Today I’d like to talk about two slightly different but overlapping ways of thinking of writing for the future. First, there is writing about the future itself, which sets out to imagine future worlds and future ways of living, as well as to tell people in the future about our lives here in the present. Second, there is the writing we might do in and for the future, starting now and continuing throughout the rest of our lives as writers and inhabitants of this planet.

Let’s begin with writing about the future. There are a lot of ways to categorize fictional futures, and any number of genres and subgenres we might talk about, including science fiction and the speculative, africanfuturism and afrofuturism, indigenous futurism, cyberpunk, solarpunk, hopepunk, apocalypse and post-apocalypse, and so on. But for our purposes today, I want to to propose broader categories focused more on the function of stories across genre lines than on the trappings of genres themselves, to describe three of the many possibilities of how fiction and storytelling can approach the future: the world-generating fiction of possibility, the world-solving fiction of problems and solutions, and the world-eulogizing fiction of capturing a passing present.

I’m going to begin with the last category, then work backward, into the future.

World-Eulogizing Fictions

In much of the most popular post-apocalyptic fiction, there exists a thread of eulogy for the present world the writer composed their novel in: in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the father and son share what might be the last can of Coca-Cola they’ll ever find, the son’s first and last sips of soda contained in the same can; in Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, characters talk about airplanes constantly, more than once remembering the sensation of looking down on the earth from above, from a vantage they expect to never again see. In her 2014 novel, Mandel was already eulogizing the present of our lives on social media, which so many of us love to complain about even as we can’t stay away, which we might miss terribly if it was gone forever:

No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.

These are extreme examples set in post-collapse worlds, but more and more, I find it possible to imagine reading even the most realist or mimetic fiction—pick your preferred label here—in a similarly eulogizing mode. Novels about “the way we live now,” as they’re sometimes referred to in book reviews, are almost always at heart about “the way we lived then,” in part because it’s very rare for a novel to be published in the same year it was written, in part because there is a lag in most of us between experience and event and the ability to write about experience and event imaginatively.

For example, Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, named one of the best books of 2018 by a dozen news outlets, takes place in 2000 and 2001; Jonathan Franzen’s 2001 novel The Corrections, the novel I first heard “the way we live now” used in reference to, takes place over the preceding fifty years. Notably, The Corrections was released ten days before the 9/11 attacks: unless you read it the week it came out, you read it in a country seemingly radically different from the one it had been composed in.

This will, eventually, happen to all of our novels: the world will move on, our novels will remain as they were when written. They will describe what is past, some of which will resonate in the future, some of which will be incomprehensible to those who come after us. (Eventually our work may one day be readable only in Penguin Classics editions full of footnotes explaining what a “Tik-Tok” or a “combustion engine” is…)

As I recall, a number of famous novelists publicly stated in the years after 9/11 that after the attacks they either abandoned or recast the novels they had been drafting in 2000 or early 2001: perhaps they felt that the world they had begun writing in had ended, and that the literature of 2000 was insufficient to “the way we live now” of 2002.

Writers felt similarly after the presidential election in 2016: William Gibson famously stopped the publication of his novel Agency, an already-written sequel to his novel The Peripheral, which was set across multiple possible futures, rewriting Agency to take place partly in an alternative 2017 where Hillary Clinton won that election instead.

There have been and will be other dividing lines. Pre- and post-internet. Pre- and post-housing bubble collapse. Pre- and post-pandemic. I was born in 1980, and was one part of one of the first generations to have environmentalism as part of our education: “Save the whales,” we had to be taught, because few earlier American generations had ever imagined they were, with their choices, making a future without whales. Won’t our stories about the natural world be different then, than those of the people who came before us?

We are living in a period of dramatic and perhaps irreversible change. If you write a novel or a story that does its absolute best to capture life as you know it, in your particular time and place, then that too is a necessary and vital part of the literature of and for the future.

History rhymes, and so does literature, which is part of the reason novels written in the past resonate today, even when they are about the future: you can read Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents four decades after they were written and find parallels to today, in the novels’ depiction of climate change and racism in America, of corporate indentured servitude, and in a fictional fascist presidential candidate running on a “Make America Great Again” platform.

But even what never again rhymes or repeats deserves to be preserved. All the unique and beautiful ways of living, of dwelling, of being, both human and nonhuman: whatever lasts in art is not entirely forgotten. Recording does not erase the loss; but in literature, much that would otherwise vanish might live on at least in story.

World-Solving Fictions

I spent most of the past several years writing a novel about climate change, which meant researching the issue not only in scientific writing but in literature, which meant in part asking, for my own education: how do writers depict large scale problems, and, perhaps more importantly, how do they depict attempts to solve them?

