The World-Builder's Guide to Revolution: Lessons from Fantasy and Sci-Fi
Social movements and speculative fiction writers are doing the same work: asking people to believe in a world that doesn't exist yet.
Whether you're writing about a post-scarcity federation or organizing for police abolition, you're trying to make the impossible feel inevitable. You're building a world detailed enough that people can see themselves living in it.
The tools are the same. The stakes are different.
Complete Worlds, Not Single Changes
The most compelling speculative fiction never just flips one switch. N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy doesn't ask "what if some people could control geological forces?" and stop there. It follows the ripple: how does that ability reshape architecture, family structures, power systems, language itself?
Movements need this same rigor. When we say "abolish prisons," we can't stop at the negation. We have to build the world that exists after. How do communities handle harm? What support systems replace punishment? What new institutions have to exist?
The more complete the vision, the harder it is to dismiss as fantasy.
Characters Make Abstraction Real
Octavia Butler's Parable series doesn't describe societal collapse from a distance. It shows Lauren Olamina building Earthseed in real time, making choices, solving problems, creating structure from chaos. Her journey makes the abstract tangible.
Movements need this embodiment. Not leaders positioned above the work, but examples living inside it. Communities already practicing transformative justice. Neighborhoods running mutual aid networks. People prototyping the future in present tense.
Theory without bodies stays theoretical.
Systems Thinking as Strategy
Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy, maps how shifts in AI and gender concepts would cascade through language, social hierarchy, military structure, intimacy. Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future, tracks climate solutions through interconnected systems—finance, policy, technology, culture—all moving together.
This is what movements often miss. We focus on what we oppose without mapping how the pieces we're building connect to each other. How does economic democracy feed environmental justice? How does transformative justice support community health?
Single-issue organizing can't touch systemic change. World-building forces you to think in systems.
Techniques Worth Stealing
Here are some practical tools from speculative fiction that movements can use:
The Five Whys: Take any piece of your vision. Ask why it works that way. Then ask why again. Five times deep, you hit the foundational values that have to shift for the structure to hold.
Day in the Life: Write a morning routine in the world you're building. What's different about dropping kids at school, handling conflict with a neighbor, participating in governance? Details make it real.
Ripple Mapping: Every major change produces second and third-order effects. Trace them. How does it shift family structure? Work culture? Who it privileges and who it burdens?
Multiple Perspectives: Consider how different people experience your future. Elders. Children. Disabled people. Immigrants. If it only works for one demographic, you're not building a world, you're replicating harm with better aesthetics.
Movements Already Doing This
The Movement for Black Lives built detailed visions of community safety and well-being, not just demands to defund police. The Green New Deal ccombined technical policy with narrative about a livable future. The Sunrise Movement made climate action feel urgent and achievable by centering young people building the world they need to survive.
Building Your Movement's World
Ready to strengthen your movement's world-building? Try these exercises:
Create an Atlas: Map the institutions, relationships, systems that structure your future.
Write the History: How do we get from here to there? What are the turning points, the moments of shift?
Develop the Culture: What new rituals, practices, traditions emerge? Culture makes a world feel lived-in.
Detail the Economics: How do people meet their needs? What does work look like? Who controls resources?
The Stories That Make Revolution Possible
Speculative fiction works because it lets you walk around inside difference. You don't just learn about another world - you feel it, inhabit it, believe it could exist.
Movements need to do this. Make futures so detailed, so textured, so lived-in that people can't help but fight for them. Be world-builders as much as organizers.
The future is a story we're telling together. Make yours compelling enough to die for. Make it complete enough to live in.
Want to develop your movement's world-building capacity? Contact us to learn how we can help.