The Imagination Curriculum
A reading list for strategists who want to think dangerously
I've been a fantasy and sci-fi reader forever. Philip Pullman, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Iain M. Banks, Naomi Alderman. The books I return to. The ones soft with rereading.
They’re not strategy books, but they’ve taught me more about thinking strategically than most of what’s on the business shelf. Because they do the thing we’ve forgotten how to do: question the frame. Follow an assumption past the threshold of what’s comfortable. Imagine that the whole thing could be organised differently.
In 2020, I did a virtual think piece for ISOLATED Talks about what strategists could learn from science fiction. We’d lost the ability to imagine genuinely different futures, I argued. We’d become extrapolators, not imaginers. Prisoners of the trend report. Fluent in visions that were really just the present with a few small tweaks. The argument has stayed with me ever since - surfacing every time I finish a novel that does the strategic thinking our industry can’t seem to manage.
A few months ago, Philip Teale left a comment on another piece I’d written: “Please can we read more of your thoughts on the imagination crisis and strategy through the lens of sci-fi! You did a great post on that years ago.” That was the nudge I needed. But the landscape has shifted since that talk.
It’s not just that the imagination crisis has deepened, though it has. It’s that we’ve industrialised our way around it. We now have AI systems trained on existing patterns telling us what to make, what to fund, what to greenlight. The feedback loop has closed. We’re not just failing to imagine different futures; we’re building systems that make different futures harder to surface.
The science fiction writers saw this coming. They always do. Because they give themselves permission to think dangerously - to ask questions that don’t have good answers, to imagine that the whole edifice might be wrong. We've trained that out of ourselves.
So I wondered - if I could create a curriculum from these books - a reading list for strategists who want to reclaim that capacity - how would I go about it?
I’ve written before about the exhaustion of the strategy book canon - the same twenty titles passed around like sacred texts, the same frameworks repackaged with new acronyms, the same case studies buffed to a shine that obscures more than it reveals.
These books taught us to optimise. To find efficiencies, exploit advantages, capture value. They were written for a world that assumed growth was good, markets were rational, and the job of strategy was to win within the existing game. They have nothing to say about whether the game itself makes sense.
What does strategy mean when the climate is collapsing? When the systems we optimise are making people sick? When the platforms we build for are actively hostile to the humans who use them? When the growth we chase requires the extraction of attention, data, and dignity from people who never agreed to the terms?
The strategy books don’t have answers because they weren’t written to ask the questions. They’re not dangerous. They’re safe. They assume the frame and dance within it.
Fiction can do what strategy books can’t. But I should be specific about which fiction, because the tech industry has strip-mined a certain kind of science fiction and I’m not talking about that. Snow Crash gave us the metaverse. Neuromancer gave us cyberspace. Minority Report gave us gesture interfaces and predictive policing. These are the texts Silicon Valley read as instruction manuals rather than warnings, and they've shaped a very particular vision of the future: technological, corporate, individualised. Cool dystopias where the aesthetics distract from the politics.
That’s not what I’m proposing. The writers I want to talk about are interested in different questions. Not “what cool technology might exist” but “what would it mean for power to be distributed differently.” Not “what if we built the metaverse” but “what are we complicit in right now.” Not “how do we win” but “what would we have to give up to live differently.”
These are writers who centre climate, consequence, complicity, and the long emergency of living in systems that weren’t built for human flourishing. They’re harder to read than cyberpunk because they don’t offer the consolation of cool. They offer something more uncomfortable: recognition. The shock of seeing your own industry, your own choices, your own complicity reflected back at you.
That’s what thinking dangerously actually means. Not edgy contrarianism. Not provocative hot takes. The willingness to follow an idea to a conclusion that implicates you, or unsettles you, or demands you change.
So let’s get into it.
What follows isn’t a ranked list. It’s more like a map of different territories - different ways these writers have taught me to think past the frame. Le Guin on permission and complicity. Pullman on the cost of knowing. Butler on collapse and what comes after. Ishiguro on the questions we’ve agreed not to ask. Chiang on power disguised as technology. Robinson on what rigorous futures work actually looks like. Banks on scarcity as a choice. Alderman on following power. Jemisin on systems that perpetuate themselves.
