In the March 1980 issue of Starlog Future Life Magazine, science-fiction writer Octavia Butler was asked: “What role can and should science fiction writers play in working with America’s major corporations in planning for the future of society?”
Her answer cut through the corporate optimism of the moment:
“Science fiction writers should provide a kind of Madison Avenue for unfamiliar or ‘unacceptable’ ideas. That is, ideas that need to be considered, gotten used to, perhaps adopted, but at least judged with as little as possible of fear, prejudice, ignorance, or that natural human conservatism which causes people to suspect or reject the unfamiliar automatically.”
— Octavia E. Butler
Butler understood something crucial: when reality breaks down, you need people trained in unreality.
Current reality is spectacularly broken. Systems designed for extraction are extracting everything — attention, resources, democracy itself. The response from institutions? More optimization of fundamentally destructive processes. More data analysis of problems that require imagination to solve.
Meanwhile, the cruelest visions of the future get built first. Surveillance capitalism materialized from someone’s speculative fiction about harvesting human attention. Mass incarceration began as someone’s imagination of containment architecture. These systems didn’t emerge accidentally. They were prototyped, refined, scaled. Harmful speculation gets funded and encoded into policy before most people recognize what’s happening.
So when Butler talks about science fiction writers as specialists in unfamiliar ideas, she’s describing preemptive work. Get people used to the thing before it arrives. Build emotional and cognitive capacity for what’s coming. Or better yet, prototype alternatives before the harmful version becomes default.
This is why speculative design matters. Why Afrofuturism matters. These practices create the infrastructure for people to believe different futures are possible.
Butler’s framing is careful. She says we should help people judge unfamiliar ideas with less fear. Fear closes imagination. Makes the strange seem threatening. When people encounter ideas they can’t metabolize, they reject them reflexively.
Speculative work softens that reflex. It creates a buffer zone where new ideas can be examined before they have to be accepted or rejected. Where people can try on futures like clothing. See how they fit. Adjust.
This is the role Butler saw for writers: translators and preparers. We make the future less shocking by making it feel familiar before it arrives.
We’re living in the future someone else imagined. Time to imagine back!
