The job of the artist or the poet or the educator or the business person is not just to paint what we want to see, write what we want to read and hear, teach what we want to learn or produce what we want to buy. Their role is to interpret the underlying high-level objectives that we seek from art, poetry, education, or goods and services more fully than we could ourselves articulate them. Success in recasting problems to achieve our objectives more effectively than we had conceived distinguishes the great from the merely competent and demonstrates why the direct approach is so often banal.

Art is not neutral. It either upholds or disrupts the status quo, advancing or regressing justice. We are living now inside the imagination of people who thought economic disparity and environmental destruction were acceptable costs for their power. It is our right and responsibility to write ourselves into the future. All organizing is science fiction. If you are shaping the future, you are a futurist. And visionary fiction is a way to practice the future in our minds, alone and together. Visionary fiction is neither utopian nor dystopian, instead it

is like real life: Hard, realistic… Hopeful as a strategy. Visionary fiction disrupts the hero narrative concept that one person (often one white man, often Matt Damon) alone has the skills to save the world. Cultivate fiction that explores change as a collective, bottom-up process. Fiction that centers those who are currently marginalized—not to be nice, but because those who survive on the margins tend to be the most experientially innovative—practicing survival-based efficiency, doing the most with the least, an important skill area on a planet whose resources are under assault by less marginalized people. Visionary fiction is constantly applying lessons from our past to our future(s). The best way to practice visionary fiction is to get to writing. The Octavia’s Brood website offers workshops, and you can also write on your own, form writing groups, and share stories with others. You have worlds inside you. You have permission to share them

A character is not a simulation of a living being. It is an imaginary being. An experimental self. In that way the novel reconnects with its beginnings.

Let us look at the three central constituents of a human being: the body, the soul, and the imagination. Humans make sure that they do not starve the body. They nourish it with enough healthy food where possible. Otherwise, the body shrivels, becomes weak. The same with spirituality. Humans nourish it with good ethical practices that ensure that they make good ethical choices and hold on to values that enhance their individual and collective lives. Religions, in the widest possible dimension of the term, cater to the spiritual to ensure that the “soul” does not shrivel because of bad advice, choices, and practices.

The primary role of the writer, or more broadly the artist, is to produce the healthiest material for the education of the imagination. Just as unhealthy food weakens the body and bad ethical choices diminish the spiritual, so also bad art can limit the imagination or direct it to unhealthy ends. That’s why the arts should not be a luxury in the school system. They should be central to it. Even engineers, architects, urban planners, teachers, and scientists thrive on a robust imagination that can find links between phenomena.