By imagining the unimaginable, it’s possible to make reality more bearable.Īfrofuturism is an artistic, aesthetic and philosophical movement that combines science fiction, magic, traditional beliefs, black history and culture. Fiction is how we grapple with ourselves. We can play out ideas and scenarios because we are creatures of parable and myth and allegory, TED talks and ethical trolley problems. Science fiction allows us the distance to circumvent issue fatigue in our very troubled times. White people make up only around 9% of the population, but, until 1994, they held the rest of the country hostage under a racist, inhumane and violent regime that forced people of colour into indentured labour and inferior schools, and responded to resistance with tear gas and shootings, hit squads and torture farms. Le Guin wrote about a fictional utopia that came at a terrible cost everyone knew about: a single child tortured in a room underneath the city, in the filth and the dark, to pay for their happiness.įor me, Omelas is a compelling way of understanding the world I grew up in, as a white South African under apartheid. In her 1973 short story ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’, novelist Ursula K.
Is science fiction relevant in an age of catastrophic climate change, the refugee crisis and the rise of the far right? Yes: not for what it predicts about the future of the world, but for how it unpacks who we are in it.
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