Lois McMaster Bujold has defined speculative fiction as a genre focusing on “fantasy of political agency.” [1] We agree: Science fiction and fantasy allow exploration of possibilities for, and constraints on, individual and collective choice. They also, through their worldbuilding, allow explicit definition of the types of possibility with which characters must grapple. SF allows us to play with metaphysics in order to imaginatively explore agency. In this context, it’s possible to decide, a priori and within a given story, that—whatever may be true for the real world—the divine right of kings is real, or the great man theory of history holds, or machine learning can perfectly predict centuries of electoral outcomes. It’s also possible to define any of these as absolutely impossible.
These questions are not so easily resolved in real politics. The history of political philosophies and forms can be interpreted, in part, as a history of opinions about the malleability of political change, how certain we can be about future stability or dynamism, and who has the agency to affect these futures. These are often strongly held opinions shading into the realm of faith. Perhaps that’s why SFF has only rarely addressed the question of political agency as a truly speculative one, rather than firmly level-setting at the worldbuilding stage. However, the genres have great untapped potential to explore questions about political inevitability and lack thereof.
These questions include where choice (if it exists) is located, how broadly distributed it is, what constrains it, and how (if at all) it’s possible to expand it. In a time when these subjects are so volatile in reality, surfacing them in speculative fiction is vital for helping people grasp their own agency. Is fascism avoidable? Why isn’t the arc bending consistently toward justice? Do my actions make a difference, or is that just something corporations say to distract from their own responsibilities? Scroll through social media and you may find all-too-certain answers to these kinds of complex questions. Speculative fiction provides opportunities for more nuanced responses.
A History of Speculative Inevitability
Many of the formative texts of speculative fiction, the direct forebears of fantasy and science fiction as they exist as genres today, are descended from the chivalric romance and the epic poem.
In the evolution of fantasy specifically, the divine right of kings and the feudal system which surrounds it are thoroughly embedded in the ur-texts which serve as the genre’s earliest models, such as Le Morte d’Arthur (1485) and the Song of Roland (c. 1100). Early fantasy writers like William Morris (1834-1896) and James Branch Cabell (1879-1958) were among the first to begin deconstructing these concepts with a contemporary genre framework. For his part, J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973)—one of the most influential models for the fantasy genre in the latter half of the twentieth century—did not use these ideas unquestioningly or uncritically, either. But he and other early fantasists also generally did not seriously explore alternatives. Indeed, the forms of political inevitability which appear in Tolkien, and which he passed along to English-language fantasy from epic and romance, are a reasonable gloss for the forms of political inevitability which have dominated genre conversation ever since.
These forms include, for example, literal divine blood as a source for the divine right of kings, an idea which goes back to the epic of Gilgamesh and appears in cultures from Egypt to Japan. Tolkien does complicate this somewhat: While the line of Luthien, Aragorn’s family, is prophesied never to fail, for instance, there are certainly centuries in which they do not hold the kingship; yet even in this case, the line does intersect with another common form of inevitability, the concept of prophecy as a shaping historical force. Prophecies in post-Tolkien fantasy may be true or they may be false, steered by or misinterpreted, lost, garbled, or literally carved in stone, but they are never simply irrelevant. Most obviously, the concept of the chosen one, as an initially humble but eventually messianic champion, can be directly related to prophecy, or to the driving forces of divine blood or divine fiat.
The most frequent genre model of inevitability leaves space for an inscrutable and rarely interventionist overlord/creator god in addition to less powerful but more accessible subordinate pantheons. This thread of gods driving the destiny of mortals runs from standard pseudo-medieval fantasies through more mindful history-inspired secondary worlds (e.g., Bujold’s Five Gods [2001-] series, Bear’s Eternal Sky books [2013-2015]), and then through more modern settings such as Butcher’s Dresden Files (2000-).
Early science fiction also descends from the chivalric romance via the traveler’s-tale and scientific romance—and diverges from this less than might be supposed. Similar threads inform such tropes as mathematically predictable societal developments, superhuman computer intelligences, and the evolutionary maturation of species from fallible physical forms into enlightened and powerful energy beings. In E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman series (1934-1948), psychically powerful aliens form a Manichaean cosmological split. The noble Arisians ordain lineages of powerful chosen ones, whose battles against the evil Eddorians permit the growth of truly adult civilization. In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series (1942-1993), the psychohistorian Hari Seldon has, though by no means a Marxist, determined the specific twists and turns of the inevitable trends of history, and chooses himself and a small set of other people to influence those twists and turns in the directions he prefers. Neither of these series is explicitly theist—both leave the question open—but the outlines of the same ideas about prophecy and choice which have dominated fantasy are clearly visible. The differences are that material beings, either human or alien, (usually) take the place of the gods in their capacity for agency. Also notable is the integration of the Victorian anthropological idea that civilizations and species have natural cycles and patterns of growth and maturation, in the same way that individual organisms do.