Start wherever you want. But I’m starting with Le Guin, because she’s the foundation.
Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin wrote science fiction and fantasy for over fifty years. She won every major award in the field, multiple times. But awards don’t capture what she actually did, which was build worlds - fully realised societies with different rules, different values, different assumptions about what humans are for - and then invite you to live inside them long enough that your own world started to look like one option among many.
That’s her gift: permission to imagine that things could be completely different.
“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” She said that in 2014, accepting a lifetime achievement award, and it’s the key to everything she wrote. The systems that feel permanent aren’t. They’re choices - made by humans, sustained by humans, and changeable by humans. But you can’t change what you can’t imagine beyond, and most of us have been so thoroughly trained inside one system that we mistake it for reality itself.
The Dispossessed is the book I return to most. It builds two worlds: Urras, a lush planet divided between capitalist and authoritarian states, and Anarres, its barren moon, colonised generations ago by anarchists who wanted to try something different.
Le Guin doesn’t argue for anarchism. She inhabits it. She shows you what a society without property, without government, without hierarchy might actually feel like to live in. The frustrations of collective decision-making. The social pressures that replace legal ones. The ways the revolution has calcified into its own orthodoxies. The unexpected freedoms that emerge when no one owns anything.
That’s different from being told alternatives exist. You can know intellectually that other systems are possible. Spending 300 pages inside one makes you feel it - feel the strangeness of returning to your own world, feel the arbitrariness of arrangements you’d stopped noticing.
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas works differently. It’s a short story, only a few pages, but it should be required reading for anyone trying to think clearly about trade-offs.
Omelas is a city of perfect happiness. Beautiful, prosperous, joyful. But its prosperity depends on a single child, locked in a basement, living in filth and misery. Everyone in Omelas knows the child is there. They’re told about it when they come of age. Some of them go and look. Most of them find a way to live with that knowledge. They reason that freeing the child wouldn’t undo its suffering, that their happiness makes the suffering meaningful, that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one. They find their justifications. And they stay.
Some walk away. Le Guin doesn’t tell us where they go - there’s no clean alternative waiting for them. But they go anyway.
This isn’t a thought experiment about distant cities. We know about the content moderators developing PTSD so our feeds stay clean. We know about the supply chains. We know about the teen mental health crisis and the platforms that profit from it. We know about AI in the military-industrial complex, the surveillance systems enabling a genocide, the taxes we pay that buy bombs that kill children. We know. We’ve been told. Some of us have gone and looked. And most of us are still here.
Le Guin doesn’t tell you what to do with that. She just makes it impossible to pretend you didn’t know. And she opens a door: the ones who walk away are proof that another choice exists, even if we can't yet see where it leads.
Pullman
Philip Pullman wrote His Dark Materials as a children’s trilogy. It became something larger - a philosophical epic about consciousness, authority, and the worlds we might find if we had the courage to look for them.
The series is set across multiple universes, but it begins in a world like ours with one profound difference: in Lyra’s world, people’s souls live outside their bodies as animal companions called daemons. Your daemon is your inner life made visible - your conscience, your intuition, your deepest self, walking beside you in animal form. Children’s daemons shift constantly, trying on different shapes. At puberty they settle into a fixed form, reflecting who you’ve become.
Think about what that means. Your inner life, visible and vulnerable. Your soul, something you can touch, something others can see. In our world, we hide our inner lives - we’ve learned to perform, to mask, to separate who we are from who we present. Pullman imagines a world where that separation isn’t possible, where you walk through the world with your soul beside you, where cruelty to someone’s daemon is the most intimate violence imaginable.
The ruling power in Lyra’s world is the Magisterium - a religious authority that has discovered something that terrifies them. When children reach adolescence, particles called Dust begin to settle on them and their daemons. Dust is associated with consciousness, experience, knowledge, the awareness that comes with growing up. The Magisterium believes Dust is sin. Their solution: sever children from their daemons before Dust can reach them. Cut the bond between person and soul. The children who survive this process are compliant, hollow, easier to control.
