Future imaginaries – how we imagine what comes next and why it matters

From utopian fiction to climate visions, from speculative architecture to grassroots blueprints – the politics of imagining a different future

Future Imaginaries gathers writing that examines how futures are constructed and contested in the present. Before anything can be built, it must be imagined. The relationship between the imagination and the political is not ornamental. It is foundational. Movements that cannot imagine a different world or that cannot articulate, in some form, what they are fighting for rather than simply what they are fighting against, tend to exhaust themselves in negation. The capacity to imagine alternatives to the way things are is one of the most politically significant capacities human beings possess.

Future Imaginaries gathers Pen vs Sword’s writing on the politics of possibility: on utopian thought, speculative fiction, alternative economic models, visionary architecture and design, and the various ways in which artists, writers, thinkers and activists have tried to imagine what a different future might look like.

It is also concerned with the relationship between imagination and action. The question is not simply what futures are imagined, but what those imaginations do: whether they inspire action, produce resignation, challenge the terms of existing debate or confirm its limits.

Why future imaginaries matter – the politics of possibility

The question “what is possible?” is not a technical question. It is a political one. What counts as possible in any given historical moment is determined not by the objective constraints of the physical world but by the social, economic and political structures of power that shape which alternatives are thinkable and which are ruled out in advance.

Neoliberal political economy has been extraordinarily successful at closing down the range of what is treated as politically possible (at creating), in Margaret Thatcher’s formulation, the condition in which There Is No Alternative. The imagination is one of the primary sites at which that closure is challenged. Arundhati Roy’s declaration that “another world is not only possible, she is on her way” is the most succinct statement of what Future Imaginaries is about: the refusal to accept the existing distribution of power and possibility as inevitable.

Speculative fiction as political thought – Le Guin, Atwood and Huxley

The best speculative fiction is not escapism. It is political thought conducted through imaginative means. Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed imagines two worlds: one governed by state capitalism, one organised as an anarchist commune. Neither is presented as a paradise. The anarchist world has its own forms of social coercion, its own failures of freedom. This ambiguity is the point: Le Guin is not writing an advertisement for any existing political programme. She is writing a thought experiment in what genuine freedom and genuine solidarity might require and what they would cost.

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale imagines a future in which the gains of the feminist movement have been reversed by a theocratic regime that controls women’s bodies, identities and speech. The novel’s power derives from Atwood’s insistence that nothing in it is invented: every element has a historical precedent. This is not a warning about a distant future. It is a warning about a present that is, in various places and forms, already here.

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World imagines a future in which control is exercised not through force but through pleasure: a society in which people have been conditioned to love their servitude. It is the most prescient of the great dystopias, the one whose warnings are most directly applicable to the present condition of digital consumer capitalism, where the soma is algorithmic, personalised and invisible.

The scientific imagination that underpins all future thinking is explored in our profile of Carl Sagan, whose Pale Blue Dot vision of the Earth as a fragile, extraordinary anomaly in the vastness of space remains the most powerful argument for planetary solidarity ever expressed in popular science.

Metabolist architecture – the city as a living system

The Metabolist movement in Japan emerged in the 1960s around architects Kisho Kurokawa, Arata Isozaki and Fumihiko Maki who imagined cities not as fixed structures but as living organisms: buildings designed to be replaced, extended and renewed, with replaceable capsule units plugged into permanent megastructures. The Metabolists were responding to the destruction and rapid reconstruction of post-war Japan, but their vision had implications for a much broader rethinking of what cities are for and how they should change.

Blobism – or blobitecture represents a later and very different architectural imaginary: the possibility of fluid, organic forms made buildable by digital modelling. The Guggenheim Bilbao, the MAXXI in Rome, the Heydar Aliyev Centre: these buildings announced that architecture’s relationship with the straight line was not inevitable but chosen. And what is chosen can be unchosen.

Blueprint for a brighter future – grassroots visions of change

Not all future imaginaries are works of fiction or art. Some are practical proposals for how things might be organised differently. A Blueprint for a Brighter Future surveys a range of real-world experiments, from Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness index to Estonia’s digital democracy, from the Chipko movement in India to Kenya’s M-Pesa mobile money system, that demonstrate the gap between what exists and what is possible.

Greta Thunberg’s school strike and the Fridays for Future movement she catalysed represent one of the most important recent demonstrations of how a single act of imagining things differently, a teenager sitting outside a parliament with a handmade sign, can become, through solidarity and repetition, a global movement.

Roger Hallam’s theory of why mass civil disobedience is necessary and his argument that the scale of the climate crisis requires tactics proportionate to its urgency is itself a future imaginary: an account of what political action would have to look like if we were serious about the future we claim to want.

Women in science and the futures we are not imagining

One of the most important future imaginaries questions is not about the future itself but about who gets to imagine it. Our account of the groundbreaking women in science, from Hypatia to Caroline Herschel, from Rosalind Franklin to Jocelyn Bell Burnell is a history of extraordinary achievement made under conditions of systematic obstruction. The futures we are not imagining are the futures that are not being made possible because the people who might imagine them have been excluded from the rooms where the imagining happens.

Aaron Swartz’s campaign for open access was also a future imaginary: a vision of what the internet could be if the logic of enclosure gave way to the logic of the commons. His prosecution shows the cost of imagining a future that the powerful prefer not to exist. And ecological art (the growing practice of artists making our relationship with the natural world visible), is the aesthetic form of the same insistence: that a different relationship with the planet is possible, and that it needs to be imagined before it can be built.

THE BIGGER PICTURE

The future is not a separate topic from the present. Every imaginary explored here is a response to conditions that already exist: the climate emergency, the concentration of power, the systematic exclusion of certain people from certain rooms. This is why Future Imaginaries does not stand alone. The artists and movements documented in Art and Power have always understood that making something new is an act of imagining a different world, that the aesthetic and the utopian cannot be separated.

The activists in Resistance and Solidarity have always needed a vision of what they were fighting for, not only what they were fighting against. The journalists and writers in Language, Media and Truth know that the stories we tell about the present determine the range of futures we can imagine. And the musicians in Music, Sound and Cultural Memory have always been in the business of making people feel, in the body, what a different world might be like – before it can be argued for in the mind. Imagination is not optional. It is how change begins.

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Future Imaginaries Archive Suggestions

History of activism – protests that shaped the world 

The Pirate Bay: From Napster to AI

The Architecture of Power

The Climate Crisis and the Heat of Truth

Aldous Huxley – Brave New World, politics and dark visions

Tiokasin Ghosthorse – indigenous voice, music and philosophy

Zarina Zabrisky – frontline journalist and Ukraine’s witness

Whose Future Is It Anyway?

WANT MORE?

To imagine a future is already to take a position in the present. The question is not whether futures are imagined, but who gets to imagine them and who lives with the consequences. Browse more articles which extend beyond the features above.

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  You might also be interested in these categories which offer different angles on Future Imaginaries – engaging with visions of tomorrow, contested futures, systemic possibility, climate/planetary futures, political imagination, or speculative critique of the present as future-shaping.

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