Science fiction futures
I would call our work to change the world “science fictional behavior”—being concerned with the way our actions and beliefs now, today, will shape the future, tomorrow, the next generations.
Science fiction is simply a way to practice the future together. I suspect that is what many of you are up to, practicing futures together, practicing justice together, living into new stories. It is our right and responsibility to create a new world.
Visionary science fiction and fantasy is a way to practice the future. This is not a utopian ideal or a radical proposition, but something that has happened before:
During the Cold War, while much of American literature was basically suburban white boys talking about their dicks, science fiction did a lot of the real cultural work.
McKenzie Wark, Sensoria, p.24
Or as adrienne maree brown says, “showing Black and white people sitting at a lunch counter together was science fiction.“
And for those of us from communities with historic collective trauma, we must understand that each of us is already science fiction walking around on two legs. Our ancestors dreamed us up and then bent reality to create us.
Science fiction and fantasy are also the perfect genre to explore the “contaminations” of queerness and “monstrosity,” both of which will have to be part of a sustainable future. We want a messy plurality, not purity and supremacy.
The most consistent vision of such symbiogenetic re-worldings can be found in the work of Donna Haraway, who continually seeks ways to imagine “worlds we might yet live in” amid the techno-convulsions of late capitalism. Steadily refusing the twin temptations of pure beginning and total apocalypse (“the world has always been in the middle of things”), Haraway’s worlders are always already hybrid and contaminated: natural-cultural concatenations who affirm that “there can be an elsewhere, not as utopian fantasy or relativist escape, but an elsewhere born out of the hard (and sometimes joyful) work of getting on together in a kin group.”
Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Pantheologies, p. 135