Most American fiction is driven by problem-based conflict: a character sets out to satisfy a want or answer a question through a series of attempts and setbacks, each round of attempt/setback rising in intensity toward catastrophe—all is lost!—and then the climax—all is won! While in epic sci-fi and fantasy, the conflict might involve saving a world or a galaxy, in contemporary realist fiction, the problem is often personal, its scope limited—and there are far more novels depicting societal problems than there are novels depicting societal solutions, in part, perhaps, because it is easier to show the conditions of a problem than to imagine its solutions being enacted.

What I am hoping for, I think, is a literature with a renewed and shared sense of scale, making way for contemporary novels of all genres in which a hugely complex problem like climate change or systemic racism or American gun violence can be addressed step-by-step, with potential solutions enacted, setbacks endured, and new solutions put into place.

What would such a world-fixing novel look like, one where a real-world problem is addressed not at the level of the individual but at the level of the system?

For possible models, I look first to hard science fiction, which is especially full of stories driven primarily by problem-solving, many of them set in outer space, where life-and-death stakes can be contained to a single vessel and a small cast: think of Andy Weir’s The Martian, where an astronaut stranded on Mars solves a series of setbacks, one after the other. “Work the problem,” astronaut Mark Watney tells himself, solving each issue in turn as it confronts him, over the four years he’s alone on Mars.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora is my favorite of these science fiction novels, even among the other works of his that might be counted about the same sub-genre, like his “Science in the Capital” trilogy of climate policy novels. Narrated by an AI, Aurora concerns two thousand people living for centuries on a vast generation ship sent to establish a new human colony at Tau Ceti, an effort that eventually fails, leaving half of the colonists to undertake an even more perilous return to Earth. Nearly every chapter contains a new problem that needs to be solved by communal action and scientific breakthrough, which then produces the novel’s next set of problems and invented solutions, leading the community of Aurora through a complex, generation-spanning attempt to save their ship, its people, and its biomes of animals and plants.

“One acts,” the AI known as Ship says, “and thus finds out what one has decided to do.”

But in Aurora, as in life, not everyone wants to face the problems facing their society, or to try to act to solve them, even as ignoring the problems slowly dooms their way of life. As Ship says,

“When you discover that you are living in a fantasy that cannot endure, a fantasy that will destroy your world, and your children, what do you do?

People said things like, Fuck it, or Fuck the future. They said things like, The day is warm, or This meal is excellent, or Let’s go to the lake and swim.”

It seems a part of human nature that when we cannot imagine solutions to the problems that face us, we sometimes choose to ignore them. One thing problem-solving literature can provide, I think, is an inoculation against such nihilism and hopelessness, fear and anger. More often than not, I’ve learned, the solutions to our biggest problems are already known—what we lack, more often, is the means or will to enact them. Fiction can inspire us to try by providing examples of worlds in which such means and will exist.

Another model for designing world-solving fictions might be the stories of Ted Chiang, which often depict the scientific method at work, using its question/hypothesis/prediction/test/analysis cycle as a way of structuring plot. The title story to his most recent book, Exhalation, he says, is about conceptual breakthrough,  “a way of describing scientific discovery and the experience of gaining a greater understanding of the universe. Recapturing the experience of conceptual breakthrough, dramatizing that, is one of the things science fiction is good at. You can just as easily do that in a completely made-up universe with a totally different set of physical laws. The underlying process is the same, and I still think of it as scientific investigation.”

In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh writes that “the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination”—what other crises might we say this about? What is police brutality but a crisis of culture? What are racism or sexism or gender discrimination or the global refugee situation but crises of culture? These too, then, are crises of the imagination—and one task writers of and for the future might take on is to to imagine solutions to these problems, then depict the step-by-step implementation of those solutions, so we might imagine all the stages along the way—and, finally, imagine arriving in worlds in which these problems have been solved.

Work the problem.

Question, hypothesize, predict, test, analyze.

Solve the story to solve the world.

World-Generating Fictions

I have always loved stories and novels set on other worlds or in other times, whether that means science fiction or fantasy, myths and fairy tales, speculative novels or historical ones. What I love most about such stories now is the way that they seem to expand the world I know, offering me other ways of being, other ways of living and dwelling and existing, as an individual and in community with others: “The great, irreplaceable potentiality of fiction,” Amitav Ghosh says, “is that it makes possible the imagining of possibilities.”

In our literature of and for the future, it will continue to be necessary to “imagine otherwise,” as Daniel Heath Justice says, not accepting the world as it is but imagining how it might be different or better. Ursula K. Le Guin agreed, saying in her National Book Award acceptance speech: “Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality.”