This is Pullman’s first provocation: institutions that fear consciousness itself. Authorities so threatened by awareness that they’d rather mutilate children than risk them growing up to ask questions. It’s fantasy, but not unfamiliar. We’re watching governments ban books, defund universities, rewrite curricula, attack anyone who teaches children to think critically. The target is always the same: the capacity to know things that make you harder to control.
But Pullman’s deeper imagination is in the doorways. His protagonists discover that the boundaries between worlds can be cut - that there are countless parallel universes, each with different histories, different possibilities, different ways of being. The Magisterium wants these doorways closed. Of course they do. If people knew other worlds existed, other ways of organising society, other relationships between authority and freedom - the spell would break. Control depends on the belief that this world, these rules, this system is the only one possible.
Lyra and Will spend the trilogy opening doorways. Literally cutting through to other worlds, discovering that reality is larger than any single authority wants you to believe. The cost is real - they lose people they love, they can never go back to not knowing. And in the end, they have to close most of the doorways behind them; the openings between worlds are causing damage of their own.
But the knowledge remains. Other worlds exist. Other ways of being are possible. The Magisterium can sever children from their daemons, can close every doorway it finds, but it can’t unmake the truth: this world is not the only one. These rules are not inevitable. The settled form of your daemon is not the only shape your soul could take.
That’s what Pullman offers: the imagination of doorways. And a useful suspicion of anyone who insists they don’t exist.
Butler
Octavia Butler wrote about what comes after. Not the moment of collapse - the long, hard work of building something new in its wake.
The Parable books - Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents - are set in a near-future California coming apart under climate change, economic inequality, and political dysfunction. Gated communities for the wealthy. Lawless zones outside. Water more valuable than money. A charismatic president who rises to power on the slogan “Make America Great Again.” Butler wrote this in 1998.
She wasn’t predicting. She was paying attention. She saw the trajectories, followed them further than most people are willing to go, and wrote down what she found.
Her protagonist, Lauren Olamina, is a young Black woman who survives the destruction of her community and sets out to build something new. Lauren has a condition called hyperempathy - she feels the pain and pleasure of others as physical sensation in her own body. It’s presented as a vulnerability, and it is. But it’s also what makes her see clearly. She can’t look away from suffering because she experiences it directly. She can’t pretend things are fine.
Lauren’s response to the collapse she’s experiencing is to create a religion. She calls it Earthseed, and its founding text begins: “God is Change.” Not a deity who listens to prayers or offers salvation. Change itself - as the only force that matters, the only thing you can count on. Learn to work with it or be broken by it.
Earthseed is practical. How to build community when the institutions have failed. How to create trust among strangers. How to grow food, share resources, make decisions together. Butler doesn’t romanticise this - it’s hard, dangerous work. People die. Communities fail. Trust is betrayed.
But Lauren is also thinking longer than survival. Her ultimate vision is for humanity to leave Earth entirely, to “take root among the stars.” She’s planning in generations while her neighbours are dying in the streets. That combination - immediate practicality and audacious long-term vision - is what makes Earthseed something more than a survival manual.
Butler’s question isn’t whether collapse is coming. It’s what you’ll build after. What structures, what practices, what ways of being together will you create when the old ones fall apart? Most strategy assumes the current system continues. Butler assumes it doesn’t, and asks: then what?
It’s a combination of despair and liberation. If this system isn’t permanent - if it’s already dying - then you don’t have to optimise within it. You can start building the next thing. Most strategy assumes continuity. Butler assumes rupture, and asks what you'll do with the freedom that creates.
Chambers
Becky Chambers writes about care. Maintenance. Repair. The slow work of keeping things and people running. In her worlds, this work matters.
Her Wayfarers series is set in a far future where humanity has left a ruined Earth and joined a galactic community of diverse species. The books follow small crews, found families, ordinary people doing unglamorous work. A tunnelling ship that builds hyperspace routes. A repair technician who maintains life support systems. A tea monk who travels between communities offering comfort.
