Thinking about the future—prospection—is supposed to be a sign of our intelligence, something that sets us apart from “lower” forms of life. But has anyone asked those forms what they’re thinking about? In fact, humans are not unique in this: Many animals seem to plan ahead, or at least anticipate things that may be coming. And as humans we’re thinking about the future all the time: when we’re planning, fantasizing, making predictions, imagining. Because we experience time in a linear fashion, we’re simply prone to thinking about the next event in a series of events.

But is time linear? My favourite thing to say at New Year’s is that time is a construct. I don’t make resolutions at any particular or special time because time doesn’t really exist. But when I come down from my soapbox, I experience time as we all do: I have deadlines, I make appointments, and I think about aging. We’re bound by linear time in somewhat inexplicable ways, but time doesn’t really work that way: If time is a construct, then maybe the future is, too.

Linearly isn’t the only way to look at time. In many African cultures, time is nonlinear, or circular: This is why the “past” doesn’t exist in the same way in those cultures. That cosmology allows for events to be happening continuously and simultaneously in the “present,” something illustrated beautifully in Cheryl S. Ntumy’s 2024 novella, Songs for the Shadows. In this work, and in the cultures it draws upon, when you die, your life continues on another plane—or you’ve already been living on that plane, and just become aware of it. You may become an ancestor, to help those who remain on this one.

This cosmological view makes the values of those communities profoundly different: If time is a loop, then things come back to haunt you. In Shona culture, “ngozi” is a kind of curse (an avenging spirit, to be specific) that comes on the family of a murderer, and can affect generations. The concept of Sankofa (“to go back and get”) from the Akan people of Ghana, meanwhile, requires reflection on the past to succeed in the future. Many other Indigenous cultures, too, have nonlinear concepts of time. In other words, Indigenous peoples imagine a future too; it just looks different.

After all, when we think about the future, we’re making it up in our minds. We have dreams and wishes, and sometimes we jot those things down on bits of paper. Some among us may then create art from these fragments: fiction, a work of sound, or a piece of visual art—like a film, or the cover of a science fiction novel. All of it, though, starts with ideas about what is—or could be—possible. Everything we create starts in the imagination: Before we make it, we must dream it. But how do we decide what’s possible?

One of my nephews used to talk about purple horses like they were absolutely real. Children dream outrageously, both when awake and asleep. By the time we’re adults, though, our ideas about what’s possible have been shaped and narrowed down by failure, loss, grief, discipline, and the societies we live in. How far we can stretch, what we can achieve, is now affected by “reality,” which is bound by what we see around us; our ability to dream is curtailed.

But we can and do still think about the future; some among us even keep dreaming about our collective future. And when we imagine that future, we often turn to SF to do it. It’s easy to find and consume future-oriented media without thinking too deeply about it—but it’s important to think about what SF is doing intentionally or unintentionally.

The trouble is unequal encounters: Our collective dreams of humanity’s future in books and film are severely curtailed by the hegemony of Western culture, depriving us of varied visions of what’s possible. We only very rarely encounter future (re)visioning outside of what an ethnically white, capitalistic worldview would imagine. Successes like the Black Panther franchise are rare and notable; most box office hits fit that other, very narrow vision. It’s all gradually changing—you only have to read early SF to see the distance travelled in the last century—but it’s not enough yet, and progress is in fits and starts. It’s intriguing, then, to think about what we’re missing when we exclude other visions.

Because what’s in the future, anyway? Not Black people, if you read books from the Golden Age of Science Fiction. No Native people either. Or disabled people (or, when they are there, they’re not really recognisable as whole, complex human beings—because we can only imagine within the narrow limits of what’s “possible”). There may be a few queer people (often imagined as aliens), if we're lucky. But there are flying cars, and holidays to Mars. There’s either no organised religion, or it’s evolved. Oh, and psionics are a big deal. Great Science has triumphed over ignorance. Science works a particular way; positivism reigns supreme. It’s all the Enlightenment imagined it to be.

Although things are improving, it’s true, we’re still up against a lot. Wole Talabi often talks about how Western philosophy has seen non-Western ideas, beliefs, and practices as inferior and nonprogressive. He has also spoken on the Imaginary Worlds podcast about the effect of “centuries of colonial brainwashing.” N. K. Jemisin says she aims to take apart the “white dude” genre of fantasy and then put it back together again. Many other thinkers talk about how Western philosophy situates all other philosophies as primitive, in the past, backward-facing, and so not relevant to humanity’s future. In this conception, only Western ideas are future-facing, and this is reflected in the future-imagining media we consume.