As an aspiring realist of a larger reality, there are two questions I ask now of every fictional future I encounter: “How will people live?” and “Who will be there?”

Part of the fun of imagining possible futures or alternative worlds is that there is no one right answer to the question “how will people live?”—but every believable answer almost certainly has to be some version of differently than we do now. For instance, I no longer believe it’s possible to posit any plausible future in which human beings exist on Earth where climate change has not been significantly addressed, so even a futuristic novel not about climate change must depict solutions to it: a novel set in the year 3000 probably cannot contain a fossil fuel-based economy like ours.

Other parts of society might be reshaped in different ways. For instance, three recent novels set in the near-future—Jonathan Lethem’s The Arrest, Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness, and Chana Porter’s The Seep—imagine three different societies in which most problems are ideally solved through communal action and consensus (as opposed to police intervention and majority rule), and plot points, no matter how dire or tense, are almost always concluded without violence. In these novels, we don’t always see the intervening steps between our present and the fictional future—how did the communities in these groups arrive at their new models, and, crucially, what was the transition between them like?—but we do get to imagine what it might be like to live in such a changed world.

Imagine a future in which the carceral state had been abolished, or where militarized policing had given way to decriminalization and restorative justice, or where a transition to renewable resources had been completed, or where capitalism and income inequality had given way to wealth redistribution or the abolishment of private property, or where guarded international borders transition to safe free movement for all peoples in need of resettlement, or where reparations for the historical crimes of slavery or genocide had been fully implemented, or where the full sovereignty of indigenous peoples had been restored by colonizing countries, or or or or —

Pick your improvement, your imagined otherwise, your larger reality. Imagine such a future and then set a story in it. That’s enough to generate a world—and once we can imagine a new world, we might go on to try and make it real.

By writing imagined futures in which today’s problems have been even partially addressed and solved, writers also make spaces for readers to explore their sincere worries or anxieties about what it would look like if we reshaped our societies and our ways of life: so much of our current politics is defined by a resistance to change, and by the fear of the privileged that if other people gain the same chances they have, they lose.

Note that it is not necessary for a future to be entirely or even mostly positive in order for it to be a useful space for imagining better futures. As Le Guin wrote in her 2015 essay “Utopiyin, Utopiyang”: “every eutopia contains a dystopia, every dystopia contains a eutopia.” In other words, even a dystopia suggests its opposite: a future to be avoided might be as suggestive as a future to aspire toward. In my forthcoming novel Appleseed, the fictional solution to the climate crisis is based in real world technology whose use I would like us to avoid; in depicting characters attempting to stop such a solution from being implemented, I hope in part prompt the reader to imagine alternative ideas and actions that might be taken in our time to avoid such a future.

The other question I ask of all fictional futures is “Who will be there?” By this, I mean, who exists in this future or this imagined world?

In her introduction to her collection How Long ’til Black Future Month? (2019), N. K. Jemisin references her 2013 blogpost of the same name about confronting the predominantly white speculative worlds once omnipresent in sci-fi and fantasy, where characters of color or of non-heteronormative sexual orientations and gender identities were rare, if not non-existent: as Jemisin puts it, for too many years, “There was no one like me in most of my geekery.” But even beyond the field’s many lacks of representation was the implicit argument such absences made, that time and again no people of color had survived: “How terrifying,” Jemisin writes, “to realize no one thinks my people have a future.”

Who gets to be a protagonist in a novel set in an imagined future is not only a matter of representation, but also one of hope: when we see someone like ourselves in an imagined future, acting with agency to improve their life or their world, it creates an opportunity to imagine other people like us existing beyond our present, and perhaps even thriving better than we have in our own time.

I’ll say this again momentarily, but it’s worth saying more than once: for myself, I can’t accept any “good” future where the cost of survival or success is that only some of us make it. No more sacrificing the future of the many to secure the future of the few.

A Fiction of and for the New Millennium

Now that we’ve discussed some of the kinds of fiction about the future we might write, I want to suggest the qualities I hope to see in such fiction, as it is being written now and as I hope it will be in years to come. Without attempting in any way to be all-inclusive, here are some of the qualities I believe we’ll find in a fiction of and for the New Millennium, for the future we are all already making together, not a break from what has been done before but a continuation and an expansion of our literature:

1. Fiction that is powered by interdisciplinary and intersectional thought, imagining, depicting, and reckoning with complexities, as well as the way humans interact with such complexity.