There’s no war to win. No empire to defeat. No chosen one to save the galaxy. Instead, Chambers asks: what would a society look like if it was organised around care rather than conquest? Around relationships rather than extraction? Around the slow, patient work of keeping each other alive and well?
A Psalm for the Wild-Built imagines a moon where robots gained sentience centuries ago and, instead of going to war with their creators, simply walked away into the wilderness. They wanted to find out what they wanted to do with themselves. Generations later, a human monk meets one of these robots in the forest. The robot asks: “What do humans need?” The monk doesn’t have an answer.
That question runs through all of Chambers’ work. What do we actually need? Not what do we want, what can we acquire, what will give us status or power - what do we need to live, to thrive, to feel like our lives have meaning?
Her answers are mundane and radical at once. We need work that feels useful. We need relationships that sustain us. We need to be seen and to see others. We need rituals and rhythms. We need to feel that we matter to someone. We need rest.
Her characters struggle with loneliness, identity, belonging. But they struggle within systems designed to support them, not extract from them. The tunnelling ship crew are doing boring, essential work, and they’re valued for it. The tea monk’s labour is considered real labour. The repair technician matters.
Chambers offers strategists a different question. Not “how do we win?” but “how do we sustain?” Not “how do we grow?” but “how do we care for what we have?” She imagines futures where the people who maintain things - who fix, who clean, who tend, who listen - are the infrastructure, not an afterthought.
What would our world look like if it was organised around care? What would success mean if more wasn’t the measure? These aren’t soft questions. They’re design questions. Chambers has done the imaginative work of answering them.
Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro writes about what we agree not to see. The questions that would make our lives unbearable if we asked them, so we don’t.
Never Let Me Go is set in an England where human clones are raised to donate their organs. The narrator, Kathy, grows up at Hailsham, a boarding school that prides itself on treating its students well. They’re given art classes, encouraged to be creative, told they’re special. What they’re not told - not directly, not until they’re old enough to have already absorbed it - is that they exist to be harvested. In their twenties, they’ll begin “donations” that will eventually kill them. They call death “completion.”
The horror of the novel is in how Kathy accepts it. She and her friends know what’s coming. They’ve always known, in the way you know things you’ve never been told directly. And they don’t rebel. They don’t run. They become carers for other donors, holding hands through surgeries, helping each other complete. They have been raised inside a system that shaped their sense of reality, and they cannot imagine beyond it.
Ishiguro’s question: how different are we? What have we been raised to accept that we’ve never thought to question? What monstrous arrangements have been made normal for us?
Klara and the Sun approaches similar territory from the outside. Klara is an AF - an Artificial Friend - a robot companion designed to be purchased for children. She’s observant, loving, devoted. She watches the family she joins with careful attention, trying to understand human behaviour. She sees everything. But she can only interpret what she sees through the frameworks she was built with. She literally cannot question certain things.
The novel asks what it means to love, to be seen, to be replaced. Klara may be replaced when her child outgrows her. She accepts this without resentment - it’s what she’s for. Is that acceptance wisdom or programming? Is there a difference?
Ishiguro isn’t writing about robots and clones, not really. He’s writing about us. About how we’re shaped by systems to accept our roles within them. About the questions we’ve been trained not to ask because asking them would make our lives impossible.
But naming the silence is the first step to breaking it. Once you see Kathy accepting her completion, you can’t help asking: what am I accepting? Once you see Klara’s loving limitation, you can’t help asking: what can’t I question?
Ishiguro offers the gift of discomfort. The recognition that something is wrong, even if you can’t yet see what’s right.
Chiang
Ted Chiang writes short stories, each one built around a single idea followed to its conclusion. He’s not interested in spectacle or adventure. He’s interested in what would actually change if things were different - and what wouldn’t.
Story of Your Life asks what would happen if you could perceive time all at once instead of sequentially. The protagonist, a linguist, learns an alien language that restructures her perception. She begins to experience her future - including her daughter’s birth and death - not as something coming but as something already present. She chooses to embrace it anyway.