There are tons of other ways of seeing the future, though, because there are millions of people who are not Western, and many other epistemologies. This has given rise to many, many futurisms: Africanfuturism. Arab Futurism. Muslim Futurism. Indigenous Futurism/s. Afrofuturism. Amazofuturism. South Asian Futurisms (Tamizh Futurism; Tamil Dalit Futurism; Desi Futurism; Adivasi Futurism, and more). Pasifikafuturism. Asian Futurism (and Ed Chang’s musings on). Chicanafuturism. And when you examine these, you find that other ways of knowing persist—different knowledges, acquired by means profoundly different from the positivism of the West. And that brings different priorities to those cultures. Nature is conscious, and humanity is in a relationship with it, so sustainability is a big deal, brought about through millennia of responsible environmental management (ecofuturism is related to this). Capitalism never really takes off, because it depends on extraction of finite resources. Techno-optimism isn’t a thing. Indigenous science and ways of doing things are valued.

And partly due to the past experiences and traumas of non-Western peoples, there are other ways still of looking at what Western ideas take for granted. Colonialism and imperialism are very bad, so you won’t in these alternative futures see too much about adventurous colonising of new planets. Property is considered in an entirely different way. And there are other differences, too: The outlook in non-Western philosophies is often optimistic, so ideas of the future often are as well. As Dr Grace Dillon says in the introduction to Walking the Clouds (2012): “Stories are often playful, or experimental.” Even the aesthetic of the future is different in non-Western futurisms.

A caveat: Diverse narratives aren’t always, of course, utopian (or hopepunkian). Here’s an important example of dystopia in Afrofuturism: The venerable Octavia Butler is always cited as a prophet. July 20, 2024, an important day in Parable of the Sower (1993), was marked by fans and future watchers as Earthseed Day. Still, although Butler got some things right—climate change is a big one—the dire events of the novel haven’t quite come to pass (yet). As of the end of 2024, Los Angeles was still a more or less functional city, without visible warlords. Sea levels are rising, but most coastal communities are not swamped (yet). And then there’s also Afrofuturism that isn’t dystopian per se, but that doesn’t make humanity the centre of the story—something more in line with Indigenous ways of thinking. An example is N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, in which humanity may die, but the planet survives.

Dystopian narratives are frequently, and obviously, a function of trauma. Some SF acts as remembrance, a warning, or even catharsis. There will always be a great deal of room for dreaming bleak or dark futures, futures that are not happy, or hopeful. The key is to evade the rigid and hegemonic structures of Western-oriented writing.

In this regard, Eugen Bacon is among the most successful writers working today. Born in Tanzania, now resident in Australia, Bacon has become one of my favourite writers of African descent. She writes a lot of future-facing fiction in what she calls the Afro-irreal, or Afro-surrealistic genre (there are various names for it). Bacon often borrows from or extends African folklore; she is a mtunzi wa hadithi, a sarungano, a griot. African folklore serves to pass wisdom, knowledge and memory down to future generations; story is used because it entertains, and is memorable. In that tradition, specific animals stand in for human traits (wisdom, trickery, and so on), and stories can be formed and reformed—sometimes passed down as they are, and other times with new bits added by a talented storyteller.

I found Bacon’s style challenging at first: It’s often very poetic, and reads like a lyric essay. It doesn’t always “make sense” in the ways I’m used to as a reader of mostly hard SF and nonfiction. But after I let go of my preconceptions, I started to see how it works: Bacon’s access to two (or more) very different cultures create a blended worldview. Born in Africa, Bacon is deeply rooted in African storytelling forms. Her subsequent travels and settling in Australia have in turn given her access to Western and Indigenous Australian cultures. This makes her able to take the best of the worlds she has access to and create new things: She’s a text-maker, a weaver, and map-maker for invented future worlds.

But do worlds require a map? All mapping is political. Maps are a way of asserting dominance over an area, region, or piece of land, by defining its borders and turning it into property. Maps were a crucial tool for colonising new, “empty” lands. Maps tell a story, and the story belongs to the map-maker, no matter who else may be on the land. Counter-mapping, on the other hand, can give us new ways of seeing, break up old patterns in the way we see the borders of everything. A definition of counter-mapping, from Wikipedia:

[Counter-mapping] is creating maps that challenge “dominant power structures, to further seemingly progressive goals.” Counter-mapping is used in multiple disciplines to reclaim colonized territory.

