“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – the realists of a larger reality.”
Ursula K. Le Guin
This was part of Le Guin’s acceptance speech in 2014 for the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. This is the video; the introduction is by Neil Gaiman, and this quote starts at about 7 minutes 30 seconds in:
Speculative fiction is influenced by today’s technology, but it influences tomorrow’s. We’ve had a couple of decades of dystopian fiction, including that which is set in the near-future.
Fiction that is both optimistic and realistic is hard. As we saw in our recent series on Misinformation and how to counter it, these are hard problems that require both large-scale cooperation and innovative solutions.
And that is why fiction that imagine such futures – ones that face and overcome such problems – are not just inspiring, hope-giving, but at their best they are a spark that lights, however slightly or briefly, a path to an actual real-world solution.