For a long time, this sort of idea has offered a relatively unexamined groundwork for speculative fiction. It is rare to find fantasy in which people discover that the divine right of kings holds true in their universe and then try to change that. Philip Pullman, for instance, doesn’t go into the political consequences of the loss of God—but seems to assume that divinity wasn’t load-bearing and the universes can kind of run themselves from now on. On the other hand, Anne Ursu’s late-2000s middle-grade trilogy, The Cronus Chronicles (2006-2009), involves humans discovering that Greek mythology is real, deposing the gods, and taking over; but it’s a rare exception, and even so we see little of the new order afterwards. Le Guin’s The Other Wind (2001) is extremely notable in this direction for featuring a human correction of a major metaphysical problem with the afterlife, which also happens to be a metaphysical problem the author set herself with the worldbuilding of the early Earthsea novels. In other words, in changing a stereotypically bad vaguely-Greek afterlife into a not-at-all-bad Daoist oneness with the universe, Le Guin’s characters are in some ways rebelling against the inevitability of the author herself. However, this metafictional level effectively camouflages how unusual these plot elements are for a work of fantasy. Science fiction, too, rarely grapples with the overturn of non-strawman sociological theory. For example, we lack stories in which the idea that civilizations have maturation cycles is given serious credence—as it is without quibble in Foundation or the Lensman series—and is then disproven or dramatically modified. This is despite the fact that this paradigmatic shift was central to much of twentieth-century political thinking.
The Mutual Interplay Between Speculative Worldbuilding and Real-World Movements
In the collection Octavia’s Brood (2015), Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown explicitly connect mundane political work with SFF. Imarisha writes:
Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction. All organizing is science fiction. Organizers and activists dedicate their lives to creating and envisioning another world, or many other worlds—so what better venue for organizers to explore their work than science fiction stories?
This is intuitively compelling: When activists work on changing the world, we begin from the posture that a better world than the received status quo is possible. In activist work as in fiction, however, there are questions about how and why change takes place, and various accounts of the limits on what is possible. Perhaps the limits on speculative fiction’s imagined societal transformations mirror some of these real, historical assumptions about constraints.
Marx and Engels offered an account of political inevitability that, whether affirmed or denied or parodied, continues to be a reference point for many. In its most plausible form, theirs is the idea that the seeds of societal transformation are present even in the most constricted circumstances, and that the capitalist system of extraction and profit is riddled with internal contradictions that will lead to its collapse. On the left, this approach has sometimes produced what Sasha Lilley calls a “couplet of ideas”—that “capitalism will collapse under its own weight or that worsening conditions automatically give rise to revolution.”[2] This produces a determinist-voluntarist dyad, in which we can just wait for an inevitable revolution to happen or heroically summon fundamental social change through the bold actions of an intrepid few. Determinism can produce quietism, the idea that the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice all on its own, without any need for humans to push it. In contrast, voluntarism enjoins the chosen to make history through force of will.
Voluntarism can also hybridize with determinism to create destructive accelerationism: If revolution will come from worsening conditions because people will hit the limit of what they’ll accept, let’s allow (or encourage) things to get worse quickly, so that we can move to the next stage of world history ASAP. Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966) is a classic example: a lunar revolution is ultimately inevitable (assuming you trust the computer calculations), but revolutionaries must first make life harder in order to reach a critical level of support, lest the natural timetable lead to even worse hardships.
Nonetheless, in SF, perhaps because of what Jo Walton and Ada Palmer identify as the “protagonist problem,”[3] most depictions of social transformation are on the voluntarist side: Big changes are depicted from the point of view of universe-moving characters. Think of Corey’s The Expanse universe, in which—while there are millions of people involved in a struggle for livable lives in the Belt—James Holden is routinely the catalyzing agent for transformation.
We see similar narratives of historical transformation in religious beliefs such as millenarianism, as well as in non-religious accounts that posit an inevitable pattern in the rise and fall of civilization (think here of Edward Gibbon’s account of the fall of the Roman Empire [1776-1789], which Asimov used as an overall plan for the Foundation series). Science fictional narratives land strangely often on the ideas that some higher power—divine or market-driven—determines the course of history and that the way things are—technologically or socially—determines automatically what will come next. Mixed in with this determinist line, we often also end up with voluntarist lone heroes, chosen ones, or at best small ensembles shaping change.
