Summer is coming to a close, and I have one final Summer of Sci-Fi post to share with you.
If there is one thing about science fiction that I want you to take away: it is that the genre is relentlessly, sometimes exhaustingly, often painfully hopeful.
I know that's a strange thing to say about a genre that gave us nuclear winter, the Borg, the maze of Arrakis, the extinction of the humpback whale, the grinding logic of the Snowpiercer, the fungal apocalypse, and a planet slowly drowning in the Shimmer. But I mean it.
Bleakness is not the opposite of hope.
The dystopias and catastrophes of science fiction don't communicate despair. They communicate stakes. This matters. This is worth fighting for or against. This outcome is possible if we make these choices. The genre says: look at what you are capable of — both the destruction and the survival. It insists that you look directly at the worst possibilities and at the people who persist through them, who find each other in the ruins, who make theatre in the collapse, who organize a labour union in the middle of a war.
That combination — clear-eyed about horror, insistent on the value of what's worth protecting — is beyond optimism. It's something harder and more useful. It moves beyond hoping things will improve in the future, and makes that hope an action to build it.
“We’ve always done it that way” doesn’t cut it.
It taught me that imagination is not a soft skill. The ability to envision what doesn't exist yet — a world where a different structure is possible, a campaign that reaches the people it's meant to reach, a donor relationship built on genuine reciprocity rather than shame — is a prerequisite for building it. You cannot build what you cannot imagine. Our sector is full of exhausted, brilliant people who are so deep in the immediate crisis that they've lost the thread of the possible. Speculative fiction is one way to find it again.
It taught me to be suspicious of the logic of perpetrators, especially when it sounds reasonable. The men in Snowpiercer, Dune, The Fifth Element, and Battlestar Galactica who justify atrocity in the service of stability are not exceptional. They are expressions of systems that reward certain kinds of thinking. Our work — in advocacy, in communications, in strategy — is always in some relationship to power, and that means always asking who benefits from the story we're telling.
It taught me that the people who survive apocalypse in fiction survive because they find each other. Not because they're exceptional individuals. The ‘chosen one’ tropes that are explored in sci-fi come with caveats and warnings. Luke Skywalker wouldn’t have realized his potential without Obi-Wan, Yoda, Han, Chewie, and Leia. Paul Attreides embrace of a messiah mythology turns him into an oppressor. These stories show us not only that you need to find your people not only for your own support, but to stay accountable and grounded.
The Great Unknown.
We don’t have all the answers, and in sci-fi the ambiguity is often the point.
Scully's faith sits next to her skepticism because she knows that science tells you what is, while the questions that keep humans awake at three in the morning are about what ought to be and what might be and whether any of it means anything. The X-Files never resolved that tension, and that's the right call. It was never going to.
The Doctor keeps regenerating — keeps dying and returning as someone new, carrying the memories of every version of themselves — because the show understands something true about how people survive enormous loss: you become someone different, and that different person is still you, and you carry forward more than you leave behind.
The world is full of uncertainty in every direction you look. The work we do is precarious, and the relationships we build are precious. It is tempting to look away from the abyss and grasp onto whatever looks solid; it is understandable, it is also harmful. In real life this looks like people fighting for their rights at the expense of others, resource-hoarding instead of sharing, blaming vulnerable groups instead of standing together to hold those in power accountable.
If you’ve read this far, I want to thank you for choosing to look into the abyss with me. At the end of the day that’s what the Summer of Sci-Fi has been all along; facing the future in solidarity, asking ourselves hard questions, and leaving room for hope.
Thank you for joining this journey. End log.
