Becky Chambers & Annalee Newitz: Resisting Dystopia

One of our guiding principles at Long Now is that in order to get to a future that we want to live in, we must first be able to imagine it. For many, it is much easier to imagine a dystopia than a thriving civilization. Our cultural visions of the future are increasingly occupied by tales of impending doom and despair. These stories have a role to play — in showing how current trends could lead to dire consequences in the future, or how certain totalizing technological or ideological worldviews have risks that are at times unaccounted for — but they can’t be the only narratives our culture has for what the future looks like. Becky Chambers and Annalee Newitz are two of the leading lights in contemporary speculative fiction. In their writing, which ranges from novels and short stories to history and journalism, they imagine quietly radical propositions: worlds that we might actually want to live in. Over the course of an adventurous, far-ranging conversation at The Interval in April 02023, the two of them walked through how they build their visions for a cozier, more interconnected society — and made the case that those visions could not only serve as an escape from the troubles of the modern world but as pathways to a better future. At times, Newitz referred to their novels as “Topian” — neither utopian nor dystopian. To Newitz, the appeal of writing in the Topian mode is that it reflects the state of our own society: not as hopeless as some would despair, but also not as perfect as some would exalt. Chambers follows along similar lines — though perhaps a tinge more utopian. Her work has been at times called “Hopepunk.” In contrast to grimmer, darker modes of speculative fiction, her worlds ditch gloom without returning to the sometimes-tired paths of more conventional heroic narratives. She noted, with a certain glee, that her narratives lacked traditional protagonists and all-encompassing villains. Instead, she tells stories of normal people like the ones she knows in real life: except, of course, for the fact that some of them live in a “fantastic, galactic future.” May we all be so lucky, someday.