One telling example shows how real-world politics can interact with narrative goals, with subtle and often-overlooked implications. Steven Brust’s Dragaera novels (1983-) take place in an elven-dominated fantasy world where political succession is overtly enforced by a magical artifact. Each of seventeen houses must rule in its turn, and each rules in ways unique to its prototypical personality characteristics. Sixteen houses out of seventeen rule via imperial lordship, but once every few thousand years, the house of the Teckla successfully instantiates a brief republic. In Teckla (1987), however, a group of Teckla revolutionaries get hold of the equivalent of Marx’s Communist Manifesto and attempt a revolution out of turn. Their efforts fail because they are at the bottom of the Cycle. Brust is often praised for building a world that metaphysically conflicts with his real-world communist political beliefs. Digging deeper into the ideas raised in Teckla, however, they appear entirely compatible with the orthodox communist belief that certain historical progressions are inevitable. The implication, in fact, is that, without the interference of the Cycle, Dragaera would follow the “natural” rules that make communism inevitable on Earth, and that if it weren’t for this constraint, a central planning paradise would inevitably replace empire. This is unusual in that, while speculative fiction is full of workarounds for the speed of light, few stories explicitly contrast principles of political inevitability across worlds or time periods. Physics is up for imaginative modification; political science is not. Given that political science is a rich field full of loud and detailed arguments about which scientific laws, if any, govern human interaction, this seems like a big sandbox in which more creators should play.
A major exception to this tendency of the genre toward tropes of inevitability is alternate universe and time travel stories. Stories in which the consequences of different choices can be literally visited provide powerful tools for considering what choices are possible, and what differences they may make. They can also highlight authorial and cultural assumptions about what can’t be changed, or about what changes are interesting. For example, there are many more books about the Confederacy winning the US Civil War than about what would have happened if the catastrophic plagues following European contact with Turtle Island had been substantially mitigated.
These subgenres are, though, perhaps particularly suited to exploring the relationship between individual and societal possibilities. Emet North’s In Universes (2025), for example, focuses on one person’s options for self-discovery, modifying the world around them dramatically in order to ask what kind of society might be necessary for them to overcome depression and embrace their queerness. Terry Bisson’s Fire on the Mountain (1988) audaciously explores what would have happened had Harriet Tubman not been sick the night John Brown raided Harper’s Ferry, imagining a collective formation that produced a socialist, space-exploring Nova Africa on the North American continent. And Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (1971) questions the power of isolated decision makers to achieve ambitious improvements, while still acknowledging and celebrating individual contributions to collective dreaming.
A few other recent works illustrate the untapped potential of speculative fiction to question inevitability. Vajra Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors (2023) depicts a world shaped by prophecy, but in which competing prophecies can cancel each other out or open space for new choices. M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi’s Everything for Everyone (2022) retains certain Marxist assumptions about inevitability and violent revolution, but vividly depicts the collective nature of change through its “oral history” structure. And Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series (2016-2021) depicts “great men” trying to shape events that their science predicts as inevitable, and in doing so discovering the limits of both those predictions and their own protagonistic power.
Inviting and Encouraging New Directions for Speculative Agency
Broadly speaking, patterns of political exchange might be portrayed as inevitable, fully open, or contingent. Inevitability provides simple constraints that allow certain well loved types of story: the restoration of the rightful king, prophecy and psychohistory, the need for a chosen savior who also makes a conveniently bite-sized protagonist. Fully open possibilities can easily go unmarked and unexamined, and allow for highly agentic characters who can change the world dramatically with enough resources. Contingency—the least explored of these options—requires wrestling with more challenging complexities, but also opens the door to all sorts of intriguing social science inspirations. Different possibilities may be open at different points and with different likelihoods, and competing groups may seek to leverage “steam engine times”—when multiple people invent something in parallel because all the precursor requirements are in place.
This type of complexity is typical of modern social science, but much storytelling is shaped by the simpler and more dramatic claims of earlier theories. Ships plying the ether are clearly marked as steampunk, but the Victorian civilizational lifecycle and the Great Ladder of Being still find their way into chemically-rigorous vacuums. Narrative appeal is one reason for building around these patterns. Another is the unavoidable awareness of real-life complexity: We live in a world that is impossible to fully grasp as an individual, and in which the many factors influencing politics—and the existential problems influenced by politics—feel deeply and dangerously out of control. A world of greater and simpler inevitability can provide a welcome escape, and we will complain about that just as soon as we’re finished with our current stacks of comfort reading.
Escapist stories are an important source of fuel, and dealing with real-life complexities can leave scant spoons for fictional ones. At the same time, stories of non-inevitability can open our imaginations toward not only possible futures, but our abilities to shape them. In the face of fascism and climate change, it can feel burdensome to realize that we can have some impact—though only limited—on the world’s movement along the spectrum between catastrophe and eucatastrophe. Speculative fiction can, and should, do more to help us figure out not only how to exercise this uncertain agency, but how to bear it.
Endnotes
[1] L. M. Bujold, Hugo Acceptance Speech, Denvention, August 2008. [return]
[2] S. Lilley, S., D. McNally, E. Yuen, & J. Davis, Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012. [return]
[3] A. Palmer & J. Walton, “The protagonist problem,” Uncanny Magazine, 40, 2021. [return]