This is a radical reimagining of what wisdom might mean. Not optimising for better outcomes. Not avoiding pain. Accepting the shape of a life, with all its joy and grief, because the alternative - not living it - is worse. Chiang asks: what if wisdom isn’t about control at all?
Exhalation imagines a universe of mechanical beings who discover their world is running down - that entropy is real, that consciousness will eventually end. The response isn’t fear but a kind of clear-eyed wonder. The narrator documents everything he can, leaves a record for whoever might find it, and faces the end with curiosity intact.
But it’s Chiang’s non-fiction that strategists should read most carefully. His essays on AI cut through the hype to ask simple questions: Who is this technology for? What is it actually doing? Who benefits from the way we talk about it?
“ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web” argues that large language models aren’t thinking - they’re compressing. They give you a version of what already exists. They’re useful, but they’re not what they’re sold as.
“Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?” asks whether AI will function like management consulting - a tool that lets executives do what they already wanted to do while providing cover. The layoffs weren’t our decision; the algorithm recommended them. The pricing wasn’t predatory; the model optimised it.
Chiang’s question isn’t whether AI is good or bad. It’s who is building it, for what purpose, and who bears the costs. Technology is never neutral. Every tool encodes the values of its makers. If we don’t ask whose values are being encoded, we’ll end up serving them without ever realising we had a choice.
That’s what Chiang offers: the habit of asking whose and for what. Applied to any technology, any system, any strategy, these questions reveal what the surface obscures.
Robinson
Kim Stanley Robinson writes futures that could actually happen. He does the work most strategists claim to do but rarely attempt: thinking through how change actually occurs, what interventions might work, what unintended consequences emerge, how societies shift from one state to another.
The Mars Trilogy - Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars - spans two centuries of colonisation, terraforming, and political revolution. Robinson imagines not one future but many: different factions with different visions of what Mars should become, competing ideologies, conflicts that play out across generations. The science is rigorous. The politics are messy. The economics are specific. He shows his working.
The Ministry for the Future is even more urgent. Published in 2020, it’s explicitly a novel about climate change - about how we might actually address it, not in some distant future but starting now. Robinson imagines a new UN body tasked with representing the interests of future generations. He imagines carbon coins, quantitative easing for the biosphere, geoengineering, rewilding, refugee flows, political assassinations, eco-terrorism, central bank interventions.
Some of these work. Some fail. Some have consequences no one anticipated. That’s the point. Robinson isn’t advocating for any single solution. He’s modelling the complexity of systemic change. He’s showing that many interventions, operating at different scales, interacting in unpredictable ways, might - might - bend the curve.
This is what corporate scenario planning claims to do but almost never does. Most futures work is vague by design. Four quadrants with names like “Turbulent Transformation” and “Sustainable Stagnation.” Plausible enough to seem credible, vague enough to avoid accountability. No one’s job is threatened by a scenario. No business model is questioned.
Robinson does something different. He commits to specificity. He follows the implications. He lets the future talk back - lets it resist the neat narratives, let it be difficult and partial and uncertain. That’s what rigour looks like. The willingness to think through what you don’t know.
If strategists actually read Robinson - if they actually engaged with what serious futures thinking looks like - they might find their own work embarrassing. That’s not an insult. That’s an invitation. Robinson shows what’s possible when you take the future seriously as a design problem rather than a branding exercise.
Banks
Iain M. Banks imagined what happens after. After scarcity. After competition. After the struggle for resources that defines most of human history and all of conventional strategy.
The Culture is a post-scarcity civilisation spanning thousands of years and countless star systems. No money. No property. No material want. Virtually unlimited energy, matter, and lifespan. Superintelligent AIs called Minds run the infrastructure - not as overlords, but as something like benevolent facilitators, genuinely uninterested in domination.
What do humans do when they don’t have to work, compete, or survive? Banks’s answer: anything they want. Some pursue art, pleasure, scholarship, relationships. Some modify their bodies, change their sex, grow extra limbs, live for centuries. Some get bored and seek out danger at the fringes. Some dedicate themselves to Contact - the Culture’s organisation for engaging with other civilisations - or Special Circumstances, its morally ambiguous intervention arm.