No problem facing our society exists in a vacuum. The climate crisis is inseparable from environmental justice, which is inseparable from the effects of colonialism and the need to recognize and restore indigenous rights. We cannot create true gender and sexual equality without also reckoning with white supremacy and racism. A novel about only one thing is a missed opportunity. As we widen the scope of what our stories are about, we might also need to find new ways to tell them: the experience and the argument of a novel exists at the level of aboutness and at the level of aesthetics, both the macro-structures of plot and at the micro-structures of the sentence and paragraph.

2. Fiction that is inclusive and representative.

The future of fiction is necessarily a fiction of and for the whole of humanity. Our literature must contain and create feminist futures, black futures, indigenous futures, queer futures, neurodivergent futures, secular and religious futures, futures for and including every community and person. Not every story has to represent everyone, but everyone should be able to see themselves represented and granted agency in literature, as well as be able to have their stories heard by the larger literary culture. Everyone should be able to imagine not only their survival but their thriving in the possible worlds to come.

This also means we need a literary culture and a publishing industry that elevates and champions all writers and that recognizes a fuller spectrum of subjects, aesthetics, and traditions as valid and worthy of critical and commercial investment.

3. Fiction capable of telling a story over long time spans and across distant geographies.

Most fiction, regardless of its genre, covers a relatively tight time span; even those with bigger timelines tend to measure story in decades, not centuries or millennia. But many of the biggest problems we face began hundreds of years ago, if not longer, and will, even if we do our best, extend hundreds or thousands of years into the future; they are, like Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects, distributed not only in time but in space, affecting locations across the globe simultaneously. Most mass media news sources are incapable of (or uninterested in) offering popular accounts that depict or consider these spans: novels may be able to make up some of that lack.

Not every new novel needs to attempt such an undertaking, but I believe more and more novels will.

4. Fiction that defamiliarizes or depolarizes.

We live in an increasingly polarized age, where people of differing opinions or different political affiliations go beyond disagreement into contempt and disdain; our ideas sometimes become tribal lines and markers of belonging, which makes them less flexible or open to new input. Fiction that enstranges the “real” world or defamiliarizes it—through genre, through the speculative or the fantastical, through inventive language or structures—may allow us to see issues in a new light, without the preconceptions we bring to the op-ed page or the Twitter feed. This makes fresh feeling and fresh thought more likely, as well as real changes in ideas and emotion.

5. Fiction that prioritizes solutions, in addition to depicting life amid the problems.

We need now and will need in the future stories that allow us to imagine discovering, implementing, and living with the solutions to our biggest problems. We have always had literature that lives in the shadow of our problems; now more than ever, we have to be bold enough to show how we escape our problems or defeat them. Make no mistake that this is a boldness: it is not difficult to get praised for pointing out a problem other people agree exists. But you are sticking your neck out when you suggest a way out of the problem, along with all the solution’s likely sacrifice, difficulty, and mess.

6. Fiction that decenters human beings or at least makes room for nonhuman agency and concerns.

We risk, in our lifetimes, creating a world with few large mammals and few birds, with depopulated oceans and empty bleached coral reefs, among so much other loss of nonhuman life. Fiction that gives the nonhuman world the same agency and attention as it gives the human world will help us erase the false barrier between humanity and “nature”; we necessarily share one planet, and we need stories that allow us to see ourselves and the earth’s animals and plants as one community, imperiled together.

7. Fiction that, despite everything, produces wonder and joy and delight in readers.

These are hard times, and there may be harder times ahead. But one of the primary reasons we are writers and readers is because literature has been for us a source of enjoyment, of beauty, and of fun. We must not lose sight of those qualities: these joys will sustain us through difficult days and difficult tasks.

For the last several years, I had a handwritten note on my desk that read GO BIG WITH WONDER, a note from myself to myself, reminding me that no matter what I was writing about, I should try on every page to make opportunities for wonder and joy in myself and in the reader. I hope you will find ways to do the same in your own work.

As Jack Gilbert says, in his magnificent poem “A Brief for the Defense”: “We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.”

Conclusion

Thank you so much for allowing me this time and space to think with you and talk with you today. I have purposely not over-relied on Italo Calvino in this talk, despite his Six Memos for the Millennium being the prompt I was given, because it would be so easy to be overwhelmed by his example, and because I know you have already been reading and discussing his lectures together. But let me end with what I read as a charge to all of us writers and readers and critics, as we imagine the stories we might tell, the arguments we might make, the challenges we might seek to tackle. In “Multiplicity,” the final of his essays in Six Memos, Calvino writes, “Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function.”

Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function. I couldn’t agree more. Write the stories no one else dares imagine: make them great, make them weird, make them matter, make them fun, make them work for the world you live in and the worlds you want to manifest in the future to come.