This is a great book. Short stories of visionary fiction from mostly activist writers. Very interesting.
- In it’s essence, social justice work, which King embodied and Butler expressed so skillfully in her novels and stories, is about love – a love that has the best hopes and wishes for humanity at heart.
- If the purpose of a writer, as Toni Cade Bambara said, “is to make revolution irresistible,” theres writers, these stories represent.
- Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction. All organizing is science fiction. Organizers and activists dedicate their lives to creating and envisioning another world, or many other worlds – so what better venue for organizers to explore their work than science fiction stories?
- We want organizers and movement builders to be able to claim the vast space of possibility, to be birthing visionary stories. Using their everyday realities and experiences of changing the world, they can form the foundation for the fantastic and, we hope, build a future where the fantastic liberates the mundane.
- “Visionary Fiction” is a term we developed to distinguish science fiction that has relevance toward building new, freer worlds from the mainstream strain of science fiction, which most often reinforces dominant narratives of power. Visionary fiction encompasses all of the fantastic, with the arc always bending toward justice. We believe this space is vital for any process of decolonization, because the decolonization of the imagination is the most dangerous and subversive form there is: for it is where all other forms of decolonization are born. Once the imagination is unshackled, liberation is limitless.
- Are we brave enough to imagine beyond the boundaries of “the real” and then do the hard work of sculpting reality from our dreams?