My high school history teacher stood with smug authority before forty kids he was supposed to educate and said, “No one in America goes hungry, unless they want to.” He said it like it was obvious, a joke.
I remembered how you could wait through the pain and stop feeling hungry after a day. The shame of vitamin deficiency sores on my face. The distended belly. I stood up, trembling, and said, “Excuse me, but I did go hungry, and I didn’t want to.”
And then the teacher explained to me why I was wrong.
I don’t remember his argument. Instead of whatever lesson he had intended, that day I learned that teachers lie, and that students believe them. He had been telling this lie unchallenged for years, and would tell it, unchallenged, for years after. His words had power to shape my lived experience in the imaginations of my peers. He told me how my past was not mine, and held me after class for being “flippant.”
This educated man was unable to imagine my life the way I described it. My past wasn’t real to him, even though our bodies were in the same classroom.
This same teacher once told me, “What you think about when you are alone is who you really are.”
When I was alone, I thought about science fiction. FTL travel. Sapient robots. The future. I adored time travel stories and old pulp books from the sixties. I imagined talking to their authors. I wanted to lead 1965 Issac Asimov through the wonderful world of 1985. I imagined him beside me. “You see, we have computers … well, I don’t have one, but um … there’s one in the high school. Oh! And some people have microwaves … not that I have one I can show you but people talk about them, and uh ...”
I learned through the frustration of my own thought experiments that the future is not equally distributed.
I needed to imagine a better future. To build the hypothesis of a fuller life. That’s what enrolls students in courses. It’s what allows scientists to take the next step.
The importance of imagination in social change and technology is well-known and documented. Researchers at the University of Hawaii have found that science fiction is mentioned more than ever before in computer science research papers. (1) The pipeline of science fiction fan to scientist is visible, to the point that universities are investing in science fiction courses for their technology majors.
Miami University professor Heeyoung Tai invited me to speak to her biochemistry capstone class on science fiction and the unintended consequences of technology, a topic that is growing in urgency at universities. My focus was similar to this quote from Ed Finn, director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University: “Science fiction is a kind of laboratory to experiment intellectually with all sorts of ideas, and whether they’re technical or social changes, it allows you to examine all sorts of cultural assumptions about everything from justice to gender to physics.” (2)
How do we build a better future without imagining it?
The reason we care about unintended consequences is that every tool can be a weapon. We can imagine the human who first picked up a rock to break open a clam did not intend her invention to be used as a club. Making the future better doesn’t simply mean giving us better hammers. It means addressing our social problems, our ethical problems, our moral problems: Precisely where science fiction has traditionally concentrated most of its efforts. There’s a popular quote often attributed to Isaac Asimov that “It was easy to predict the car, it was hard to predict the traffic jam.” (3)
How do we build a more equitable future without imagining the lives of people from backgrounds different from our own? How do we educate future myopic teachers to see beyond their own privileged existence and dogmatic insistence? Fiction is, in fact, a powerful tool to that end.
Psychologists have found that people build the same mental pathways around fictional characters as they do for real, remembered friends. Not only that, but the more a reader is absorbed in a story, the more the story changes them. “Researchers have repeatedly found that reader attitudes shift to become more congruent with the ideas expressed in a [fiction] narrative," writes psychologist Raymond Mar. (4)
Humanity has used fiction since time out of mind to influence the minds of others, from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to recent climate change novels like Sam Miller’s Blackfish City. When CRISPR technology hit, journalists and lawmakers had decades of science fiction analogies to outline the ethical issues in genetic modification. People fighting against modified crops that cannot reproduce in order to maintain a monopoly on seeds can point to The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi for the ramifications of this policy.
The year 2020 saw the largest increase in poverty in the US since the government began tracking in 1960. (5) Yet, diversity in fiction, while increasing, still lags way behind reality. A Vox article found in 2014 that only 8% of science fiction and fantasy movies had a person of color as a protagonist, and of those, 75% were Will Smith. (6) More of tomorrow’s technology-imaginers, leaders, and citizens are not seeing themselves in the homogenous view of mainstream fiction.
We have to be able to imagine social and mechanical technologies in order to create them. Soft and hard. Technology alone will never make the world better. Justice and equality are needed, too. We have to be able to imagine the inner lives of others to build a more equitable future. This is why, now more than ever, it’s important to write science fiction from under-represented perspectives.
So much human labor goes unnoticed. The medieval peasant. The AI training and content moderation sweatshops in the global south. A spaceship needs a janitor, even if it’s a robot. The work has to be done. Too often we’ve put the reader in the position of a feudal lord, unaware what brings the food to his table, or the AI user, assuming that her output was magically created by the algorithm and not thousands of hours of human work.
The machinery of culture, of technology, of society, moves in the hands that sweep, paint, farm, or hammer. Don’t you want your readers to see that vital connection? How else can we imagine a role for ourselves as we really are in the human experiment?