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To Build a Future Without Police and Prisons, We Have to Imagine It First
How visionary fiction can help us imagine a better world
Here’s a thought experiment for you: What is the world you want? Really picture it — and be as idealistic, hopeful, and unrealistic as you can.
That’s right — unrealistic. As Walidah Imarisha puts it, “all real substantive social change has been considered to be unrealistic at the time people fought for it — until those people changed the world to make it happen.” We tend to think of fiction as an indulgent fantasy and social change as serious work, but as Imarisha points out, creating a better world demands all of the above.
It’s a helpful mind shift for anyone who’s ever been told to get their heads out of clouds, manage their expectations, and “be realistic.” And it’s the thought behind this piece for OneZero, in which Imarisha writes:
For 10 years, I have created, nurtured, and taught a practice called visionary fiction — a means of imagining better, more just futures and then doing the work of building them into reality — and why I hope we will embrace it today…Visionary fiction is fundamentally concerned with how we reshape this world: It’s an all-encompassing term for any fantastical art (speculative fiction, horror, magical realism, fantasy…
