"Hard times are coming. We’ll be needing the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, who can see through our fear-stricken society to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope."
In 2014, Ursula K. Le Guin was given a Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation. In her acceptance speech she made a plea for the role that science fiction and fantasy (SFF) plays in guiding us through tough and challenging times.
"...We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words."
"...we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now...We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality."
Lincoln Michel, himself a science fiction writer, was inspired. "I know I’m not the only writer who has had these lines stuck in their head ever since. How can we create new ways of living in this world if we can’t imagine them on the page? Literature has many goals, of course, but one of them—especially in science fiction—has always been imagining new possibilities."
The seed she planted inspired him to ask on Twitter about favorite SFF works that imagine different systems. He turned the responses and his own library into a syllabus of novels that imagine alternative ways of living that are positive, not dystopian.
Article: When Science Fiction and Fantasy Envisions Life Beyond Capitalism