo-engineered future in order to push for a present where women might have had the same basic rights as men. In his 1930s Robot Series, Isaac Asimov didn’t only invent the term “robot” but also — in anticipation of their dangers — a strict, human-serving morality that scientists should ensure governs them.
Those speculative fictions are as much concerned with the present, the here-and-now, as they are with some distant, yet-to-be-realised future. Fiction gives them form and flavour, but the subject matter they’re really dealing with are the sharp facts of the present, which — in every passing moment — create our future. As the famous cliché goes, “The novel 1984 isn’t really about 1984, but about 1948; the year in which it was written.”
In these ways, speculative fiction can be considered social dreaming, and their writers can join the ranks of other great social dreamers: the inventors, innovators, radicals and revolutionaries who felt discontent to accept what was, and rather spent their energy pushing for what could be.
We live in a moment of radical change, when even our most sophisticated tools of prediction are falling short. As the horizon of our uncertainty grows ever nearer, and the depth of our problems ever deeper, we should use every tool in our toolkit to dream more deeply and more often, at all levels of society.
Though our fortunes are never fixed, it can sometimes feel like we’re racing down the highway of one inevitable future. But regardless of whether we’re looking for them, there are forks in our road, and the more we prototype, prod and pick them apart, the more capable we are to spot signposts today that might lead us toward a better and brighter tomorrow.
In the words of the prolific science fiction author Frederik Pohl, “A good writer does not think up only the automobile, but also the traffic jam.”
So as we face the fog on our horizons, let’s keep speculating, let’s keep imagining and, above all, let’s keep dreaming — wide-eyed and active in the maze of possibilities that lie before us.