The Culture is complicated, messy, sometimes hypocritical. Banks doesn’t pretend that solving material scarcity solves everything. People still struggle with meaning, identity, relationships, mortality. But they struggle differently. They struggle without the desperation that comes from artificial scarcity, without the zero-sum logic that poisons so much of our own world.
This is Banks’s gift to strategists: the imagination of a different game. Almost all strategic thinking assumes competition for scarce resources. Market share. Attention. Talent. Budget. The entire framework depends on the idea that there isn’t enough to go around.
But what if there was? What if scarcity was a design choice rather than a natural law? What if the game could be different?
Banks doesn’t offer a roadmap to post-scarcity. He offers something more valuable: proof that it can be imagined coherently. That a society organised around abundance is thinkable, liveable, interesting. That human beings don’t need the threat of starvation to have meaningful lives.
The Culture also raises harder questions. Contact and Special Circumstances intervene in “less developed” civilisations - sometimes helping, sometimes manipulating, sometimes causing catastrophic harm with good intentions. The Culture believes it knows best. Banks doesn’t let his utopia off the hook. Even a society that’s solved scarcity can still be arrogant, still cause harm, still mistake its own values for universal ones.
But the questions Banks opens up are worth sitting with. What would you do if you didn’t have to compete? What would strategy mean if the goal wasn’t winning but flourishing? What would your industry look like if scarcity wasn’t the premise?
Alderman
Naomi Alderman writes about power. Who has it, who wants it, what happens when it moves.
The Power starts with a simple inversion: what if women could hurt men as easily as men can hurt women? Teenage girls develop the ability to generate electrical shocks from their hands. The power spreads. Within a generation, the world has changed completely.
Alderman follows the implications without flinching. Some women use the power to escape abuse, to protect themselves, to claim autonomy. Some use it to dominate, to exploit, to build new hierarchies with themselves at the top. Religions emerge. Economies shift. Wars are fought differently.
The point isn’t that women are better or worse than men. The point is that power corrupts - period. The gender flip reveals what we’ve normalised: a world structured around one group’s capacity for violence.
The Future asks a different question: who has power now, and what are they doing with it? The answer is tech billionaires - three of them, thinly fictionalised, who see civilisational collapse coming and are building escape plans. Bunkers, islands, rockets. The people with the most resources to address the crisis are using those resources to ensure they’ll survive it while everyone else burns.
Alderman imagines a group that decides to redirect those resources. To take what the billionaires have built and use it for collective survival rather than private escape. It’s a heist novel, a thriller, and a thought experiment: what would it actually take to change the trajectory?
Most strategy carefully avoids talking about power. We talk about markets, consumers, trends, insights - neutral-sounding language that obscures who actually decides things and why. Alderman insists on following the power. Where is it concentrated? How did it get there? What would it take to move it?
That’s a strategic question. Maybe the most important one. And Alderman shows that asking it opens up possibilities that staying polite forecloses.
Jemisin
N.K. Jemisin writes about systems - the ones that trap us and the ones we might build instead.
The Broken Earth trilogy is set on a supercontinent wracked by regular apocalyptic seismic events called Seasons. Civilisation rises and falls in cycles. The current empire, the Stillness, survives by enslaving people called orogenes - those born with the ability to control seismic energy. Orogenes could save everyone. Instead, they’re collared, controlled, bred like livestock, taught to hate themselves.
It’s a system that makes everyone less safe. The empire’s fear of orogenes creates the conditions for the catastrophes it claims to prevent. Orogenes, brutalised and desperate, sometimes crack. When they crack, continents break. The Stillness responds with more control, more brutality, more fear. The cycle continues.
Jemisin is mapping how oppressive systems perpetuate themselves - not through malice alone, but through structure. The Guardians who control orogenes aren’t all cruel. Some genuinely believe they’re helping. The system survives because it shapes what everyone inside it can imagine. The orogenes themselves often believe they deserve what’s done to them.
