September 2025

Written By Paul Fleming

Octavia Butler, one of the greatest speculative fiction writers of all time

Dear friends, 

Octavia Butler wrote about the future we are living in now. Her powerful Earthseed series was written three decades ago about the time period of 2024-2027. Butler’s work of speculative fiction painted a version of the future that is both grim and hopeful, one where a response to social collapse is to build new communities that imagine different ways of being, connecting, and cooperating. The Earthseed series has inspired countless readers—including yours truly—to build a better world with prescient lines like: “All that you touch you Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change” and “In order to rise from its own ashes, a phoenix first must burn." While many view the Earthseed series as dystopian, Butler is also showing us the path to a better world. Her work is a pillar of Afrofuturism, which helps to imagine futures that include Black liberation and radical change. 

Writing the future we want and need can be an important precursor to building it. If we want to make a better world possible, we have to imagine it in full detail and writing can be an important tool to do that. Writing forces us to articulate the nebulous ideas floating in our minds. Just like journaling can be an important salve for dealing with anxiety, writing helps us to think through complicated thoughts and bring greater clarity to our ideas. 

Over the past several years, I’ve been working on a future-oriented non-fiction book called Imagine Doing Better intended to help us think about the future we want and need for our society. I decided to close my non-fiction book with a fiction chapter where I imagine a thriving community two-hundred years from now. In the prior chapters, I emphasize the importance of imagination for our policy-making process, so I decided that I should lean into that imagination for the final pages of the book. The process of sitting down to write the story of the future was complicated, tough, and exciting. I had to put into words—in vibrant detail—what I wanted the future to look like for my great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren. It forced me to reframe my mindset from articulating the critiques of society today to articulating the strengths of a better society tomorrow. I ended up writing a day in the life of a child named Ash as they interacted with their family, school, and community. 

My attempt at speculative fiction is novice-level compared to Octavia Butler’s, but creating characters and communities in full detail helped me to advance my understanding of the better world I want to make possible. I was forced to shift my lens from a checklist of policies I wanted in the future, to a technicolor vision of a thriving community. And by engaging with other people’s speculative fiction, or other hopes for the future, we can collectively identify the future that we want to advocate and fight for together. Writing the future you want to see, even if you don’t consider yourself a writer, is a tool we all can use to help envision the better world we want to make possible. 

Take care and write the future we need,

Paul

Today’s Key Point: Writing stories about the future can help us imagine it, which is an important precursor to doing the work to build a better world for tomorrow.

Today’s Reflection Questions:

  • Here are some potential writing prompts to get you going on writing the future: 

    • What is a value you wish were more prominent in the future? Write how people would interact and institutions would operate in that future world.

    • What do you wish for the children in your life? Pick a young person and write about a day in their life when they are in their seventies. 

    • What is an institution (e.g. schools, police, banks)  that you wish would be different in the future? Write a story with that transformed institution as the setting.  

Quote of the Month:

“Don’t ask the question ‘what do we have now and how can we make it better?’ Instead ask ‘what can we imagine for ourselves and the world?” -Mariame Kaba

Inspired reading/listening/viewing:

Paul Fleming
Next

June 2025