Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination

They tend to be more comfortable in the role of jeremiad—warning of lost humanity, warmth and wisdom—or playfully pulling apart the strange dynamics of networked relationships, rather than offering even a fuzzy route to a better future. But that is probably exactly what we should want and expect of art.

The book focuses on a simple question: how could we become better at imagining the society in which we might like to live a generation or two from now?

It is designed to be an antidote to fatalism—to remind us that other worlds are possible.

I’ve seen so many ideas move from being impossible to becoming everyday realities that I find fatalism hard to stomach.

I’ve found a strikingly similar pattern among political leaders, academics, NGO workers, businesspeople and young high-fliers, and not just in Europe and North America. Young people that I met in Africa were generally quite optimistic, but here too, despite burgeoning science-fiction scenes, dynamic hubs of digital innovation and lively political m

whereas the activism I’d been raised on was fuelled by hope, what struck me most about these young people was their profound pessimism. They wanted humanity to avert disaster, but, despite politicians announcing Green Deals of many kinds, they had little hope that their societies could become much better.

In the words of speculative fiction writer Ursula Le Guin: ‘As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.’

We can try to grasp future possibilities rationally. But we can also grasp them viscerally—feeling or even tasting them, as well as seeing.

‘The more living patterns there are in a place—a room, a building, a town—the more it comes to life as an entirety, the more it glows.’12