Futures Reimagined: The Role Of Fantasy & Sci-Fi In Building New Imaginaries

As the poet Lucille Clifton writes, “We cannot create what we cannot imagine”, imagination is a crucial component of human evolution. It is no coincidence that the reading lists of today’s tech executives are filled with Science Fiction books. And Fantasy is where it all starts.

Fantasy For Children

For children’s psychological development, fantastical stories are not so much about the elves, wizards and fairies but rather the adventures the characters embark on, the hardships they had to overcome, and the struggles between good and evil. Conflicts are played out in petri dishes inside the grand lab of imagination, safe from real-world consequences and the no man’s land of ambiguity. In this sterile lab, ripples of life -from rejection, defeat, hatred, to love- unravel in allegories; farcical struggles in vivid imitations that can sometimes provide much needed perspective and reflection when similar scenes are played out in real life.

'Fantasy: Realms of Imagination' Exhibition Poster Art. Sveta Dorosheva (2024). British Library

This makes the stories we read in our childhoods foundational in developing our sense of empathy for others, and Fantasy plays a major role in this. Even when we are reading a fictional story, we -for a brief moment- become invested in the imaginary world and identifying with a character’s journey as if they are our own.

But they can also embed in us values from generations yonder, both considered universal today and those specific to an era- from chivalry, jingoism, to various prejudices. Revisions to Roald Dahl’s books in 2023, for example, threw the literary world into turmoil as the wider public debated whether some of Dahl’s descriptions -especially those that related to ‘weight, height, mental health, gender and skin colour’- should have been changed to suit today’s sensibilities. Likewise, the JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series has also been accused of containing damaging allegories that perpetuates long-held prejudices. Wizarding-Muggle relations, let alone Wizarding-House Elves relations shall we say, are far from equal.

Allegorical prejudices aside, what makes children’s imaginations excel far beyond adult imaginations is that while adults confine their imaginations to what would be most probable and practical in the real world, children’s imaginations are unincumbered by things like the laws of physics, economic realities and social decorum. And Fantasy is an exceptional vehicle for this. All a good fantasy world needs is a self-contained logic and internal system that is strictly followed throughout a narrative. The imaginary world can have as many dragons, blood pacts, and prophecies as it likes, but it can only work when the logic that a writer has set out within that world is strictly followed.

New World Imaginaries

Now this is where the Fantasy genre becomes an especially effective medium to explore new, alternative worlds and ideologies. With Fantasy, non-negotiable aspects of contemporary society can be suspended as the author creates their own set of rules with its own social etiquettes and economic systems. Indeed, numerous writers with a penchant for imagination -that was inevitably developed from childhood- has taken advantage of the Fantasy genre to push against the stifling social structures in their day.

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Queen Mab (1813) is not just a fairy tale about a fairy queen who takes a woman on a dreamlike journey to her celestial palace, it’s about Shelley’s dreams for an equal society that championed republicanism, atheism, and vegetarianism. Indeed, the poem was often cited during the Chartists’ working class movement in the 1830s-40s.

And before Shelley, there was Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and Plato’s Republic before that. Both ground-breaking works of literature grappled with notions of what an ideal state would look like. More for example, imagined a society where all religions are tolerated equally, and proposes a form of proto-communism where there is no private property and agricultural produce are shared. Plato on the other hand, proposes three social classes, each corresponding with human reason, spirit, and appetite.

Science Fiction And Today’s Tech

The same muscles we use to construct potential world imaginaries are the very ones we also use in Science Fiction, a genre that holds an almost messianic place for Silicon Valley and the tech titans of the world today- whether advisable or not. At the genesis of it all, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is widely regarded as the first modern Fantasy and Science Fiction novel in the English language. Shelley uses traditional Fantasy tropes of the monster but extrapolates from the scientific advancements that were rife during her lifetime, a signature trait of the Science Fiction genre.

Likewise, today’s technological ambitions are often echoes of the Sci-Fi stories read by the tech executives who now call the shots for much of the world’s future trajectory. Elon Musk’s a fan of the video game Deus Ex, Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and the Foundation (1951) series, Isaac Asimov’s seminal works about the fall of a human Galactic Empire and the beginnings of a new civilization. Google’s former president Sergey Brin cites Snow Crash (1992) -which predicted ‘the rise of online social networks’ as well as the idea do the metaverse- as a key inspiration.

Similarly, academic heavyweights like MIT, Penn State and Georgia Tech are incorporating Science Fiction into their Engineering curriculums. Corporate exercises in innovation may now include generating multiple scenarios for the future and producing ‘new products and business models’ to fit these futures.

But the clear horizon of opportunities that these tech bros see themselves reflected in is actually the same side of a double-edged sword, as many tech titans often miss the anxieties towards technological development and human hubris that are also explored in these works.  Elon Musk’s visions for space travel for example, seems to be a misaligned tribute to The Hitchhiker’s Guide, Douglas Adams’ satirical critique of wealthy individuals who build luxury colonies across the galaxy.

Misinterpreted or not, Sci-Fi and Fantasy now seems to be the chosen muses for today’s Future- showing how far the power of imagination has come from the fantastical stories of elves and wizards in the confines of our childhoods.