If you see storytelling as a form of map-making—defining the borders of an idea—then storytelling is also a political process. Dreaming the future, then, can be a profoundly decolonial process. When Indigenous cultures—almost always oppressed by the dominant culture—dream of a different present, they’re dreaming outside of imposed borders. They’re counter-mapping, undertaking a decolonial process. So when we dream the future from diverse perspectives, or perspectives outside of any dominant culture, we are engaging in resistance.

In engaging in resistance, though, non-Western writers of SF grapple with Audre Lorde’s assertion that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house (see Gina Cole). In this context, can SF ever be decolonial? Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has also struggled with the idea of writing in the coloniser’s language (see Decolonising the Mind, 1986). But, just as with the view of many postcolonial writers that English has been decolonised (there are as many Englishes now as there were peoples in the British Empire), SF possesses the capacity to be used in subversion of, and to resist, any existing oppressive structures. Postcolonial SF writers have found ways of writing themselves and their worldviews into the future, of dreaming of other ways of being, and of weaving new textual maps of future worlds that include and even centre them.

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Indigenous futurism similarly asks that we critically examine the beliefs, attitudes, methods, concepts, or language that get called ‘scientific,’ and/or valorised as rigorous, objective, empirical, evidence-based, superior, and so on. If certain worldviews that consider themselves ‘scientific’ have been deeply implicated in racism, colonialism, genocide and ecocide, then surely we must either rethink what counts as science, and/or rethink the esteem in which it is held? As Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt (2005) have pointed out, it is in the name of  “scientific progress” that Indigenous knowledge was and is constantly stolen. … But what is at stake here is not just defending Indigenous knowledge by reclaiming patents or monetary compensations. It’s also reframing what is understood as science, estranging and reimagining the vital concepts which underlie it, concepts such as ‘objectivity,’ ‘experiment,’ ‘neutrality,’ ‘bias,’ etc. To put it another way, bringing Indigenous knowledge together with the Western scientific tradition requires that we rethink not only the content, but also the form of science.

-- From an essay by Vítor Castelões Gama and Marcelo Velloso Garcia that considers Indigenous Futurism

Futurism is concerned with science, so it’s helpful to think about what we’ve been told science is. A simple definition is the use of observation and experimentation to learn about the world. Coming out of the Enlightenment, the impact of the philosophy of positivism on European thought and science was profound: Now all knowledge had to be based on reason and logic, rather than intuition, faith, or other ways of knowing. Everything else—including the ways Europeans themselves had seen the world before this—was now considered primitive, and confined to the realm of superstition. That allowed Europeans to see the new way as progress: Evidence from repeatable experiments was now the only truth.

This approach advanced scientific knowledge, but complicated the encounters with Indigenous peoples that happened at about the same time, during the “Age of Discovery.” Armed with what they saw as the next stage of human philosophical progress, Europeans set out to bring the Enlightenment to the world, consigning what they considered nonscientific ideas to the primitive past, and smashing Indigenous epistemologies. The effects of this process are still with us in the ways we consider what science is, what’s knowledge, what’s valuable, and this is at the core of what we consider to be science in SF and in futurism. That is, because Europeans had military power on their side, these encounters were always violent—in short, apocalyptic.

There’s an Indigenous and Native American concept about how the Apocalypse already happened, and they’ve survived it. Many postcolonial societies understand the world that way. Apocalypse means different things to different people: the decimation of society and culture, environmental degradation, earthquakes, volcanoes, the Day of Judgement. For some, the Apocalypse is some coming disaster; for others, a world-ending one in the rearview mirror.

Let’s examine a popular trope of a future or imminent apocalypse through the lens of a climate catastrophe: What are Native Americans doing in a hot world? And Africans, Indonesians, Indigenous Australians, Caribbeans, the Innu? And what about animals, and plants? Because they’re going to suffer from a warmed world just as much as humans will. Indeed, it’s instructive to consider our nonhuman kin as fellow sufferers from the disaster of a climate catastrophe—may, in fact, help us think through ways of dealing with it.

