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Your Complete Guide to Dreaming Up a Survivable, Sustainable Future
How ‘visionary fiction’ can be used as a framework for building a better world for all humans
One of the key steps to building a survivable, sustainable future is envisioning and articulating what that future should look like. That might sound obvious, but it’s easier said than done, and it’s a step that’s too often taken for granted. And yet: Black-led movements have been advocating for police and prison abolition for decades, and describing what alternatives might be — big, ambitious visions that few thought possible. Until, suddenly, in the wake of the uprisings after George Floyd’s murder — they were.
Walidah Imarisha, a scholar, educator, author, and editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories for Social Justice Movements, calls this methodical, strategic dreaming that melds the imaginative power of science fiction with the tactical prowess of social justice movements “visionary fiction.” And she argues that we need such a framework now more than ever. The case is so compelling that OneZero dedicated a package to investigating this intersection where deep thinking about the future meets boots-on-the-ground activism.
Imarisha’s piece over at OneZero — “To Build a Future Without Police and Prisons, We Have to Imagine It First” — details the potency and progress of visionary fiction, and argues that activists and artists should not shy from huge, ambitious thinking at this loaded, historic moment.
To showcase what the form is capable of, OneZero also published a masterwork by one of the all-time great practitioners of visionary fiction — Bloodchild, by the science fiction legend Octavia E. Butler. Its investigation into the costs and legacy of human bondage is as potent as anything in the genre.
Finally, Imarisha put together a list of eight exemplary works of visionary fiction that will help activists, artists, and good citizens everywhere to constructively envision robust, better futures, and to put plans for realizing these tomorrows into the realm of the possible. And we need every tool we get our hands on about now — and it’s always best to start with the blueprint.