But systems can break. The trilogy follows Essun, an orogene who has survived by hiding, by complying, by doing what the system demanded. Across three books, she stops complying. She discovers the history that’s been hidden - how the system was built, what it was built to contain, what it would take to unmake it.
Jemisin doesn’t offer a clean revolution where the good guys win. Breaking a system that old, that embedded, that self-reinforcing requires sacrifice, compromise, loss. Some things can’t be saved. Some people don’t survive. The new world that emerges is uncertain, incomplete.
But it’s different. The cycle can end. That’s Jemisin’s offering: not hope exactly, but possibility. The knowledge that even the most entrenched structures were built by people and can be unbuilt by people. The understanding that systems survive by limiting imagination, and that imagination is therefore resistance.
Where are the leverage points? What would have to change for everything to change? What cycles are you inside that you’ve mistaken for nature?
Jemisin has thought about these questions more rigorously than most strategists ever will. Her fantasy trilogy is, at its core, a work of systems thinking. It should be read as such.
These are just a few. There are so many more.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness reimagines gender entirely - a world where people have no fixed sex, where the categories that structure so much of our thinking simply don’t exist. Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time builds a future where childcare is communal, where hierarchy has dissolved. Samuel Delany’s Triton imagines a society of radical personal freedom - change your body, your gender, your desires, as easily as changing clothes. Adrienne Maree Brown’s Emergent Strategy isn’t fiction, but it draws on Octavia Butler to ask how we organise differently, how we build movements that work like ecosystems rather than machines.
Cory Doctorow writes about how technology could serve us instead of surveilling us. Nnedi Okofor builds African futures that centre different histories, different possibilities. Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West reimagines migration through magical doors that connect distant places - what would borders mean if anyone could walk through them? There’s solarpunk, a whole movement imagining futures that are sustainable and desirable, not just survivable. There’s everything Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown collected in Octavia’s Brood - speculative fiction from social justice movements, stories written by organisers and activists imagining the worlds they’re fighting for.
Six years ago, I made the case that science fiction writers were doing the strategic thinking our industry had abandoned. I hoped we’d catch up.
We haven’t. If anything, the gap has widened. The writers kept writing. We kept optimising.
But Philip’s comment reminded me that there are people in this industry who want to think differently. Who feel the limits of the trend report, the shallowness of the scenario exercise, the emptiness of strategy-as-theatre. Who sense that something is missing and can’t quite name it.
For anyone who recognises that feeling, this is where I’d start.
The Reading List
Le Guin: The Dispossessed. The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (short story). The Left Hand of Darkness.
Pullman: His Dark Materials trilogy (start with Northern Lights, published as The Golden Compass in the US).
Butler: Parable of the Sower. Parable of the Talents.
Chambers: A Psalm for the Wild-Built. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet.
Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go. Klara and the Sun.
Chiang: Exhalation (stories). Stories of Your Life and Others. His essays: “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web” and “Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?”
Robinson: The Ministry for the Future. The Mars Trilogy if you want to go deep.
Banks: The Player of Games (the best entry point to the Culture). Use of Weapons if you want something darker.
Alderman: The Power. The Future.
Jemisin: The Fifth Season (first book of the Broken Earth trilogy).
Keep going: Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time. Samuel Delany’s Triton. Nnedi Okofor’s Binti. Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West. Adrienne Maree Brown’s Emergent Strategy. Octavia’s Brood, edited by Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown. China Miéville’s The City & The City. Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire. Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries. Richard Powers’s The Overstory. Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home.
The point isn’t to read all of them. The point is that the work exists. People have been doing this imaginative labour for decades - building alternatives, asking questions, following implications. The curriculum is there, waiting.
All you have to do is pick one up.
This is fantastic Zoe. So many to get into and I'm delighted to have only read a handful of them! You should set up a bookshop.org store. The commissions are good and it supports indy bookshops not Bezos
https://uk.bookshop.org/affiliates/profile/introduction
Strategy is about operationalizing some “optimal” result within a frame that remains unnoticed and unscrutinized.
Fiction of the kind mentioned is about scrutinizing the unnoticed frame and articulating others, thus making imaginable what we currently do not see even as a possibility for us.
Thanks for this post - so true