Specialists in Unreality
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”
Not selling products, but selling possibilities that existing logic couldn't accommodate. 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.
Destructive imagination has infrastructure. Liberatory imagination has critique.
Butler grasped why specialists in unreality become essential during system failure. We oscillate between what is and what could be. We make the impossible feel inevitable by building narrative bridges between here and elsewhere. We live in multiple futures simultaneously because the present is insufficient.
What Gets Built From Speculation
The futures industry loves to talk about "scenario planning" and "strategic foresight." What it rarely acknowledges: we already live in someone else's speculative fiction. The gig economy. Algorithmic policing. Climate migration. These were all imagined before they were implemented. Someone wrote them down, modeled them, sold them as inevitable.
The difference is resources. Harmful speculation gets funded. Gets lobbied for. Gets encoded into policy and infrastructure before most people recognize what's happening. By the time the public catches up, the system is already running.
So when Butler talks about science fiction writers as specialists in unfamiliar ideas, she's describing a kind of 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. Why Indigenous futurism, disability justice futurism, and queer worldbuilding matter. These practices don't just imagine different futures. They create the sensory, emotional, and intellectual infrastructure for people to believe those futures are possible.
Training Ground for the Unthinkable
Specialists in unreality are trained to hold contradiction. To sit with the absurd until it becomes coherent. To move between timescales without losing the thread. These are survival skills when the center cannot hold.
We know how to build worlds from fragments. How to take the refuse of the present and construct tomorrow from scraps. How to write our way into existence when the data says we shouldn't be here.
This work happens in fiction, yes. But also in organizing. In mutual aid networks that shouldn't function according to market logic but do. In community land trusts that operate outside property norms. In harm reduction models that imagine safety without cages. These are all forms of speculative practice. All rehearsals for futures the present can't yet name.
Judgment With As Little Fear As Possible
Butler's framing is careful. She doesn't say science fiction writers should convince people. She says we should help people judge unfamiliar ideas with less fear. There's a difference.
Fear closes imagination. Makes the strange seem threatening rather than possible. When people encounter ideas they can't metabolize, they reject them reflexively. The unfamiliar becomes dangerous by default.
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. Discard what doesn't work.
This is the role Butler saw for writers: not prophets, but translators. Not predictors, but preparers. We make the future less shocking by making it feel familiar before it arrives.
The Work Now
We need more specialists in unreality. More people trained to imagine past the limits of what institutions can see. More practices that treat speculation as method, not entertainment.
Because here's what's true: the future is being written right now. The question is who's writing it, what materials they're using, and whether the rest of us will recognize ourselves in it when it arrives.
Butler knew that science fiction writers had a role to play in shaping what comes next. Not by predicting it. By rehearsing it. By building the narrative infrastructure that makes new realities thinkable.
The people who specialize in unreality might be the most practical people we have. Because when reality breaks down, you need people who know how to build from nothing. Who can look at collapse and see material. Who can imagine past the end and into what's waiting on the other side.
We're living in the future someone else imagined. Time to imagine back.
