Social movements and speculative fiction share a fundamental truth: both are in the business of imagining different worlds. Whether you're writing about a post-scarcity federation of planets or organizing for police abolition, you're asking people to envision and believe in a reality radically different from our own.

So what can social movements learn from the world-builders of fantasy and science fiction? As it turns out, quite a lot.

When we think about social movements and revolutionary change, we often picture serious faces, hard work, and sacrifice. While commitment and effort are essential, we're missing something crucial: joy. Pleasure isn't just a nice-to-have in transformation work – it's a strategic necessity.

Every movement begins with a story. The story of what's wrong, the story of what's possible, and the story of how we get from here to there. These aren't just rhetorical flourishes – they're the soil from which transformative change grows. Yet too often, movements focus on critiquing what's broken without painting a clear picture of what could be.

The next time you're tempted to write another dystopia, consider this: we don't lack for stories about how things fall apart. We're desperate for stories about how we come together, how we build anew, how we transform our world not through destruction but through collective imagination and action.

When we talk about the future, we often hear the same voices: tech billionaires promising digital utopias, startup founders predicting disruption, white male futurists envisioning chrome-plated tomorrows. But some of the most profound and transformative visions of the future have come from Black women who've long been reimagining what's possible. Their work doesn't just add diversity to the field of futurism – it fundamentally reshapes how we think about the future itself.

Radical imagination isn't just about thinking up new ideas – it's about uprooting our assumptions about what's possible.

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, the once-thriving Greenwood District, known as "Black Wall Street," is reimagining community ownership of real estate to drive equitable economic development after a history of racial violence and systemic marginalization

In our design practice, we often talk about imagining new futures. But what does it mean to imagine futures from a position where your very existence has been systematically denied? This is where Afrofuturism offers profound lessons for anyone engaged in speculative design and radical imagination work.

We struggle to imagine a world without police, prisons, or capitalism. But as scholar Ruha Benjamin argues, imagination is a vital resource for social change. The books below offer radical visions of black futures that can inform our movements today.