Western sci-fi is frequently and bleakly dystopian in its outlook. People fight over scraps, and form roving gangs to steal. Most people retreat into tiny armed communities (like in one of my favourite novels of 2024, Joel Dane's The Ragpicker), or must head off into the wilderness to fend for themselves and any surviving loved ones. Naomi Kritzer’s The Year Without Sunshine (2023) is notable precisely because of how hopeful and community-oriented it is. After an unspecified disaster, basic services fail, and a neighbourhood works together to survive until the government can get them back online. Annalee Newitz has pointed out that this is how humanity will actually respond after a disaster—because we often do, in real life.

For postcolonial societies, the Apocalypse has happened: How did we respond? How are we responding right now? We check up on each other. We form cooperatives, and farm together. We drive a sick neighbour to the hospital at one a.m., because we have a car and they don’t. We send around a collection plate when that neighbour dies, because death is a communal thing: Their family’s loss is ours, and we know they’d do the same for us. We start GoFundMes after floods from once-in-a-century storms to bring relief to affected communities. And you see all these things in the stories we write.

This episode of the Imaginary Worlds podcast clarifies some of these ideas. African authors Chinelo Onwualu, Wole Talabi, and Suyi Davies Okungbowa talk about why African cli-fi is less dystopian than that from Western writers. As host Eric Molinksy explains in the introduction, how we imagine the future is deeply rooted in our past, values, and culture.

We’ve seen countless climate stories set in a fiery California (Unleashed, by Cai Emmons [2022]), or a flood- or hurricane-altered North America (The Displacements, by Bruce Holsinger [2022]; Honeymoons in Temporary Locations by Ashley Shelby [2024]—look out for the story about the bears!). Then there are stories that focus on geo-engineering gone wrong: Burning Sky by John Darnton (2024) imagines an environmental disaster caused by releasing particles into the atmosphere to cool the planet, a scenario also explored in Apple TV’s Extrapolations (2023). Other stories simply assume climate collapse, and then imagine our response to it (the excellent Collapse Years by Damir Salkovic [2024]).

But there are other climate futures. In Talabi’s 2024 collection, Convergence Problems, the story “Ganger” imagines a postapocalyptic Nigeria with people divided by class into arcologies and villas under a dome. Interestingly, in Lost Ark Dreaming (also 2024), Suyi Davies Okungbowa also imagines arcologies within a stratified society: A farsighted businessman has set up five offshore towers called the Fingers, with upper levels reserved for those who can afford to move there, and lower levels for refugees (a few) and the grunts who keep things running. Neither of these stories imagine any way to modify the environment; they are more concerned with people’s lives, and revolution. World Weaver Press’s Pan-Asian Multispecies Cities (2021), too, is wonderfully dense with imaginings that include the other inhabitants of our world. There’s also a great definition of another tradition, solarpunk, in the introduction:

[It’s about] refusing to surrender to the temptation of violent, dystopian post-apocalypse imaginaries. Seeking ways of practicing solidarity, embracing human ingenuity from traditional ecological knowledge to scientific research, celebrating diverse forms of being in the world, from personal expression to relationships.

I love to read hopepunk and solarpunk because writers in these genres dream so expansively about what’s possible. Maybe it’s because our brains are so wired to imagine bad things that it takes courage and imagination to imagine good and hopeful futures—a kind of act of resistance, and a political choice.

The Great Transition by Nick Fuller Googins (2023), for example, is both a hopeful, and much more fully fleshed-out, imagining of a future in a warmed and flooded world, in which young people are winning the battle against climate criminals—the oligarchs who are driving us all off the climate cliff (this is also central to the plot Jon Raymond’s Denial [2022]). They are also winning the battle against climate change, because the world has finally got to zero emissions. The novel dares us to imagine a future in which workers and ordinary people have retaken control of political power and of huge multinational companies—one in which these companies are run as co-ops, a world where there are “Half-Earth” agreements to protect the planet’s biomes, and only Indigenous people can live in those areas where nature is protected and thrives. The story focuses on a small family that’s torn apart by the basic question of when we can be sure that enough has been done to guarantee the future.

In a new collection, Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions (2024), Nalo Hopkinson imagines climate futures in an altogether lighter and more hopeful way, and from a Caribbean perspective. The story “Repatriation,” for example, is a joyful vision of a time when we can restore coral reefs. “Broad Dutty Water,” meanwhile, is a wonderful, and also post-apocalyptic, tale that’s reminiscent of Kevin Costner’s Waterworld (1995): Ocean levels have risen, and people live on moveable islands. This story is also cool because, like in Multispecies Cities, it considers multispecies futures.

The aforementioned collection, Multispecies Cities (2021), edited by Christoph Rupprecht, imagines domed cities, robotic animals, roof gardens, garden cities, and modified marine creatures. The follow-up, 2024’s Solarpunk Creatures, features a robotic dog that hunts for rain, very smart bees, and more.

In a world that tells dark stories, hopepunk and solarpunk are counter-narratives. In other words: The futures we imagine aren’t inevitable; it’s fun to see visions of counter-futures. In a world under capitalism, and (over)run by billionaires, it can start to feel impossible to imagine other ways of being. If you’re in capitalism’s underclass, as most of us are, dreaming may seem like an expensive hobby. And then there’s life on the periphery: The further away you are from the metropole (are we post-colonial yet?), the harder one may need to struggle to find ways to dream. Techno-optimistic or techno-solutionistic billionaires like Marc Andreesen offer us their dreamed futures—but these employ methods that seal our fates in the underclass, with no way to break the chains. (Sofia Samatar’s 2024 novella The Practice, The Horizon, The Chain is a vivid and literal imagining of the chains of social stratification). The billionaires’ dreams are for humanity to continue under capitalism—the very thing that’s brought us to this moment of crisis. Their solutions to our problems and imagined futures are more of the same—only faster, higher, and bigger. With more money for them.

This returns us to the discussion on science and positivism above: Human belief in technology is based on a belief in the rationality and rightness of science. According to this view, technology is science, science is good, therefore technology is good. The trouble is, while technology has brought us cheap vaccines and microwaves and mobile phones and cars, it’s also brought us pollution and global warming, an exhausted working class, unhealthy relationships with social media, unlivable cities, and more. Technology is, unfortunately, not neutral, never an unalloyed good, and as flawed as the humans who create it. Technology cannot save us—or if it does, it will only save those of us who can afford it, or only those it can see … For example, it either can’t see Brown or Black people, or sees them as criminals (see Meredith Broussard, More than a Glitch [2024]).

It’s the unfortunate truth that our technological future can be extrapolated from the present and past: Technology based on the hegemonic culture’s values means capitalistic extraction, exploitation, and exhaustion (of both people and the world’s resources); broken algorithms and a degraded natural environment. It may mean wealth but only for a few. Might it be possible that non-Western epistemologies—with their different orientation—may offer us different ideas for our technological future? The answer is yes—but we have to look for them.

What’s happened as we’ve tried to dream of the future is the shattering and proliferation of genres. This isn’t the bad thing some may imagine it to be: In that proliferation is diversity, and the opening up of space to voices that may otherwise remain unheard. This is truly a case of the more, the merrier. The problem isn’t too many futurisms; it’s that we don’t open ourselves up to the resources we’re creating from our varied ways of seeing the world. Sadaf Padder proposes a framework for South Asian Futurisms that’s constructive, open-ended, and exploratory. This feels to me like a good goal for what we can call the unified genre of world futurisms, a kind of marketplace of ideas.

We are entangled. I’ve begun to think around the idea of not siloing stories from different traditions (and genres, which are after all an invention of marketers from publishing houses). What if we thought of African and Indigenous North American and Chinese and Aboriginal stories, of all futurisms as part of a kind of mycelial network?

I am indebted for this thought to Merlin Sheldrake and his 2020 book on fungi, Entangled Life, which introduced me to many mind-expanding realisations about the possibilities of mycelial networks. Mycelium does fun things. It’s a transportation network for nutrients. It can sense what’s happening in its environment, interpret those signals, and respond. It links various fungal bodies. Mycelial networks are now thought to be the way individual plants (and trees) communicate with each other.

In An Earnest Blackness (2023), Eugen Bacon introduces the idea of what I’ve decided to call a textual mycelial (or mycorrhizal) network. She says:

The main elements of the rhizome are heterogeneity and (inter)connections that form a dialectic multiplicity. The rhizome has no center. It spreads continually from beginning to end. It adapts. It deviates.

We all have blind spots: every human, every human culture. What if we aligned ourselves to each other in such a way as to minimise those? We could build much bigger, better, more inclusive futures! How expansive our world(s) would become. A future where everyone exists, and even flourishes.

We can dream.